Parashat Toledot – 5787

A D’var Torah for Parashat Toledot

By Rabbi Dorit Edut (AJR ’06)

 

For those of you who have seen the famous movie “The Wizard of Oz” and then the two modern prequels “Wicked” and “Wicked for Good” you know that we have evolved from seeing the world as totally good vs. totally bad.  Yes, as the modern saying goes, ‘It’s complicated’.

Knowing how many Jewish references there were in the original “Wizard of Oz,” I wonder if the directors of the modern sequels were also familiar with the Jewish Bible, especially this week’s portion depicting the origins and evolution of the rivalry and even hatred between the twin brothers, Esau and Jacob.  While the stereotyping of these two brothers starts at birth – with one being hairy and having reddish skin while the other is only described as holding onto his brother’s heel – I’d like to suggest that we can read the text more carefully to see that it is NOT all black and white.

The problems between the two begins in the fetal stage, according to the Torah. There we learn of Rebekah experiencing such great pain in pregnancy because the two children are ‘struggling in the womb’ – ויתרצצו. The verb appears in the reflexive/reciprocal stem (Hitpa-el), meaning “to crush each other” or “to dash/struggle violently against one another”, according to the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. This does give us an implication that these two really are already in conflict with each other. However, there is a less threatening meaning as given in Prof. Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary, used often with Talmudic study, which means “squeezing each other”. Was this simply because there wasn’t much room in Rebekah’s womb for both of them as they grew bigger, or were they perhaps holding on to each other in a kind of embrace, as when Jacob is found to still be holding onto Esau’s heel as he comes out of the birth canal?

While many commentators try to show that this gesture of Jacob was meant to try to prevent Esau from being first-born, and thus prove the primacy of the Israelite nation over that of the Edomites/Romans (alleged descendants of Esau), one of the Midrashic commentators saw this as a way of showing the order of world history, that the descendants of Jacob do succeed the descendants of Esau:

Midrash Aggadah, Genesis 25:26:1

And after him came out his brother. After Esau rules, Jacob will rule, and this is like what is stated, “For liberators shall march up on Mount Zion etc.” (Obadiah 1:21)

Further distinctions are made between them when as next we learn about their early careers – Esau as a “skillful hunter” and Jacob as “a mild man who stayed in camp.” The word for “mild” in Hebrew is “תם”- which we know from the Haggadah’s description of one of the Four Sons can also mean “simple, innocent, artless.” So, we could read this as saying that Jacob, being the younger one, the one who stayed at home, close to his parents, is contrasted to his brother who has gone out in the world and developed his physical prowess, courage, and ability to function in nature. Where is the conflict here? How many of us have children with wildly different talents or interests? Does that cause them to strongly dislike each other or be aggressive towards each other?

Yet we cannot ignore that Jacob – “the innocent, artless, mild man” – does take advantage of his brother’s hunger in order to get him to sell his birthright to Jacob. And Esau does not seem so interested in the birthright anyway. What actually did the birthright entitle a person to? According to the midrash in Genesis Rabbah 63:13,

 “Until the Tabernacle was established, private altars were permitted, and service was performed by the firstborn. From the time that the Tabernacle was established, private altars were prohibited, and service was performed by the priests….”

Here we understand that Jacob was the one who was the spiritual heir of Abraham, the one who was interested in making these sacrifices to God. Esau, although he was a hunter and could provide the meat for these rituals, was not really interested in the sacrifices themselves or perhaps did not have a developed spiritual life. But I don’t think we can say for certain that he did not believe in God just because he “spurned the birthright.”  And did this giving over of this special honor to his brother actually make Esau an evil person? If anything, the deviousness of Jacob in this scene is more morally questionable than Esau’s seeming lack of understanding of the long-term value of this birthright.

Next, we have the interference of the parents who have long played favorites with these two separately. It is Isaac who favors Esau and requests that he bring him some delicious meat that he will hunt for him so that he can bless him before he dies. He indicates that Esau even knows the kind of food Isaac likes. Rebekah, favoring Jacob, creates a method of disguising Jacob so that his blind father will pronounce a blessing upon him instead of Esau. If we read carefully, we see that Jacob immediately responds to his mother’s plan with concern that his father will not only find out that this is a trick but will ultimately curse him instead of bless him. One of our Biblical commentators, Malbim, commenting on this verse (Gen. 27:8) expresses Jacob’s concern for what will happen if his father curses him:

And I have brought a curse upon me, that not only will he not bless me in matters of the world, but he will also curse me that I will not have wealth and all the covetousness of the world. 2) And not a blessing, for even the blessing that I will attain now, which is the blessing of the world, will be lost after he thinks of me as deceiving from the way of the Creator.

