Giving Our Rachels Their Due

Giving Our Rachels Their Due (Parshat Vayeitzei 5786)
By Rabbi Rachael Houser

In my childhood, there was no errand more despised than a trip to the dreaded Joann Fabrics. My mother and grandmother steered all four of us Houser children past rows of calicos and bolts of denim toward a table in the back of the store. There they would hand us catalogs of Butterick and McCalls patterns. These patterns, always just shy of trendy, contained instructions for how to sew outfits from scratch. Mom told us to find clothing patterns we liked and would be willing to wear to school. I remember turning each catalog page reluctantly, dreaming instead of early 2000s fashion must-haves: arm socks in leopard print and sparkly newsboy caps.

Once we made our selections, the errand wasn’t over. Mom and Granna Betty would buy the patterns and then bring us over to the rows of fabric to choose what colors our clothes would be. Economy dictated that we three girls and baby boy wore a lot of matching outfits. Admittedly, this looks adorable in photos. But to an eight-year-old, this matching was a nightmare. Fabrics chosen, they would wheel us over to check-out and take home the spoils, and our clothes would be made in a few weeks. 

I regret to say that far from being grateful, I grumbled at my homemade clothes for many years. I didn’t understand why my mother and grandmother commiserated over patterns and pooled coupons to afford fabrics in bulk. It took years for me to recognize and appreciate the labor, creativity, and skill that went into four sets of bespoke wardrobes. It took even longer for me to realize what sewing meant to my family. 

You see, my great-grandmother Idie, the oldest of ten, learned to sew from her own mother and grandmother. It was her responsibility to sew clothing for her baby sister Posey out of fabric scraps. Idie taught her daughter, my Granna Betty, how to sew her own clothes, who in turn taught my mother Diane. My mom earned a meager living in college as a seamstress for freshmen in need of hemmed pants or resewn buttons. This skill enabled my stay-at-home mom to clothe four rapidly growing children on the single salary of my hard-working journalist father. In turn, she taught the four of us. We Houser siblings sew, knit, crochet, embroider, and weave to this day. As a child, homemade clothes were the bane of my existence. As an adult, I’ve worn my own homemade or self-altered clothes for years. I even spent a year working in a costume shop for my college theatre, sewing big gowns for Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. What began as a necessary skill, one that Great-Grandma Idie probably considered more chore than craftsmanship, has become a defining trait of the Houser family. 

In Parshat Vayeitzei, we encounter a character whose skill becomes the bedrock of her family in generations to come. But she was not given her due in her lifetime. When our patriarch Jacob arrives in Haran seeking refuge with his uncle, he meets the love of his life, Rachel. Now, in our tradition, Rachel receives a bad reputation: the better-loved, beautiful wife who makes her sister Leah miserable with Jacob’s blatant preference for her, the nagging shrew who demands that Jacob give her children but dies in childbirth. 

Yet the verse that introduces her gives us a completely different, forgotten side of this matriarch. Rachel enters the scene headed for the well to water her father’s flock, the Torah tells us, ‘because she was a shepherdess.’ Ki roah hi. This word for female shepherd, roah, is the only instance of its kind in the entire Hebrew Bible. Rachel is the only roah, the only shepherdess. She is given her own, independent responsibility to care for her father’s flock. 

We lose sight of that as the parsha goes on, which focuses on Rachel’s capacity as a wife and mother. But in the years after Jacob marries her, he becomes a prosperous shepherd and animal breeder, someone who knows rituals to ensure that his share of Laban’s flock is the sturdiest and healthiest. When—and from whom—did Jacob learn how to do this? The Torah tells us in the previous parsha that Jacob wasn’t like his outdoorsy twin Esau; he preferred to stay inside the tents with his mother. How did Jacob go from being an indoorsy guy to a successful shepherd? Could it be that he learned this skill in the seven years he worked for his uncle to marry Rachel, from the woman he wanted to marry—whose very name means ‘sheep?’

If Jacob learned how to be a shepherd from his wife, then Rachel isn’t just responsible for giving her husband a trade. She’s the one who gives the Israelites their greatest talent, the skill that sets them up for generations to come. Decades after her death, her son Joseph invites his many brothers and their families to move to Egypt to escape a widespread famine, and he asks Pharaoh for permission to settle the Israelites in Egypt. When Pharaoh learns that the Israelites are shepherds, he agrees not only to let them stay, but asks that their most expert shepherds work with the royal livestock. The Israelites are invited to the inner circle of royal life from the moment they arrive in Egypt to wait out the famine, thanks to Rachel’s unsung legacy. 

Rachel’s job is truly one of a kind, the sole shepherdess in the entire Hebrew Bible. But her role isn’t just unique, it’s the gift she gives her family. By tutoring Jacob, who in turn teaches his children, Rachel’s skill becomes the defining trait of the Israelites, the very thing that gives them a home and a purpose in a new land. Yet we do not attribute this legacy to her. We do not give Rachel her due. We remember her as the mean girl, the beautiful but barren wife. But her unseen labor made her family’s success possible. 

This Thanksgiving weekend, we gather together with generations of family. Yesterday probably found thousands of bubbes and mamas in the kitchen, basting turkeys, baking pies, setting tables, cleaning dishes—sometimes without complaint, sometimes with a whole lot of kvetching. Seated at our tables might have been parents and grandparents who balanced checkbooks and saved every penny and did difficult, undesirable, unglamorous work in order to raise a family. 

What I ask this Thanksgiving weekend is that we look around these tables and in these kitchens for our own Rachels, for the members of our families whose hard work went largely unnoticed, and that we hold up their unique contributions to the light. In some cases, like Rachel, we might find that the work done over many generations became a skill or a value that defines who we are. I wear this tallit I made during rabbinical school, sewn with stitches taught to me by my mother and her mother before her, as a tribute to the Rachels of my family. Let us give our Rachels their due.