After Rebecca bore Esau and Jacob, Laban begot two daughters: Leah and Rachel. They exchanged letters and agreed that Esau would marry Leah, and Jacob would marry Rachel. Leah constantly wept over this, and from weeping, “Leah’s eyes were tender” (Genesis 29:17) (Tanchuma, ed. Buber, Vayeitzei 12).

Who are the “women in the tent” (Judges 5:24)? Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah - for they were exceptionally modest in their tents (Maharsha) (Horios 10b).

No one thanked the Holy One, Blessed is He, until Leah came and thanked Him. She declared, “This time let me gratefully praise the Lord” (Genesis 29:35) (Berachos 7b).

Jacob, the younger and more clever twin, is used to getting his way. Having overturned the inheritance of Esau, he proceeds confidently to Haran. Meeting Rachel at the now famous well, he audaciously kisses her, and then asks Laban, his kinsman, for her hand in marriage. But Laban is no easy touch. He exacts a promise from Jacob which will be translated into twenty years of servitude. It is a contract quite dependent on the exigencies of the day. Particularly when it came to the parceling out of Laban’s daughters! Though Jacob desires Rachel, the “tender-eyed” Leah is substituted on the evening of marital consummation. And technically, Laban acts within the rules, as he reminds the angry Jacob the next morning: “It is not so done in our place, to give the younger before the first-born” (Genesis 29:26). It must have been particularly galling for the young patriarch to have been reminded, by his immoral relative, of his earlier manipulation of the older Esau.

And who is this “tender-eyed” young woman? The rabbis avoid, through clever midrashic treatment, the obvious: that is, Rachel is physically more attractive than her older sister - “Rachel was of beautiful form and fair to look upon” (Genesis 29:17). But Leah has inner strength and inner beauty. She asserts her rights with Jacob in the tent of cohabitation, and despite the fact that Jacob “loved Rachel more than Leah” (Genesis 29:30), the Lord rewards Leah with six-twelfths of the eventual twelve tribes of Israel. Again, the message of Torah is remarkably current. The tradition extols women of profound external beauty, particularly those who become matriarchs of our people. Yet there is Divine recognition that one is rewarded for the performance of mitzvos, deeds of lovingkindness that express a deeper internal loveliness. Of the latter, Leah is most certainly endowed. She is the first person in the Torah to give thanks to God for allowing her to bear children, and names her fourth son Judah (which means “praise the Lord”), for that Divine privilege.

Leah never lets a mere physical blemish take away from her rightful role as one of the four matriarchs of Judaism. Like Sarah, she is “restored” by God, with a little assist from Laban, to her proper place in her and Jacob’s family, which is no less than the wife and mother of Israel.