Chayei Sara 5773: The Six Factors of Enduring Love

When these six factors are in place, a man cannot help but fall in love and stay in love with his wife; a love that is deep, profound and able to heal even the most savage of wounds.

Healing grief

Any significant loss causes grief and needs healing. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her 1969 book, The Five Stages of Grief, outlines the process of healing and suggests its five steps: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. She does not deal with the way people of strong faith manage loss and how they can often accelerate the process or omit some of its steps, at times leapfrogging straight to acceptance. Even after the acceptance of loss though, there can still be pain. The true healer of grief is not time; it is love.

The rather romantic idea that there are types of grief that only love can cure is a Torah concept. The act of love that cures, however, is not the act of being loved but rather the act of loving another. After Yitzchak marries Rivka and he loves her "he becomes comforted after the death of his mother" (Bereishis 24:16). Rashi expands: "It is normal that as long as a man's mother is alive he is attached to her. Once she dies he finds comfort in his wife". The loss of a mother causes deep grief to a man, a grief that only his love for his wife can heal.

For Yitzchak's love of Rivka to heal his grief, it must have been a very deep and authentic love. It is interesting that the first recorded arranged marriage led to such profound love. How did their relationship transition from the rather clinical shadchanus model, to a relationship of deep love and profound connection? There are six factors responsible for this remarkable transition all of which merit comment.

The six factors

1.  Their match was truly made in heaven with Eliezer picking up miraculous clues that Rivka was the woman destined to be his master's wife.
2.  Eliezer tested Rivka's character and accepted her even though her family was one of idolaters. Although from the perspective of religious background the couple was disparate, from the perspective of character they shared common values.
3.  Yitzchak saw in Rivka behaviors and values that were aligned with those of his mother (see Onkelos 24:16).
4.  The aura that Rivka generated and her impact on her environment was similar to that of his mother's. (Rashi, based on the Midrash, interprets the peculiar phrasing of 24:16 as:And he took her (Rivka) into his mother's tent and behold, she became Sarah his mother!)
5.  Yitzchak took her as his wife.
6.  And Rivka became his wife.

We'll comment briefly on each factor:

1. A match made in heaven: If a man seeks his wife with a pure intention, he will often see miraculous indicators that she is the one for him. Talk to couples about how they met and you will hear stories of coincidence after coincidence (or miracle after miracle). Common values and shared ancestry coupled with deep attraction (a compelling drive to do chessed with one another) are strong indicators of divine destiny.
2. Common values: People evolve and there is no guarantee that two people married to each other will evolve in the same direction. If the directions of their evolutions diverge, they could find that chasms emerge between them later on. Common values help to maintain parallel evolutions and continued values-alignment between a couple as they each grow and develop.
3. Alignment with maternal values: If a man has had a healthy relationship with his mother, his framework of the feminine personality is formulated by his experience of his mother, her personality and her behaviors. He more easily falls in love with a woman whose personality reflects that of his mother's.
4. Aura: We all generate energy and project it on to our environments. The people around us feel our energy and they feel its absence when we are not there. Women are particularly powerful generators of energy, and a mother's energy pervades every nook and cranny of her home. The children she raises imbibe her energy each day of their lives. When she dies the absence of her maternal energy causes as much grief to her children if not more, than the absence of her physical being. This absence is the loss a child experiences at the passing of his or her mother, a loss that a man only compensates for with a similar energy exuded by his wife.
5. Taking her as a wife: The phrase in the verse that "He took her as a wife" does not refer to the marriage ceremony that took place by proxy when Eliezer was in the home of Betueil, Rivka's father. Taking her as a wife is more about the connection between them. Unlike the English getting married, "Taking her (as a wife)" is an active, transitive verb. This is hetaking her. This is a man acting in a manly way towards his wife and taking her in every sense of the word. This is a husband making a wife feel that she is taken. Taken not in the sense of ownership but rather in the sense of wanting to beresponsible for her and desiring to protect and honor her.
6. Becoming a wife: Once again, becoming a wife in this context does not refer to a change in legal status; that also happened earlier in her father's home. This refers to her transition frombesulah (unmarried girl) to wife - a qualitative transition, a transition of being and of essence, not one of legality. She took on the persona of wife, supporter, lover and chief admirer of her husband.

When these six factors are in place, a man cannot help but fall in love and stay in love with his wife; a love that is deep, profound and able to heal even the most savage of wounds. This is romance the Torah way. Is there anything sweeter?