The Torah is filled with unforgettable people. Even their mere names summon compelling opinions or images. Abraham holding the knife over his son. Rachel weeping for her people. King David facing Goliath. Joseph in the clutches of Potiphar — almost. Moses on Mount Sinai. So thick and resonant are these figures that they, and others as prominent as they (Jeremiah in the pit, Daniel in the lion’s den), obscure the Torah’s missing persons. The Torah’s dramatis personae are as dramatic as in no other book, yet the Torah is also dead silent, filled with gaps.
When Lot, Abraham’s nephew, was captured in the war, the news arrived via a fugitive. Who was the fugitive? Unnamed.
More than a millennium later, a fugitive brought news of the destruction of the Second Temple to the Prophet Ezekiel and the other exiles already in Babylonia. Who was a fugitive? Unnamed.
Sarah our Mother, the mother-in-law, does not exist. She never was a mother-in-law. She died upon hearing that her son Isaac had almost been slaughtered by her husband on Mount Moriah. Her son married only after his mother’s death. She couldn’t be a mother-in-law.
Abraham our Father, qua father-in-law, does not exist. When his faithful servant Eliezer brought back Rebeccah as a wife for his son Isaac, Abraham was nowhere to be found. He had scrupulously laid out the criteria for his son’s wife to Eliezer, but after Eliezer successfully met the criteria and brought back Rebeccah, the Torah records not a single word of conversation between Abraham and Rebeccah, nor that they even met, even once. To our knowledge, Abraham was not a father-in-law. But even if he was, the silence in the Torah guarantees that we shall learning nothing from him in this capacity.
Similarly, Rebeccah our Mother, the mother-in-law, does not exist. She sent away her son Jacob to a distant land out of fear that his brother Esau would kill him. Jacob married within Rebeccah’s lifetime, but she never met even one of her four daughters-in-law: Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah. Rebeccah did not act as a mother-in-law.
Dinah, the beloved daughter of Jacob, had 12 sisters-in-law, the wives of her 12 brothers, but the Torah records no marriage for Dinah. She was raped, she was rescued by her violent brothers Levi and Simon, but did she become a wife? On this, the Torah is as silent as it is on Abraham-and-Rebeccah.
When the two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, are struck down for offering a “foreign fire” on the day of the Tabernacle’s inauguration, the entire House of Israel is commanded to weep, but not their children, for they had no children. Collective weeping by the whole community, not individual weeping by immediate offspring, was the only possibility.
Moses had two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, known for what they were not: Moses’ successor. Other than that, they are not known at all. Gershom-and-Eliezer do not exist.
The man who couldn’t keep two Sabbaths in a row, who desecrated the second Sabbath after it was commanded on Mount Sinai — who was he? His name is unstated. He is a mystery.
A prophet denounced and foretold the downfall of the infamous king in ancient Israel, Yeravam the idolater. Who was this prophet? Unknown. A false prophet deceived the true prophet. Who was the false prophet? Unknown.
Angels fill the Torah: the four who spoke to Hagar after she fled from Sarah, the deliverer of Lot from Sodom’s destruction, the announcer of Sarah’s fertility at age 100, the healer of Abraham’s pain from his circumcision, the visitors of Jacob in his dream of a ladder reaching Heaven, the sword- wielder over Balaam and his donkey, the announcer of fertility for Manoah’s wife (mother of Samson), the instructor of Elijah, the destroyer of Assyria’s colossal military camp. Powerful and prevalent, these angels! But what are they? We know what they do —they serve as agents of G-d — but we do not know what they are. They are undefined in the Torah. Angels exist, but only as a mystery.
The missing persons of the Torah are not like pauses between the notes, not absences that etch presences. The Torah is a tale of transmission, of passing down the tradition, a record of begettings. The Torah is the story of the giving of the law to the generation of Mount Sinai so the next generation and all future generations would embrace it. The Torah is the book of continuity, of generation-to-generation. The Torah recounts the struggles of the founders to create a people that would keep re-creating itself after each dramatic defeat. The Torah is history filled with gaps, losses, non-existences and mysteries.
With missing persons.
The Torah is full of Divine imperatives but also of missing teachers.
The Torah sets in motion history’s longest continuity, sustained despite the wars from without — Pharaohs, Nazis, Hamas — and the wars from within — heresies and polarizations. No husband for Dinah is set forth and Aaron’s sons did not procreate. Abraham did not guide Rebeccah and she did not guide her son as he was entangled with her malevolent brother Laban. Rachel did not know her son Benjamin, as she died in childbirth. No Patriarch or Matriarch guided his or her own grandchildren. At best, a dying Joseph blessed his grandsons. Even G-d Himself does not show up in the Scroll of Esther.
Midrash fills in many of the gaps, but that’s the point: midrash needs fill in, because the Torah leaves out.
By force of faith or stubbornness, and sometimes via a mysterious angel’s nod, the founders’ descendants assume the leadership, carry the vision forward, and re-grasp the Torah — undeterred by all of its missing persons.
© IJN 2024
