Let My People Know

"A perception that pierced the veil of the present"


Rebekah was a woman of great understanding. 

When she felt it to be necessary, she was capable of moving anyone who stood in her way: family, parents, relatives. 

Yet there is nothing domineering or destructive in this decisiveness: she did what she felt she had to do and then retired to her place backstage. 

The sages viewed the matriarchs as having prophetic powers, superior to those of the patriarchs. 

And Rebekah did indeed act as prophet, in response to a perception that pierced the veil of the present. 

Hers was a condition not of constant prescience but of flashes of exalted clarity, consistent with Maimonides' description of prophecy as a stroke of lightning revealing the route to be taken. 

In this sense, at all the crucial moments of her life, Rebekah had a clarity of vision greater than that of those around her. 

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
 
From Biblical Images by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz