Happiness Set Point

Rabbi Melanie Aron

November 13, 2004

Some psychologists today believe that each person has a happiness set point, some degree of happiness which is natural to him or her. When a really good thing happens, a person will get happier for a while, but eventually will come back down to their natural happiness set point. And if something bad happens, a person will get much sadder for a while. But again, after some period of time, they will get back to their natural happiness set point.

If I had to guess what Rebekah of the Bible’s happiness set point was, I would guess it was pretty high. After all she was an active woman who courted adventure. It’s not a coincidence that she went over to the stranger at the well and offered him water. And remember, when her father turned to her and asked her if she would go with Eliezer to Canaan, an unknown land, to marry someone she had never seen in her life, she said yes.

But at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion we see a different Rebekah. After waiting twenty years to have a child, Rebekah is finally pregnant. But instead of it being the most wonderful time in her life, Rebekah is miserable. It’s not the morning sickness, it’s the struggle that is going on in her womb. Rebekah just can’t take it, she doesn’t know what’s going on, and she calls out, im ken lamah zeh ani- Hebrew words that are hard to translate. Literally, they mean: if so, why am I? Or perhaps what she said was, why is this happening to me? Or, if this is how it’s going to be, why did I want so much to get pregnant? Or perhaps the bleakest of the translations, if this is how it is, why go on living?

What was the problem exactly? Was it the physical pain? The wearing nature of pain that continued without relief in sight? Or was it the uncertainty?

The commentaries offer some different interpretations.

The Medieval Biblical commentator Ibn Ezra says that Rebekah went around to talk to all the women in the community who had been pregnant to ask them if they had experienced the kind of pregnancy she was enduring. When they said no, she despaired, and believed that she must have done something evil to have been cursed thus by God.

Another commentator, Sforno said her fear was really about the childbirth at the end of the pregnancy. If pregnancy is this painful, she concluded, surely I will die in giving birth. How can I survive such pain?

Finally, a third commentator said that she was filled with regret. When I wanted to become pregnant, my husband prayed on my behalf. We should have left well enough alone. Why did my family bless me: Be thou the mother of thousands and tens of thousands? Couldn’t God’s promise have been fulfilled in some other way?

I wondered if our bleakest moods aren’t similar in some ways to Rebekah’s. Sometimes our psychological distress comes from the wearing nature of physical pain. Sometimes it comes from fear of what lies ahead, or anger at ourselves for tempting fate by pushing for something that perhaps was not meant to be. And sometimes, it is because our experience is so different from our friends and neighbors in ways that aren’t positive, that we feel we have been singled out for hardship.

There was no pregnancy support group for Rebekah, so she sought a different kind of counsel. The Torah tells us, she went to inquire of God. The oracle she received didn’t remove the pain, it didn’t change her physical situation. But it did give her some understanding of why she was going through what she was going through and that seems to have been helpful. It also made her feel that her pain was part of a larger story, and that made her feel less alone. The oracle, that her sons would grow up to be two separate nations, was probably not what Rebekah wanted to hear, but she had the fortitude to recognize that this challenge would be one that she would have to live with over the long haul. As our portion concludes we see Rebekah return to herself and once again become an active take charge woman.

Very few of us go through life without difficult moments and adolescent girls in particular often experience times when they are confused and despairing, as Rebekah was in our Torah portion. We pray that Kayla and Rebecca will find, as Rebekah did, guidance and a sense of connection which will help them to bounce back to a positive and affirming attitude towards life.