Parshas Toldos 5786
In May 2012, an 18 year old took the stage at Benedictine University’s “Youth Government Day.” A prominent political activist by the name of Bill Montgomery was in the room and he later noted that while the other speakers at the event had bored the audience of a few hundred high-school kids, they began to pay rapt attention when this new speaker took the mic. Montgomery approached the young man and encouraged him to pursue political activism full-time. The speaker’s name was Charlie Kirk. A month after that first meeting, he and Bill Montgomery co-founded Turning Point USA.
Which isn’t the least bit surprising. It’s exactly what anyone would have imagined as the first foray into a lifetime of advocacy and activism: taking the mic, leading the conversation, sharing one’s personal thoughts with the crowd. Someone who had never demonstrated those skills would never have become Charlie Kirk.
But he may have become Yitzchak Avinu.
The Gemara in Shabbos 89b describes a conversation Hashem had with the three Avos, one after the other. Disappointed with the behavior of the Jewish People, Hashem shares His plan to destroy them. He turns first to Avraham, then to Yaakov, both of whom can only concur with the Divine intention to obliterate the Jewish People.
But then Hashem turns to Yitzchak and shares His accusation. “Your children have sinned.” Yitzchak responds with indignation. “My children? When they accepted the Torah, placing ‘na’aseh’ (we will perform) before ‘nishma’ (we will hear), did they not become Your children as well?”
Yitzchak is successful and the execution is stayed. Yitzchak, as it turns out, succeeds in advocacy where both his father and son walk right past the podium and never even pick up the mic.
If we look to the Chumash to uncover clues—hints to Yitzchak’s future success in impassioned advocacy—we come up empty. It is Avraham and Yaakov who live lives dotted with dynamic escapades, telling off their adversaries, boldly engaging new horizons of spiritual activity.
Yitzchak is not the one at the podium. He is not the leader, he is the follower. It is his father who takes the lead as they march off to the Akeidah. When famine strikes Eretz Yisrael, Yitzchak first attempts to descend to Egypt—just as his father had done—before receiving Divine instruction not to. Yitzchak goes to Grar and poses as Rivka’s brother, rather than her husband, mimicking the behavior of his father when he and Sarah arrived in the same land. Of the remarkably little the Torah tells us about Yitzchak, one of the few episodes featured prominently is Yitzchak’s efforts in re-digging his father’s old wells, and calling them by the same names that his father did.
Yitzchak is not portrayed as the dynamic innovator, but as the dutiful follower. Avraham enjoyed a long career of taking the mic; Yitzchak did not. But when it came to advocating for the Jewish People, it is Yitzchak who strides defiantly to the podium. How did this come to pass?
Perhaps Yitzchak’s advocacy does not come in spite of his long resume of following in his father’s footsteps, but specifically as a result of it. One can only imagine Avraham’s response to the news that the Jewish People had sinned. “How can that be? Proper belief has been handed to them on a silver platter. I already wrote the playbook for them, all they needed to do was follow. If I had sinned, I could have claimed theological confusion; if they’ve sinned, what excuse could possibly be offered?”
But Yitzchak would have an entirely different opinion. One born out of a life of following. No new horizons, no stepping out into the unknown. A life dedicated to simply emulating those who came before you, following in their footsteps, abiding by the script they’d already written.
Looking at the relatively little that the Torah chose to teach us about the life of Yitzchak, it is hard to see it as anything other than monotonous, particularly in comparison to the lives of Avraham and Yaakov.
But monotonous doesn’t mean easy. It means maintaining fidelity to principles that you never authored, forfeiting the natural satisfaction born of living your own life and fulfilling your own ideals. Yes, much of the heavy lifting has already been done for Yitzchak, but in a certain sense, that only makes his life more difficult. How do you generate passion for something that doesn’t feel entirely personal?
When the Gemara paints the picture of Yitzchak going to bat for the Jewish People, it is simultaneously validating the struggle and shaking us by the lapels. On the one hand, it is giving credence to the difficulty we experience in finding many aspects of our avodah monotonous and impersonal. I daven words that aren’t mine, I abide by zmanim I didn’t select, I wear tefilin without customizing the shape, color, or parshios that are tucked inside. That is hard to do. Yitzchak Avinu knows it, and defends our lapses during that struggle.
But it’s also a wakeup call. To not equate the stimulating with the valuable. To not look to a mitzvah’s resonance on a personal level as a barometer for whether or not we’re cut out for that mitzvah. One may feel a certain satisfaction in managing his startup, completing his pet project, or engaging with a hobby he’s personally selected and developed in a way he does not when living by principles and laws imposed upon him from the outside. There is real mesirus nefesh—real sacrifice—there. But we sacrifice for things that are important. And importance and resonance are not one and the same.
Yitzchak Avinu looks to us and says, “I get it. It doesn’t feel like your own. And that’s hard. Believe me, I know.” It is our job to look back to Yitzchak Avinu and say, “Yet we’re still supposed to perform, aren’t we? After all, you can only create a dynasty by following what came before you.”