|
This week’s portion opens with a sentence that seems to repeat itself: “These are the generations of Isaac, son of Abraham: Abraham begat Isaac.” If we’ve just been told Isaac is Abraham’s son, why say it again?
The Sages of the Midrash, who loved to notice every seemingly extra word, told a story. People were gossiping that Isaac wasn’t really Abraham’s son at all. After all, Sarah had been unable to conceive for many years, and only after she was taken into the palace of Abimelech, king of Gerar, did she suddenly give birth. The answer, says the Midrash: Isaac was born looking exactly like his father. Anyone who saw him knew at once who his father was.
But the story takes a surprising turn. Another Midrash says the resemblance was so perfect that people simply mixed them up. Whoever spoke to Abraham thought he was talking to Isaac, and vice versa. So Abraham asked God for the signs of old age, so that people could tell father and son apart. That, says the Midrash, is why Abraham is the first person in the Torah described as “old.”
It sounds like a legend, but it carries a sharp psychological insight. Read Isaac’s story in the Torah, and he really does look like a “copy” of his father: he too goes down to the Philistines because of famine, he too meets Abimelech, he too says his wife is his sister, and he even re-digs his father’s wells. The Sages’ message: children are not replicas of their parents. Every person needs a path of their own.
This question returns to us with real force in the modern age, with the possibility of cloning humans, as was done with Dolly the sheep in 1997. Beyond the medical risks, which remain very high, there is a deeper issue. A child born of two parents is always a surprise: like them, and yet different. Identical twins exist in nature, but neither was created to be a substitute for the other. Deliberate cloning turns a person into a means, a product made to specification.
The Mishnah puts it beautifully: when a person stamps coins from a single mold, they all come out identical. But human beings, though all created from the same mold, each come out different from the other. Or as the philosopher Hilary Putnam said: “Every child has the right to be a complete surprise to its parents.”
And what would love be worth if we knew we could simply “remake” someone we had lost? It is precisely difference, the space we give another person to be themselves, that makes love more than self-love, and parenthood more than copying ourselves.
The bottom line: We are all created in God’s image, but none of us was created as a copy of anyone else.
| 
