When I've read this story in the past, I, like Jacob, have favored Rachel. She was the beautiful youngest child. She was the object of Jacob's affection, the star of their tender love story. She was the rightful first bride, displaced by Leah. She was the barren wife, wanting to die rather than live a life without having her own child.
I felt bad for Leah, but I didn't like her or admire her.
When I reread the story in preparation for our meeting today, my perspective changed. The scripture account doesn't provide much insight into her own feelings about the strange and difficult events of her life.
How did she feel about her father's plan to substitute herself for Rachel? How did she feel during those long seven years watching this man fall deeply in love with her sister, all the while apparently without any suitors of her own? How did she feel in her marriage, sharing her spouse with her sister, knowing that she wasn't loved (KJV even says she was hated, although there seems to be some disputation about that translation)? How did she feel as she bore son after son, still without receiving the equal love of her husband?
Camille Fronk Olson writes this about these two women:
In addition to being used as a mere bargaining chip for her father's financial gain, Leah was hated by her husband. Rachel, on the other hand, was fortunate to have an adoring husband, but she could not bear children, the achievement that gave women value in her society. Through deepening trials, each was stretched to the realization that only God validates and enables. His infinite balm, offered to each of us, provides healing, comfort, and pure love that exceeds any mortal attempt to succor. (Women of the Old Testament, p. 65)I love the idea implicit here that these women's difficulties are what brought them to God. They each had to recognize their worth apart from their status in their society or relationships with the people around them.
I have been thinking recently about the worth of an individual soul.
What gives me worth?
We attach individual worth to many different things--the clothes, car, house we own, the body, education, experience, family, or friends we have.
As a perfectionist, I've sometimes attached my worth to what I do. If I do enough good, then I am good, then I am worth it.
Other times, I've attached my worth to how others perceive me--do people recognize my good intentions? do they feel loved by me? If enough people believe I am good, then I am good.
In more mature moments, I've attached my love to the unconditional love that God has for me. If God loves me (and He loves us all), then I must be worth something.
A couple of weeks ago, one of the counselors in my bishopric, Brother Cope, gave a lesson to our Relief Society about the Atonement. At one point, he asked us if we believed we were worth the price that Christ paid for us. It shocked me to look inside and realize that I didn't think I was worth it.
I have a healthy self-conception. It's not about self-esteem. I didn't think I was worth it because, in a very real sense of the word, I worship the Savior Jesus Christ. I believe in and love His goodness. Without thinking badly of myself, I didn't think I was worth his pain or death.
I commented in our Relief Society class that I thought I was both worth it and not worth it--I was the dust of the earth and undeserving of God's mercy, but God loved me and that gave me worth.
Brother Cope surprised me by then forcefully telling all of us that we were worth it. I've never been a fan of saccharine self-esteem lessons, but this wasn't that at all. It was truth, sincerely spoken, sincerely believed.
Something resonated inside me--doctrinally, it still didn't make sense to me that I was worth it, but spiritually and emotionally, I felt his words with all the force and power he intended. At that moment, I felt what it means to have worth in a way I never had before.
I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to make sense in my head of this feeling, trying to find a way to verbalize where the worth of every individual comes from. My pondering led me to some thoughts, but not in a way I could explain--until this morning.
I was reviewing some old notes and talks from my mission and I came across a definition of worth that I had scrawled in a margin and long forgotten about. It was this and comes from here: "The worth of a human soul is its capacity to become like God."
And I realized that I am worth Christ's Atonement and you are worth Christ's Atonement not just because of who He is and how He loves, but because of who we can be. This is why it is such a tragedy when people die young--it's not just the fact that someone has died, it's the lost potential. It's the inestimable cost of the good that person might have accomplished in this life, of the influence he or she might have had..
In Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev, the young protagonist recounts this conversation with his father about a passage in the Talmud:
“Any man who has caused a single Jewish soul to perish, the Torah considers it as if he had caused the whole world to perish; and any man who has saved a Jewish soul, it is as if he has saved a whole world.”When a soul is lost, it's as if a whole world--of potential, love, goodness, children--is lost. And if a soul is saved, a world is saved. If Christ saved one soul with His Atonement, He saved a world in goodness and potential and legacy.
[ . . .]
I asked him once, “Is it only if he kills a Jewish person, Papa?”
“No, Asher. Elsewhere the same passage appears without the word ‘Jewish.’”
“Papa, how can a man who kills one person be like one who kills a whole world.”
“Because he also kills all the children and children’s children who might have come from that person.”
You are worth the death and suffering of the only perfect man who has lived because of who you are and who you can become--because there is no end to the good you can do and the legacy you can leave on the world.
The worth of Leah doesn't lay in the fact that a man loved her or not. Her worth came in her existence--in her personality, her service, her faith, her family. She, like all of us, was part of a web--how many lives would have been altered in irreplaceable ways if not for her being who she was? If she were not a mother in Israel, a believer in God, a direct ancestor of the Savior?
How would the world and the people in your web be lost without you being who you are? Who in the future can you help by being there? It's an It's a Wonderful Life kind of question, but one worth pondering.
Written by Meridith at http://meridithwrites.blogspot.com/ ADSENSE HERE