Word Prompt – RIVKA – Rivka Schwartz

The only thing funnier than writing about my own name is writing about my own name, twice. (I wrote about "Rivka" for The Jewish Press some years back.)

We're all familiar with the Midrash that Rivka was three when she married Yitzchak – familiar, because Rashi cites it. Since it presents some fairly obvious challenges, teachers have found themselves struggling to explain or account for it. Perhaps you were offered some version of the explanation that I was; that people matured faster then, that three-year-olds were of age to get married. I don't think I was buying it. My father offered me the much more plausible and palatable explanation cited by Tosafot, based on a different calculation of years and numbers: that Rivka was 14 when she married Yitzchak.

Torah Judaism makes all sorts of demands on us; of practice and belief, of moral stances that conflict with the culture around us. We have to contend with them, and prepare our children to contend with them. What we don't have to do is make things harder than they need to be. Rivka's age at her time of marriage is not a tenet of the faith – indeed, it is the subject of differing opinions in Chazal. When a student asks, "How could a three-year-old get married?!" we don't have to offer farfetched or farkvetched explanations. Instead, we can just say, "Tosafot says she didn't.”