GEN1302 Was Leah hated? No. The previous sentence has just told us that she was loved. What then does the Torah mean by “hated”? It means, that is how Leah felt. Yes she was loved, but less than her sister.  Leah knew, and had known for seven years, that Jacob was passionately in love with her younger sister Rachel. The Torah says that he worked for her for seven years “but they seemed to him like a few days because he was so in love with her” Genesis 29:20 Leah was not hated. She was less loved. But someone in that situation cannot but feel rejected. The Torah forces us to hear Leah’s pain in the names she gives her children. Her first she calls Reuben, saying “it is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.” The second she calls Simeon, “Because the Lord heard that I am not loved.” The third she calls Levi, saying, “Now at last my husband will become attached to me” Genesis 29:32 – 35. There is sustained anguish in these words. We hear the same time later when Reuben, Leah’s firstborn, finds mandrakes in the field. Mandrakes were thought to have aphrodisiac properties, so he gives them to his mother hoping that this will drive his father to her. Rachel, who has been experiencing a different kind of pain, childlessness, seize the mandrakes and asks Leah for them. Leah then says: “Wasn’t it enough that you took away my husband? Will you take my son’s mandrakes too?” Genesis 30:15 The misery is palpable. Note what is happened. It began with love. It was about love throughout. Jacob loved Rachel. He loved her at first sight. In fact, there is no other love story quite like it in the Torah: Abraham and Sarah are already married by the time we first meet them; Isaac has his wife chosen for him by his father’s servant. He is more emotional than the other patriarchs; that is the problem. Love unites but it also divides. It leaves the unloved, even the less-loved, feeling rejected, abandoned, forsaken, alone.  That is why you cannot build a society, a community, or even a family on love alone. There must be justice-as-fairness also. SACKS 43-4