Delivered November 21, 2025
Rabbi Zvika Krieger, Chochmat HaLev

In this week’s Torah portion, we read about the life of Yitzchak and Rivka, Yitzchak and Rebecca, our second set of forefathers and foremothers.

Tucked away between the key plot points, there is a seemingly non-sequitor chapter about them traveling down to Gerar, the land of the Philistines, in search of food during a famine. Yitzchak was worried that they might murder him to get to his beautiful wife Rivka, so he tells the Philistines that Rivka is his sister instead.

There are a few things that are troubling about this story. One is that this seems like a horribly selfish plan for Yitzchak. “They might kill me if they think I’m your husband, but if they think I’m your brother, they’ll spare me and just have their way with you.”

But what’s even stranger about this story is that basically the exact same story happened a few chapters earlier, in Parshat Lech Lecha, when Yitzchak’s father Avramah/Abraham travels down to Gerar to find food during a famine, and tells the same lie about his wife Sarah being his sister, to protect himself from Abimelech, the same king of Gerar.

Bible scholars call this a doublet, one of many stories repeated twice and sometimes. The predominant academic theory is that the Torah as we know it is actually a synthesis of a few different texts from different parts of the Jewish world, and so these repetitions reflect the fact that the same stories were told in different Jewish communities through different characters.

But the traditional Jewish commentators, who believe the Torah was divinely authored, have a different explanation for these repetitions. It is a concept they call: Ma’aseh Avot Siman LeBanim – the deeds of the fathers are a sign to the children.

Nachmanides, the Medieval Spanish mystic, writes: “The events that happened to Avraham are not mere accidents, but like a prophetic vision showing what will happen to his descendants… Everything that happened to him is a decree that will come upon his offspring, and every action of the patriarch becomes a model for the generations after him.”

So while these traditional commentators see this repetition as a form of prophesy or destiny, I’d offer a slightly different translation of Ma’aseh Avot Siman LeBanim: Intergenerational trauma.

I don’t think the Torah is trying to show us here that God has pre-written our futures, but rather that patterns repeat in families, especially the patterns we don’t consciously examine.

We all grow up watching our parents and caregivers navigate fear, conflict, power, intimacy, scarcity, anger. And whether they intend to teach us or not, we absorb their strategies in the depths of our nervous system. Some of these are beautiful gifts—ways of loving, ways of protecting, ways of finding joy. And some of them are survival strategies that were adaptive in their world—but can become constricting in ours.

Human beings learn to love, to fight, to hide, to protect, and to cope by watching the generation before us. Sometimes we learn from their examples, and sometimes we learn from their counter-examples. When we’re our best selves, we effectively discern which lessons to take on, and in what ways we can do better than previous generations. I’m sure many of us remember thinking or even saying, “When I grow up, I’m never going to do that.”

But forging new patterns isn’t always easy. Especially when we’re stressed, hungry, tired, or under-resourced, we default to the patterns we inherited. We act out their story before we even realize we’ve picked up the script.

This is exactly what’s happening with Yitzchak. He isn’t consciously trying to imitate Avraham. He doesn’t sit down and say, “Ah yes, time to reenact dad’s morally questionable Gerar Strategy.” No. Yitzchak ends up repeating the same harmful behavior because he learned fear from his father, and when fear rises in him, it calls forth his father’s survival playbook.

Avraham, facing famine and danger, panics—and the part of him that feels small and powerless reaches for deception to stay alive. Yitzchak, decades later, faces famine and danger and does the same thing. Not because he wants to, but because trauma echoes. Fear doesn’t ask our permission before it pulls us backward.

This is the Torah’s way of saying: We don’t only inherit our parents’ blessings—we inherit their fears, their coping mechanisms, their unresolved wounds, their silences, their survival strategies. And the truth is: even when we don’t want to repeat their mistakes, we often do. Not because we’re bad. But because the nervous system under stress reverts to what is familiar, not what is wise.

We see the pattern repeat again and again throughout the book of Genesis: Fathers sacrificing their sons. Siblings in competition. Parents choosing one child over another. Husbands sowing jealousy between their wives. When our ancestors were threatened, they returned to old patterns. Just like us.

We see the same thing in our collective life as Jews. When threats feel close—whether rising antisemitism on our streets or the unbearable complexity and grief of Israel and Palestine—our communal nervous system often reaches back for the oldest scripts it knows: fight, flee, close ranks, assume hostility, or silence ourselves. These reactions come from generations who had to survive. But unexamined, they can keep us trapped in inherited fear rather than helping us shape a wiser, more spacious Jewish future.

Many of us spend years trying to build healthier relationships than the ones we grew up watching, trying to parent differently than we were parented, trying not to shut down like our father, not to explode like our mother, not to disappear like the adults who were supposed to hold us. And yet—when we are scared, overwhelmed, exhausted—we default to what is familiar, what is encoded in us.

I remember when I was a kid and my mother got divorced for the second time, I said to myself, “I’m never going to make those mistakes.” And here I am, 42, divorced, with a kid of my own. Some of the mistakes that ended my marriage were my own, but I’m embarrassed to admit that some of them were the same ones I witnessed growing up and promised to avoid.

