“How is your marriage?” Someone once asked a woman. Her response: “Before I got married, I was incomplete. Now, that I married, I am finished.”
Something is perplexing concerning the laws of marriage, articulated in the weekly Torah portion Ki Tezei.
Biblical law is often ambiguous and riddle-like. Thus, when Moses presented the Torah to the Jewish people, he gave them an oral interpretation, clarifying and elucidating the meaning of the Bible. This oral tradition has been documented in the Mishnah and the Talmud.
Marriage is one of those issues where the Biblical law is unclear and requires interpretation. The Torah speaks in this portion, of “a man marrying a woman,”
but does not specify the legal means to affect a marriage. This presents an oral tradition to fill the gap. A similar expression used when discussing marriage is found once more in the Bible when addressing Abraham’s purchase of the Machpalah cave after Sarah’s death. Both in the verse on marriage and in the verse about Abraham purchasing the burial plot for his wife, the Torah employs the term “taking.
We legally compare the two cases. Just as Abraham purchased the field and the cave using money, so too must a groom give a monetary gift to his bride if he wishes to obtain her hand in marriage.
When the groom places the ring on the finger of his bride and declares “You are betrothed to me...” man and woman enter the covenant of marriage.
Why? Because we derive it from the legal formula employed by Abraham to purchase the Machpalah cave. This classical Talmudic methodology is well-known to any student of the Talmud. Yet it does seem tasteless, if not awful.
Why are we deriving the laws of marriage from a story of death and burial? The death of Sarah terminated her marriage with Abraham; yet it is from a story that terminated a marriage that we deduce the laws of creating a marriage!
Equally distasteful is the fact that we compare the obtaining of a spouse to the purchase of a burial plot.
Today I will offer two explanations—on two levels, the literal and the other esoteric.
Under ordinary circumstances and during a stable economy, in most real estate deals –
both sides come out satisfied.
I sell you my home for one million dollars. You are happy—you got my home. I am happy, I got my 1 million. Everyone gave up something significant, but everyone also received something significant in return. Such is the nature of business. You give and you get.
There was one recorded exception—the sale of the plot of land in Hebron from Efron to Abraham, to bury Sarah.
Abraham bought the Machpalah, the Torah states, for 400 silver shekels. This was an enormous sum of money. According to the Talmud
ordinary shekels for the cave! (The Torah states that it wasn’t a type of shekel that could he pay a total of one million to be used anywhere.)
Efron was ecstatic. He just received a huge sum of money for what? For a “hole in the ground,” pun intended. Efron came home, saying to his wife, I can’t believe what I got today. I sold a cave at the edge of my field in Hebron to this Hebrew man Abraham as a burial plot. And he paid for it one million shekels. I just got the deal of a lifetime: I gave up almost nothing and I made a mint. I can almost retire!
It would be like I sell you my garage in Kentucky, and you pay me ten million for it... This was the seller’s perspective.
How about from the buyer’s vantage point?
Abraham came home and said the same thing: You would not believe it, Isaac! For 400 silver shekel, I purchased the cave where Adam and Eve – the two people created directly by G-d, the two people with whom all of history began, the two progenitors of all mankind, the two formed by the Almighty Himself—are interred. And I had the privilege of burying Sarah there.
For such a priceless location, I paid, a relatively, small sum of money. I received so much more than what I put in. Ah! Now we understand why the laws of marriage are deduced from this transaction. Do you want the recipe for a good marriage? You got to learn from the transaction of Efron’s field.
The attitude of both the groom and bride ought to reflect the feelings of both Abraham and Efron in that sale. A groom ought to come home in the evening and say to himself: Ah, look what I got! A priceless bride! A gem of a human being. Look how refined, how special, how sweet, how kind, my wife is. What did I give to get this? Not much, just 400 shekels... but look at what I got in return!
And the bride ought to feel the same.
But if the groom, and then-husband, walks around telling his wife, “Hey, you are so lucky you got me... you should thank your stars that an insecure kvetch like yourself lucked out to get me as her husband,” if that is going to be his attitude, the relationship will break.
When a husband and a wife both genuinely feel that they are privileged to be with their partner; that they have been given such a gift with this relationship—then the partnership will grow and blossom.
There is an American “short story” about a very poor man who lives with his beloved wife in total poverty.
For their anniversary, his wife craved to buy him a gift, but she had no money. She did have very long, beautiful hair. So, she had her hair cut and sold and bought her husband a band for the one beautiful thing he owned: a gold watch that was passed down in the
family over many generations, yet he could not wear it because the band was torn.
In the meantime, the husband was yearning to buy his wife a gift. But he was also penniless. So, he went out on the same day and sold his gold watch and bought the most expensive combs for his wife to be able to brush and take care of her stunning hair.
