We tend to think love comes first.
Two people meet. Something clicks. They enjoy being together. Feelings deepen. Eventually, if everything goes well, they make a commitment.
In other words, love produces commitment.
It seems so obvious that we rarely consider whether the equation might also work in the opposite direction.
Then we come to one of the Bible’s great love stories.
Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. At a well, the servant meets Rebecca, who offers him water and, without being asked, draws water for his camels as well.
Rebecca is a giver.
Soon she faces an enormous decision. She is being asked to leave her family and everything familiar to travel to a distant land and marry a man she has never met.
“Will you go with this man?”
“I will go” (Genesis 24:58).
Rebecca goes.
When she arrives, Isaac takes her as his wife. And then the Torah says something surprising:
“She became his wife, and he loved her” (Genesis 24:67).
Notice the order.
The Torah does not say Isaac loved Rebecca and therefore married her.
First, “she became his wife.”
Then, “he loved her.”
Why would the Torah describe love backwards?
Maybe it isn’t backwards at all.
We speak about “falling in love,” as though love were something that simply happens to us. Attraction matters. Affection matters. The delight of discovering another person matters.
But the Torah points toward another kind of love—the love that is built.
Rebecca’s story has been preparing us for it. She gives. She accepts responsibility. She leaves home. She makes a commitment.
Then Isaac and Rebecca begin a life together.
The Torah is not suggesting that people should marry someone they do not love and hope affection eventually appears. It is teaching that the feelings that begin a relationship and the love that sustains one are not necessarily the same thing.
Attraction may begin a relationship. Commitment gives love somewhere to grow.
Anyone who has loved another person for many years knows something about this.
Love grows in remarkably ordinary places.
It grows when someone gets up with a sick child at two in the morning. When a husband or wife listens even though they are exhausted. When we keep the promise, forgive the mistake, or show up when it would be easier not to.
None of those moments would make a very good romantic movie.
Together, they can make a lasting marriage.
And the principle reaches beyond marriage. Think about children, parents, siblings, lifelong friends. We assume we give so much to them because we love them.
But something else has been happening all along.
We love them more deeply because we have given so much of ourselves to them.
The verse contains one final detail. After saying Isaac married Rebecca and loved her, the Torah tells us that “Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67).
Rebecca did not replace Sarah. No one could.
But through the home Isaac and Rebecca built together, something wounded in him found comfort. Their love became more than a feeling. It became a place where another person could feel at home again.
That is why the Torah’s first description of romantic love is so different from the love stories we usually tell.
Our culture often asks: How do I know when I’ve found love?
Isaac and Rebecca leave us with another question:
What am I doing to build it?
I wish you a good week and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yonatan Hambourger
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