Rivka’s Compassion at the Well

In this week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, the text quietly hands us one of the clearest moral flashes in Genesis: Rivka — Rebecca — is chosen not for wealth, not for pedigree, and not for rhetorical brilliance, but for a single, humane instinct. When Abraham’s servant Eliezer prays for a sign at the well, he asks that the woman who offers him a drink and then waters his animals be the one. Rivka does exactly that. She gives water to a stranger, then runs to give water to the camels — and in that instant Eliezer knows the mission is complete.
 
It’s a short scene, almost a throwaway detail amid negotiations and betrothal customs. But the Torah elevates it. The sign Eliezer seeks is not legal knowledge or ritual competence; it is compassion. The matriarch of Israel is chosen because she instinctively tends to other living creatures. That choice tells us something profound about what the Torah values and about the heart that forms a people.
 

A Torah Value With Modern Implications

In the video above when Rabbi Akiva asks the simple, urgent question — If Rivka walked into our world today and saw how humans treat animals for food, what would she think? — we are forced to place the biblical story beside our present reality. The practices of modern industrial animal agriculture are, in both scale and method, a world the Torah never imagined. Confinement, deprivation, genetic manipulation, mechanized transport and slaughter — these are human inventions that create suffering on an industrial scale. If gentleness and care were the decisive virtues that made Rivka the matriarch, how consistent is our era’s food system with that spiritual inheritance?
 
This contrast matters because the Torah does not present ethics as abstract theology separate from everyday behavior. Biblical narratives model how character is formed in ordinary acts: how you treat water, strangers, the weak, and the voiceless. Rivka’s act at the well was ordinary — and that ordinariness is precisely the point: spiritual excellence shows up first in the mundane. Eliezer’s test invites us to consider the moral weight of the routine gestures we perform every day — including the choices about what we eat.
 
There are several ways to take up this teaching without sliding into moralizing or guilt. The story of Rivka is not an instruction manual; it is a moral mirror. It asks us to measure ourselves by the standard the text holds up: Does our life enlarge compassion or shrink it? Do our tables reflect the values we recite in our blessings?
 
For many Jews — and for many readers of the Torah more broadly — this question leads to practical, heart-led reflection. If a matriarch is chosen for kindness to animals, what should kindness look like in a world where the production of meat, dairy, and eggs is often intimately tied to suffering? If Rivka’s compassion is our model, might we be called to reduce harm where we can, to seek food that aligns more closely with the merciful vision of the holy texts?
 
Answering that is partly personal and partly communal. Individually, people will come to these questions in different ways: some will begin by educating themselves, others by trying plant-based meals, some by supporting small- or pasture-based farms, and others by advocating for policy and humane standards. Communally, synagogue kitchens, kiddushim, holiday meals and institutional catering are powerful levers of change: the choices institutions make about food signal what the community values and normalize new practices through shared celebration.
 
Jewish tradition provides resources for that shift. The halakhic principle of tza’ar ba’alei chayim — preventing unnecessary suffering of animals — is not marginal. The prophets and wisdom literature repeatedly call the people to acts of compassion and justice that extend beyond ritual. Genesis itself begins with an Edenic image in which humans are given plants for food; rabbinic voices throughout history have both wrestled with and celebrated nonviolent ideals. Rivka’s story sits inside that larger ethical conversation and can be read as a bright, early marker on the Jewish moral map.
 

How JVL Brings Compassion Into Community Life

This is where Jewish Vegan Life (JVL) steps in as a practical companion to the Torah’s moral prompt. JVL translates that Rivka-style compassion into living Jewish practice: creating resources for holiday and everyday cooking, hosting livestream teachings that pair Torah with ethics, running holiday programming and local hubs so people can eat, pray, and learn together, and equipping congregations with plant-forward menus and educational materials.
 
JVL’s work is not about moralizing; it’s about making it possible to live in accordance with our texts — by supplying delicious, celebratory recipes, teaching materials for rabbis and educators, and communal experiences that show how Jewish joy and compassionate eating can coexist and reinforce one another. In short, JVL helps communities turn the quiet ethic at the well into visible, joyful practice around the table.
 

Seeing Today’s Food System Through Rivka’s Eyes

Reading the text with Rivka in mind, then, is less about condemning individuals and more about awakening moral attention. The question Rabbi Akiva asks — what would Rivka do? — is a contemplative prompt. It’s the kind of question that becomes a spiritual practice: when you are about to eat, pause and try to see the plate through Rivka’s eyes. Does this choice bring life and care, or does it ask someone else — human or nonhuman — to pay the price for my convenience?
 
If the story moves you, here are modest, practical ways to practice its wisdom: try a plant-based meal once or twice this week; bring a delicious plant-based dish to your synagogue’s kiddush or holiday table; read one short piece about modern animal agriculture and one about Jewish texts on compassion; or start a conversation in your community about sourcing and seasonality at communal meals. None of these is a litmus test — they are experiments in aligning practice with values.
 

Carrying Rivka’s Legacy Forward

Rivka’s kindness at the well is not only a moral parable; it is an ethic for community formation. A matriarch chosen for compassion becomes a model for the household and the nation. In our day, the choices around food — what we cook, what we serve, what we celebrate with — are the places where the next generation learns what our values look like in practice.
 
The Torah’s stories are not static relics; they are living prompts that invite us to reconsider the ordinary. When we read Rivka’s kindness beside the scale and suffering of contemporary animal agriculture, the story’s quiet power becomes a call. Not necessarily to instant conversion or to perfection, but to awake, to attend, and to let compassion shape our plates as it shaped Eliezer’s heart at the well.
 
If Rivka were here, would she be satisfied with what she saw? That is precisely the question the Torah invites us to ask — and it is a question whose answer can, in small and large ways, change how we live together in the world.