Kindness - and Seichel

In Parshat Chayei Sara we read about the search for a wife for Yitzchak. Eliezer, Avraham’s faithful servant, is tasked with finding a suitable match for the heir to Avraham’s legacy. While Avraham makes clear that he does not want a daughter-in-law from the land of Canaan, he does not specify what qualities Eliezer should look for in a potential mate, the trusted servant comes up with a test to help find the right woman. As described in Chapter 24, Eliezer asked God to send him the “right woman” ie one who offers not only him a drink but also his camels. This test seems to be looking to find a spouse that excels in the attribute of chesed, kindness and sensitivity. This makes sense, since Avraham is known for excelling in the attribute of chesed. Seen though many episodes during his life, including his hospitality and his prayers on behalf of Sedom, Avraham epitomized chesed. A spouse who possessed similar traits of loving-kindness would be a suitable mate for Yitzchak and a worthy matriarch of the Jewish People. Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (great-grandfather of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik) in his commentary on Chumash Beis Halevi, suggests that there is another test hinted at by Eliezer. Once Eliezer drank from the water container, what would the woman do with the leftover water? Perhaps the person drinking was ill, in which case it would not be appropriate to bring the rest of the water back to her family. It would also be insulting to dump the water in front of the stranger on the slight chance that the water had become infected. The most appropriate way to handle the situation would be to dump the rest of the water into a trough and allow the camels to drink it. According to the Beis Halevi, this second test was to determine if the woman had seichel, in addition to being kind.

Seichel literally means “wisdom” or “understanding.” But it refers to a wisdom that sometimes entails a sixth sense. It’s a kind of intelligence that comes from taking in the big picture and then responding accordingly. What happens in the absence of this seichel? A few years ago there was a news story about a driver in Vermont who steered his car right into Lake Champlain. The driver said that he was using navigation app Waze, which apparently insisted that driving into the lake was the right way to go. “The app directed the drivers to turn onto the boat launch near the Coast Guard station,” the Burlington Free Press reports. “By the time they realized what was happening, the car had slid 100 feet onto the lake. The three people in the car managed to climb out.” In June 2017, there was a man who drove into a lake in Massachusetts and blamed his GPS. He’s joined by a woman in Ontario who similarly navigated into a pond and … blamed her GPS. Seichel is also part of what comprises Emotional Intelligence, defined as the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.

Rivkah did not only demonstrate chesed, she also demonstrated seichel. Common sense is too often not so common. Let us learn from our matriarch to use our God-given seichel to effectively help each other and improve the world.