Parshas Chayei Sarah: Experience as a Reflection of Conduct

In this week’s parsha, Avraham avinu sends his trusted servant, Eliezer, to find a wife for Yitzchak. The Torah goes into detail describing Eliezer’s journey and the way he found Rivka. After Rivka passed the “test” that Eliezer had davened for, she ran back home to report what had happened – that she had met Eliezer and that he had asked if there was place for him to sleep. The Torah relates that Lavan, Rivka’s brother, ran out to Eliezer and invited him in, telling him, “Why should you stand outside when I have cleared the house....” Rashi (24:31) comments that Lavan was not merely indicating that there was physical room for Eliezer to stay, but rather that he cleared his house from idols. Seemingly, Avraham’s public stance on avodah zarrah was so clear that even his servant merely showing up in town, prompted Lavan, an idol worshipper, to put all his idols away because he knew it would be unacceptable to have them around, even in his own house, so long as a representative of Avraham was present.

I was talking to someone this week and they told me, “I finally got my [social media] algorithm to stop making a particular type of post keep coming up”. Evidently, he had clicked on a couple of things and suddenly he was being targeted for weeks by ads, and like-posts trying to push him further towards thinking and acting based on his initial clicks. It took weeks for him to deliberately “x” out of posts and purposely skip remotely similar ones in order to retrain the algorithm. He was excited when the posts stopped coming altogether. 

The thoughts, speech, and actions we put into this world have a way of sticking to us and attracting similar thoughts, speech, and actions to follow. My friend put one click into the algorithm and the consequence was like shining a flashlight in the dark amidst a swarm of moths. Avraham avinu, and by extension his family and even his servants, set a standard of absolute intolerance of avodah zarrah, and this influenced idol worshiper to clear his house when someone from Avraham’s house was in town. 

It is no coincidence of course that we see a similar pattern later in the parsha with both Yitzchak and Rivkah – the perfect shidduch! When RIvkah saw Yitzchak for the first time (Beraishis 24:64), Rashi describes that she was amazed by him, and took a veil and covered herself. Yitzchak’s mere proximity instilled a level of awe and respect. Later, Yitzchak wanted to test this for himself in RIvkah. He brought her into their tent, and, as Rashi explains the passuk, “Behold, she was Sarah, his mother” - meaning all the miracles that took place while Sarah was alive (the light would remain lit continuously from shabbos to shabbos, the challah would increase, and a cloud of Hashem would be present over the tent), returned with RIvkah around. All that Rivkah exhibited with her middos and emunah caused the same metaphysical reactions back just as was experienced when Sarah was alive.  

People tend to experience and attract back to them what they themselves put out in the world. During these times that the spotlight of the world is hyper-focused on Jews and Israel, it is even more important to take a moment and consider the types of thoughts, speech, and action we put out into the world; and one way of noticing is to tune into the things that find their way back to us.