This, I think, is the Torah’s deeper meaning of Ma’aseh Avot Siman LeBanim: If we don’t heal what we inherit, we will repeat it.

But the Torah doesn’t tell us this to shame us. It tells us this to begin the process of healing. So how do we do that?

Well, immediately following the sister/wife story in this week’s parsha, we have an episode that seems even more random, in which Yitzchak starts to dig up the wells that his father had dug years ago. But perhaps the symbolism is clearer in the context of Ma’aseh Avot Siman LeBanim: Each one he digs, the Philistine shepherds chase him away, as if to say, “You’re not going to get very far if you just keep digging up your father’s wells.” Only when he starts digging his own wells, in new places, do the shepherds leave him alone. He names the last three wells, perhaps to give us a roadmap for this healing process: Esek, Sitnah, and Rechovot.
The first is Esek, which means tension. Esek is where every healing journey starts: the awkward, uncomfortable moment you realize that your inherited coping mechanisms simply don’t fit who you’re becoming. This stage can be painful because it exposes the fault lines in our lineage.

Yitzchak names the next well Sitnah, meaning sabotage. It’s the moment healing gets harder before it gets easier. The word “Sitnah” is related to Satan, the inner prosecuting voice that rises up when we try to change: “Who do you think you are? You’ll never escape this. You’re being ungrateful. This isn’t how we do things in this family.” Sitnah is what happens when the nervous system panics and pulls us back into what is familiar. In family systems theory, it’s called homeostasis, our natural tendency to maintain stability and balance. Sitnah, doubling down on old patterns, is not a sign we’re doing it wrong. This resistance is a sign we’re starting to do the hard work of healing.

The final well is called Rechovot – named, as the Torah teaches, because “כִּי עַתָּה הִרְחִיב יְיָ לָנוּ — For now God has made spaciousness for us.” Rechovot teaches the practice of differentiation – the sacred work of separating what is truly ours from what we inherited. Rechovot teaches the practice of curiosity instead of judgment. It is the inner spaciousness that becomes possible when we stop fighting every battle and start observing ourselves with gentleness and wonder. Rechovot is about expanding our inner container – creating space to hold uncomfortable feelings, creating space to pause rather than default to our inherited panic responses. Rechovot is about making room to see with clarity, to breathe, and to choose differently.

Let’s take a spacious moment to connect with that Rechovot energy. I invite you to close your eyes and take a deep breath.
Take a moment to reflect on the ways in which our parents have shaped who you are today. What gifts did you receive from them? How has their example helped you cope with challenging situations? In what ways have you vowed to be different from them? Which harmful behaviors did they exhibit? And how do you see yourself replicating those behaviors? In what kinds of situations do you find yourself being more like them than you’d like to admit? In what situations do you find yourself unconsciously reenacting behaviors that you know are self-defeating? How might you want to try something different?

***

After Yitzchak digs the new well at Rechovot, the Divine appears to him and says: “Al Tira – Don’t be afraid.” The Divine blesses Yitzchak’s sacred journey from, from struggle, to accusation, to spaciousness. The Divine says: You don’t need to let fear drive you into old patterns anymore. And what does Yitzchak do next? He builds an altar—an act of spiritual anchoring. And he pitches his tent—an act of claiming his own home.

To his surprise, his servants find a new well in this place of clarity and agency. Yitzchak names the well Shiv’a, which is tied to the word for Seven in Hebrew – like the name for the seven days of mourning in Jewish tradition, Shiva. The name of the well alludes to the grief Yitzchak had to endure on his healing journey – the rupture with his parents, the relationships damaged by trauma, the pain he had to carry. Like sitting Shiva, Yitzchak experiences and then metabolizes that grief.

Seven in Jewish mysticism is also correlated with completion, wholeness, and integration. He names the well Shiv’a to mark that moment of settledness—finally arriving at that sense of “I know who I am.”

Rashi, the prolific Medieval Torah commentator, points out that the name of this final well, Shiv’a, is also tied to the word for oath. Bestowing this name is Yitzchak’s way of marking a new covenantal moment—the first covenant he creates that is not a repetition of his father’s. It’s a commitment to a new way of being.

Let’s close with a blessing for us all.

Mi Sheberach avoteinu v’imoteinu v’horeinu—
May the Sacred Oneness who blessed our ancestors bless us with shiv’a on our own healing journeys.

May we be blessed with the courage to metabolize our feelings—
to grieve what needs grieving,
to name what has been unspoken,
to feel even what is painful without collapsing into it.

May we be blessed with integration—
with the inner spaciousness that lets the past sit inside us
without controlling us,
with the capacity to hold complexity without losing ourselves,
with the wholeness that comes from stitching together all our scattered parts.

And may we be blessed with commitment—
with the strength to make new covenants,
to choose new ways of being,
to build new wells that our children can inherit—
wells not of fear or scarcity,
but of clarity, expansiveness, and love.

And may we go from struggle, to resistance, to spaciousness,
and finally to the deep, rooted healing that allows us to say,
like Yitzchak: “God has made space for us… and now we will flourish.”

Ken tehi retzona. May this be so. Amen.

Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev. You can read more of his teachings here.