As we know from the next chapters of Genesis, Jacob does suffer the consequences of this deception – by being deceived by his uncle Laban several times:  when he is given Leah instead of Rachel as the promised wife for whom he worked 7 years, and secondly when Laban does not give him the type of goats and sheep he had asked for.

As for Rebekah, who was willing to take the consequences of a possible curse from Isaac upon herself, she also can be said to have suffered. She sends away her favored son and dies before he returns so they never see each other again.

Rebekah’s understanding of what God had told her when she was pregnant with the twins – that the older will come to serve the younger – leads her to act when she fears that Isaac’s blessing of Esau will totally upset the Divine oracle given to her.  But as Prof Diane Sharon wrote in the section on Parashat Toledot, entitled “Another View” in The Torah: A Women’s  Commentary:

  “What if Rebekah misinterprets the prophecy? What if its ambiguity is part of the divine purpose? What if, by eliminating the ambiguity – by urging Jacob to steal the blessing meant for his brother – Rebekah is not acting in harmony with the will of God?

     In that case, we would expect the text to show dire consequences. Indeed, such consequences ensue. First, the fruits of the stolen blessing do not come easily to Jacob. The blessing that he gains by guile refers to material benefits. He later secures his wealth – the promise in this stolen blessing -in an environment of stealth. Second, he loses something far more precious than material abundance: his beloved wife dies in childbirth….”

Could there have been another way to resolve this parental favoritism and the deep chasm it created between the two brothers? Was Isaac on his deathbed NOT going to bless BOTH of his sons, regardless of the order? Indeed, Midrash Tanhuma Buber on Gen. 27:33 explains that Isaac was going to bless Jacob as well, after first-born Esau, because he dared not upset the genealogical order set by God:

“Why did he tremble? Because he had blessed the younger before the elder; for he had intended to bless both of them. So he called Esau in order to bless him first, since he was the elder. Then afterwards, < he would call > Jacob. So he intended to bless him. Why? Because before the Holy One it is difficult to supplant a genealogical chain, to replace primogeniture. So note that he only called Esau. On what basis do you say that he wished to bless Jacob? On the basis of what Jacob said, [to his mother] (in Gen. 27:12): THEN I WILL BRING UPON MYSELF A CURSE INSTEAD OF A BLESSING. He said to her: Even the blessing which he was going to give me, in the end he will not give me. Isaac only trembled when he said: What sin is on my hands that the genealogical chain should be ruined at my hands, for me to bless the younger < first > and the elder afterwards?”

There follows the dramatic scene of Jacob deceiving his father and his father uttering the famous lines showing his suspicion in Gen. 27:22 – “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” These words also point not only to the duplicity obvious to the reader, but also to the whole issue of ambiguity in understanding what is happening to us at certain times in life. It has been used as a caution against being a hypocrite, one of the sins for which we ask forgiveness on Yom Kippur. But then comes the heartbreaking moment when Esau appears before his father and asks with deep sorrow: “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” And our Sages much later during the Roman times also find sympathy with Esau, as for example in Midrash Genesis Rabbah 67:4:

    “Years later our people will have to shed tears for what the descendants of Esau did to them, as retribution for the day Jacob made Esau cry.”

The narrative ends with Esau now hating his brother and plotting to kill him after the death of their father. Rebekah sends Jacob away to her brother Laban and gets Isaac’s approval on the basis of Jacob needing to find a wife there among their family, instead of among the Hittites who lived in Canaan.

From this alternative reading of this parashah, we can derive that God does not always make things clear to us – and yet we must try to act justly and mercifully in all our relationships and encounters with others. See how two twin brothers were so gradually separated and made into stereotypes of the good and the bad for later generations.

Faced with all the challenges that the recent electoral processes here in the USA and in Israel have presented us – maybe it is time for us to take a deep breath and think what stereotyping has occurred through our media.  We also can try to allow the divine process in history to unfold, as Prof. Diane Sharon writes in the above quoted source:

“Perhaps the gift from our biblical mother Rebekah in this parashah is her prompting us to sense ambiguity, to appreciate nuance, and to have the wisdom and patience to let divine intention blossom in its own time.”