Rebekah sees him before he sees her. From the back of her camel she looks across the field and asks the servant, "Who is the man, so majestic and graceful, who walks in the field before us?" Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 24:65 preserves the double adjective — majestic and graceful — and the servant's one-word answer: "He is my master."
And then the gesture that shaped a ritual. "She took a veil and covered herself."
The Jewish tradition reads this moment as the origin of the bedeken, the veiling ceremony performed before every traditional Jewish wedding. Before a bride walks to the chuppah, the groom is brought in to veil her himself — an echo of a moment that did not quite happen. Here Rebekah veils herself before Isaac reaches her. In our ceremony, the groom does the veiling himself. Either way, the gesture says the same thing: modesty is not shame; modesty is the awe that real encounter demands.
Notice what Rebekah is doing. She is not hiding from Isaac. She is honoring him. The Aramaic word for the veil here is a garment of intention. She is telling Isaac, and herself, that this is a covenantal meeting, not a romantic collision. She wants to meet him with dignity intact.
The Maggid's reading is tender. Every bride at every Jewish wedding since has carried a piece of this moment. Before the joy, a pause. Before the joining, a veil. A moment of covered beauty that says: what we are about to build is more than spectacle.