Turn It Again: Torah Wisdom for Today
In Pirkei Avot, a book of maxims in the Mishnah, an ancient rabbi, Ben Bag-Bag said about Torah study, “Hafokh bah, va’Hafokh vah, d’khola bah.” Turn it over and over, for everything is in it. For two thousand years, that’s what Jews have done. Here is another turning.
Parshat Toldot 2024
Blue Collar
The first mention of love in the Torah is when we learn that Isaac loved Rebecca. In a touching scene from last week’s parashah, Isaac finally finds comfort after the death of his mother, which he took hard. In a moment of profound wisdom, the Torah tells us that he found comfort because he loved Rebecca. It’s not because he was loved by her, which might seem the natural replacement for his lost maternal love. Instead, the Torah reminds us that we find a measure of peace when we love others. Loving someone, having a deep concern for them, shifts our focus away from our own struggles as our heart softens to that person’s troubles.
In fact, the Torah describes Isaac and Rebecca’s love with tremendous tenderness. When she can’t conceive, he beseeches God on her behalf. He wants a way to provide relief to the woman he loves.
Despite their mutual devotion to one another, they had their share of travails. Rebecca had trouble carrying her twins. Her pregnancy was so difficult that she begs God to help her understand why she was suffering so. God’s answer is stunning:
“Two nations are in your womb,
Two separate peoples shall issue from your body;
One people shall be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger.”
I can’t imagine a more painful message to receive. More than anything, parents want our children to be healthy and to get along with one another. In the normal course of life, children outlive us, so it provides us with a sense of comfort that they will take care of each other when we know longer can.
That sense of hope was denied to Isaac and Rebecca; in this section of the Torah, Jacob steals his brother’s birthright, a crime for which both of their parents share some complicity. The Torah never describes what happened to their marriage after Jacob was forced to flee, but it had to cause them pain on a daily basis.
This rupture in the family might have been impossible to prevent, because the two boys really were like two separate nations, for “Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob became a mild man, raising livestock.”
This was far more than a different choice in careers; it represented two completely different orientations to the world. By dedicating himself to a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Esau preserves a previous phase of human development, one which was characterized by a volatile and less stable way of life. Just as humans were developing settlements characterized by complex communities, Esau returns to a simpler, wilder way of life; he is a sort of mythological Marlboro man who is strong, self-sufficient, and deeply free.
Jacob, on the other hand, has been “urbanized,” which is to say his life seems linked to pastoralism or agriculture. The phrase to describe him is yoshev ohalim, someone who dwells in more permanent tents. As an archetype, he is an exemplar of qualities valued by sedentary societies, such as patience, foresight, and reliability. He has been tamed or domesticated so that he can live with others in complex communities.
Esau is portrayed in traditionally heroic masculine terms, not so different than the way that Ulysses is described in the Odyssey. Because the Bible privileges society and legacy building, Esau’s life choices are denigrated both within the Torah as well as in later rabbinic writings. He becomes the “other” while Jacob assumes the mantle of the “cultural hero.”
We see this In the sociopolitical context of the Bible, in which Esau is often associated with Edom, a neighboring nation that was sometimes in conflict with Israel. Some scholars argue that Esau’s characterization as a hunter and “man of the field” aligns with stereotypes of Edomites as wild, uncultivated, or overly physical. Jacob, by contrast, represents the Israelite ideal: a mild, wise, and covenant-bound figure who embodies divine favor and destiny.
These two archetypes are hardly remnants of an outgrown history, for at any moment, humans occupy these different states. Some of us live in the information age, others of us remain wedded to the agrarian world, such as the farmers of the Great Plains, while still other people somehow cling to a nomadic existence in a society that can’t stand people who live on the streets. These fundamental divides in America continue to create the same sort of pain for our society as Jacob and Esau’s rivalry caused their parents. These dissimilar lifestyles require a commitment to different sets of values that might seem to be hopelessly at odds with one another.
But there is hope, although we won’t find it in this week’s Torah reading. Eventually, Jacob and Esau experience a thaw in their relationships, which once again flows out of their strong bond and love for one another. If we can find the courage, maybe we won’t have to wait as many decades as the two brothers did. Maybe we can begin to repair those relationships now.
