Shabbos Parashas Toldos - 5780

Shabbos Parashas Toldos - 5780

Rabbi Hal Miller

All the wells that his father's servants had dug in the days of Avraham his father,

the Plishtim stopped up and filled them with dirt. [Bereishis 26:15]

The Plishtim were later wiped out, every single person, and not by Jews. In 1948,

the Arabs created a new "nation", populated it from their own misfits, and labeled

it "Plishtim", today's Palestinians. If today a Jew digs a well in the land of Israel,

nobody would be surprised if a Palestinian stopped it up, just out of spite. But why

did the Plishtim of old do so to Avraham's wells? Avraham had left, and in fact by

this point, had died. None of Avraham's descendants were trying to use them, but

the Plishtim, who could have used them for their own, just destroyed them. Not

only did they stop them up, they backfilled them so they couldn't be found again.

Why destroy something they could have just claimed benefit from?

Tosefta in Sotah says it was a defensive move. The Plishtim were worried that

enemy armies would approach from that direction, and upon finding wells, would

be able to refresh and sustain themselves in a fight, so they turned the land into a

desolate border merely for self-protection. But if this was so, then why did they put

such effort into claiming them when Yitzchak later redug them?

Gur Aryeh writes that it could not have been jealousy, even though much appears

in the Torah about the Plishtim being jealous of Avraham and Yitzchak, because

if that were the reason, the Plishtim would have claimed and used the wells when

Avraham left.

Rashbam disagrees, telling us it was, "to prevent Yitzchak and his children from

gaining a hold in the land. They attacked Yitzchak's possessions out of hatred and

jealousy." Sforno, Ramban, and Radak agree.

Rav Hirsch calls it jealousy and Jew-hatred. Avraham, and now Yitzchak, were of

a foreign people, yet wandered the land as though highly respected princes. The

Plishtim feared Avraham because their king had issued a decree protecting him,

but once Avraham died, the people took senseless revenge out of hatred. But at

this point, no Jew was in the vicinity nor on the horizon, so the only ones hurt by

the act of the Plishtim were themselves. Could their hatred be so deep?

A number of commentaries note that the names of the wells are relevant to our

question. Yitzchak, when he came and redug them, used Avraham's names. The

first was Esek, which means contention. The second was Sitnah, which means

hatred. Some say that the Plishtim here only wanted the benefit of Jewish labor

to redig the wells, but that does not answer the question of why they stopped

them up so thoroughly in the first place.

But the names do answer the question. The Plishtim did not need the wells.

They only wanted to deprive Avraham's descendants from having them. All the

nations in the area had benefited economically while Avraham was around, and

would do so again when Yitzchak was there. The sole reason for stopping up

the wells was unbridled hatred. They didn't need the wells, they only wanted to

cause harm to someone who had never harmed them. Sounds just like the

Palestinians of today. They don't want the land, they just want to hate. There

is no way to negotiate with that, and hasn't been in all our history, going back

to Avraham and Yitzchak.