Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

Don’t we all love receiving a bunch of flowers! Connecting flowers to love and romance is not simply a triumph of 20^th century marketing. In fact, there is a beautiful tale in this week’s parsha with flowers at its heart.

Parshat Vayeitzei spans a grand arc of the love and losses of our patriarch Jacob and his four wives (yup, polygamy was a thing!) Yaakov loved Rachel, but her father Lavan tricked Yaakov into marrying Leah (Rachel’s older sister) first and Rachel as an afterthought. We are told that Yaakov loved Rachel, while Leah is described as a shabby, second-best wife.

In an interesting show of compassion, we are told that God saw that Leah was unloved and so gives her what was considered a great gift in ancient times; fertility. Leah gives birth to six of the 12 tribes of Israel. On the other hand, Rachel struggled to fall pregnant even though she longed for a child.

This Parsha presents a classic ‘jealous siblings’ scenario. Each has something that the other wants: Leah wants what Rachel has, the love of Yaakov. Rachel wants what Leah has, fertility. This is: “You are so not invited to my Bat Mitzvah,” 3000 BCE.

Our story picks up when Reuven Leah’s son saw that his unloved mother was sad. He goes out to the field and brings her some flowers (we will put the potential Oedipal themes in this story aside for today.)  In Hebrew these special flowers were called dudaim. Some translate dudaim as mandrakes but I am drawn to Everett-Fox’s translation; love apples. Our medieval commentaries describe these flowers as herbal medicine, used for fertility and romance. Rachel sees these flowers and asks Leah for some of them, presumably to help with fertility. Leah responds by saying, ‘is it not enough that you have taken my husband’s love and now you want my flowers?’  Without blinking an eye, Rachel says, ‘you can have our husband for the night, in exchange for the flowers.’ And so, Rachel hires out her husband to her sister-wife, in exchange for a bunch of flowers!

The Rabbis in Bereishit Rabba make an astonishing comment about the dudaim. They write: Come and see how great was the mediation of the mandrakes. That’s right, two thousand years ago, it was understood that flowers were a ‘kiss and make up tool.’ The question is, what mediation happened? Leah acquired Yaakov for a day but it was not the beginning of their great romance. Rachel eventually falls pregnant but we cannot attribute this simply to her use of the dudaim. Shauli makes the comment that ‘du’ means two and da’ah means to glide, conjuring the image of two people gliding in an exalted space. Instead of the flowers being some magical love potion, could it be that these flowers are a conversation starter and mediator between the jealous sisters. The dudaim get the sisters talking. Their conversation is intimate because each sister has the courage to acknowledge her longing; Leah shares that she longs for love, Rachel acknowledges that she longs for children.   

The best kind of love flowers are the the conversations where people are real with each other. It’s very hard to turn to someone, especially someone you are jealous of, and acknowledge your jealousy and longing. In having that authentic conversation, we may not get what we want, but we might be able to get something else, connection or friendship! In our world today, these dudaim are even more important. We live in echo chambers, where we are used to hearing people who have the same opinions as us. This is not a world of dudaim, of twoness and mediation. Even if we talk to other people, often those people think like us and talk like us.

Especially at the moment, when it feels as if everyone has an opinion this way or that way, it feels really important to talk to people who think differently from us. We don’t have to agree with them, but we need to remember that dialogue between people brings about understanding among people and even great love in this world. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all  want?

Shabbat Shalom