Hashem remembered Rachel and heard her prayers and caused her to conceive. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son, and said, "Hashem has ended my disgrace."

(Bereishit 30:22-23)

"My disgrace" - I was disgraced because due to my being barren, they said that Yakov would divorce me and I would marry Esav instead. [This is the simple understanding of the verse.] According to the Midrash, however, the disgrace to which Rachel was referring was that a childless woman has no one to blame for her misdeeds. Once she has a son she can blame him: "Who broke this vessel? It must have been your son! Who ate these figs? It must have been your son!"

(Rashi, ad loc.)

Rashi suggests two ways of understanding Rachel's disgrace: One possibility is that she was concerned lest she be sent away and left with no way to stay in Yakov's family other than to marry Esav. Becoming a part of Esav's family would surely be a disgrace (see Bereishit Rabba 80:8, "Ki Cherpa Hi Lanu...").

The second interpretation Rashi offers is that a childless woman is blamed for everything that goes wrong in the house -- this is her disgrace. Now that Rachel bore Yakov a child, if anything should break in the house it would be blamed on her son.

This second explanation is very difficult to understand. After waiting all these years for a child, and after all that she has been through, is this what Rachel thanks Hashem for when her prayers are finally answered? That should she now break a pot she can blame it on her son? Is this a proper show of gratitude to Hashem for bestowing upon her such a tremendous blessing?

The commentaries to whom we generally turn are silent concerning this Midrash. (See "Sichot Mussar" by Rav Chaim Shmulevitz, 5732, Ch. 6, for the Mussar [= personality development] school's interpretation of this Midrash.)However, Rav Asher Sternbuch of Har Nof, Jerusalem (son of Rav Moshe Sternbuch, author of Moadim U'Z'manim), recently shared with me a beautiful thought that sheds much light on this cryptic Midrash. Let us first study the background of Yosef's birth, in order to appreciate Rav Sternbuch's explanation.

When Rachel was due to marry Yakov, Yakov suspected that her father might try to cheat him by giving him Leah instead. To this end, Yakov gave Rachel a secret password by which he would be able to identify her under a veil or in the dark. Should Lavan indeed try to make the switch, Yakov would be able to catch Lavan immediately.

Things did not work out as planned, however. Lavan did, in fact, make the switch. But Yakov didn't manage to catch him in time. As Rashi writes:

"And in the morning, behold it was Leah" -- but in the night Yakov did not realize that it was Leah. Why? Because although Yakov gave a password to Rachel, when Rachel saw that her father was substituting Leah for her, she said, "What a tremendous embarrassment this will be for my sister!" (Yakov would discover that it was Leah and send her out right in middle of the wedding.) Rachel decided to give the secret password to Leah.

(Rashi, Bereishit 29:25)

"Hashem remembered Rachel and heard her prayers" -- Hashem remembered that Rachel gave the secret password to her sister when she got married.

(Rashi, Bereishit 30:22)

Indeed, had Yakov married Rachel (the younger daughter) as planned, Leah would have been left with no choice. In order to marry into the family of Avraham, she would have had to marry Esav. By giving Leah the password, Rachel enabled Leah to marry Yakov, since once she had been with him for the night he would accept her as a wife and not send her away. In this manner Rachel saved her sister from marriage to Esav.

Now that Rachel was barren she was afraid that Yakov would divorce her and *she* would fall to Esav. At this point Hashem remembered that she had saved her sister from this fate. He now saved Rachel from the same fate by granting her a child and thereby securing her husband, measure for measure. (See Maharal's Gur Arye, ad loc.)

What other "measure for measure" might there be? In what way is having a child a proper reward for giving her sister the secret password? The answer lies in Rachel's words upon Yosef's birth: "Hashem has ended my disgrace." We noted that Rachel had saved her sister from disgrace ("What a tremendous embarrassment this will be for my sister!"). Now, at Yosef's birth, Rachel expressed her gratitude that she, too, had been saved from disgrace, measure for measure.

But what disgrace was Rachel saved from? As we pointed out earlier, childlessness might be a cause for sadness and depression, but it is not a cause for disgrace!

The Midrash that Rashi cites enlightens us in this matter. There is indeed an aspect of disgrace involved in the state of childlessness; it leaves the mother subject to hyper-criticism. She can be blamed for everything. This, suggests Rav Sternbuch, is the key to understanding what Rachel meant. Rachel realized that it was this aspect of disgrace that comes with childlessness which allowed the principle of "measure for measure" to come into play in granting her a son.

This is why Rachel thanked Hashem upon Yosef's birth for sparing her from being embarrassed by her misdeeds. It was not that she did not have a greater reason for giving thanks than the fact that she would no longer be blamed for breaking things. Her major cause for thanks was of course the fact that she would be the mother of a tribe of Israel. However, Rachel meant to acknowledge the determining factor that gave her the merit of having a child in the first place. She saw that sparing her sister from disgrace had earned her this child, who would, to some degree, spare *her* from disgrace. She thanked Hashem for the child by thanking Him for dealing her "measure for measure!"