This year in our sukkah, the Crunch family had a discussion each night at dinner about who the ushpiz (Biblical guest) for that day. The first night, we talked about Avraham, his order from Hashem to leave his family and journey to a new land, perhaps never to see his family again. He obeyed this command, and took his wife, servants, and livestock and set out.
Because Yom Kippur and the story of Yonah the prophet was so recently in her head, 4-year-old Banana pointed out that Yonah was also commanded by God to make a journey, but unlike Avraham he resisted, ran away, and it took living in the belly of a giant fish for a few days to straighten him out.
The next night we began by discussing Yitzhak, Avraham’s son, but found the conversation turned toward Rivka instead. In some sense, she found herself in a similar situation to that of Avraham and Yonah, where she was presented with the option to go to a new place to live. But unlike Avraham, she would be leaving her immediate family and everything familiar to her behind, and unlike Yonah, would probably never be able to return home again. Yet at a tender age (and the Cap’n had no interest in discussing the outlier opinion that she was only three when Eliezer’s proposal was made to her; putting her age at 12 or 13 is quite young enough) she had the middot (good character qualities) to merit Eliezer’s offer, and the guts, foresight, and perhaps the prophesy too to accept them and make her journey. In the end, Rivka struck us as the gutsiest of the three.
I like the idea of discussing the Biblical guest for each night.