They both returned home with their gifts. She returned home with a short haircut, holding a new watch band. He came home with combs in his hand, but without his watch... He gave her the combs and she gave him the watch band.
Tears flowed simultaneously from their eyes, not for the futility of their actions, but for the depth of their love. He looked at her and said: With the love I get from you, I don’t need the watch band. She said the same about her hair.
The Torah states: This can explain another fascinating and enigmatic verse in our portion, just a few verses
after the above verse on marriage.
When a man takes a new wife, he shall not go out in the army, nor shall he be subjected to anything associated with it. He shall remain free for his home for one year and delight his wife, whom he has taken.
Yet here we see again how in simple three words, “vsemach es eshto,” the recipe for a loving marriage is presented. Certainly, the meaning of the verse is, as Yonoton ben Uziel says that for the first year, the husband should celebrate life together with his wife.
But Rashi says, that if you “translate” this mitzvah as telling you to focus on your happiness together with your wife you are making an error. A marriage works when each party is trying to make the other one happy.
This may be what Rashi means: “One who renders: “he shall rejoice with his wife,” is mistaken.” If your philosophy in life is going to be always this: how can I
make sure I am happy with her, it is a mistake. You must think: What can I do today to make my spouse happy? What can I do today for my spouse? All you focus on is how you can bring joy and light to your spouse today. Automatically, you will also become happy as a result.
On April 21, 2014, CNN shared a story about a couple: Helen and Kenneth Felumlee.
Their love story begins on Feb. 20, 1944, when Kenneth and Helen eloped just before Kenneth's 21st birthday after three years of dating. The couple would go on to have eight children, who would be witnesses to their commitment daily. Their kids say that Kenneth and Helen would hold hands at breakfast every morning, right up until the end.
But here is the catch: Over their 70 years of marriage, the two never spent the night apart!
When Kenneth and Helen had to take an overnight ferry many years ago that only had bunk beds, they opted to both sleep on the bottom bunk instead of spending an evening separated.
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Two years ago, Kenneth had his leg amputated due to poor circulation and his health |
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started to decline. Helen became his main caretaker, but her condition began fading, |
too. On April 12, 2014, Helen passed away at the age of 92. But here is what happened. Just 12 hours after her death, Kenneth, 91, died as well.
The next night would be the first time in 70 years that her husband Kenneth would need to sleep alone, away from his wife. For seven decades, he was not away for a single night from her...
"We knew when one went, the other was going to go," said their daughter, Linda Cody.
"We wanted them to go together, and they did.”
Kenneth was surrounded by 24 of his closest friends and family members when he left to join his beloved wife. "It was a wonderful going away party," his daughter Cody said. "He was ready. He just didn’t want to leave her here by herself”.
There is another answer to why we deduce the laws of marriage from the field of Efron.
This was presented by Rabbi Schnuer Zalman of Liadi founder of Chabad, whose birthday will be celebrated on the 18th day of Elul.
Every law in Torah can be understood on a concrete level and also on a mystical, spiritual level. Marriage too exists on two levels: between wife and husband, and between man and G-d. The Mishnah states that a woman can enter a marriage by one of three
methods. The first is silver, or money. But the word also means desire, love yearning. A Jew gets married to G-d through through ahavah, love,
affection, passion, primarily during prayer.
Asks the Talmud, how does one find the ability to develop a love to G-d? Naturally, we do not feel a longing to G-d. we love material stuff, we don’t love G-d~!
And the Talmud answers: We derive our “love” to G-d from “the field of Efton” a field of earth.
The love is always there. The passion in the Jewish heart to G-d is a constant and permanent state. We may be overburdened by life, so we don’t consciously feel it. Or we may be filled with so much static in our own brain, with so much emotional toxicity, with so much self-doubt and insecurity, that we do not really feel our inner heartbeat; we are just trying to survive. But the love is always there. Deep in our souls there is a fire, a passion, a longing to touch the truth, to touch the Divine, the source and essence of all of life. But we need to humble and subdue our external toxicity to reveal it. We need to challenge our animal dimension till it becomes plowed and humbled like a field of earth, and then the inner love of the soul will emerge.
Of course, this interpretation holds true for the human relationship as well. People often ask, how do I rediscover—or discover—my love toward my wife, or my husband? And the answer is. The love is usually there deep inside. But to access it, to experience it, we need to learn how to subdue our animal instincts, how to challenge our external fears and insecurities, how to free ourselves from our fake egos, and turn them into a field of earth. Then our inner souls and love emerge in their full ferocious might.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Mavis Wanczyk wrote...