TOLDOT
Toldot (Genesis 25:19 to 28:9) is a bridge parsha that takes us from Abraham to Jacob, the next major actor in Genesis. The parsha covers the birth of Esau and Jacob, the “theft” of the birthright for a bowl of porridge, the truly stolen blessing by Jacob and Rebecca, and Jacob’s departure to Paddan Aram to find a wife from his mother’s family, who are also kin on Isaac’s side. Jacob flees both because Rebecca has heard that Esau wants to kill Jacob for stealing the blessing and because Rebecca (and presumably Isaac) desperately want him to not take a wife from the neighbors, as Esau has done. (26:34) Indeed, the parsha ends with Esau taking a Canaanite wife as his third wife, specifically because “Esau realized that the Canaanite women displeased his father Isaac.” (28:8)
I am going to discuss four themes.
Interpreting Esau’s interactions with Jacob
The birthright of every person to have a unique purpose
The birthright to be at home in the more than human world
Hierarchy, blessings and right relationships.
Most or all of us learned the story of Esau supposedly selling his birthright for a bowl of porridge or stew. (25:29-33). Esau returns from hunting, is famished and sees that Jacob has made a stew and asks for some. Jacob replies ‘Sell your birthright to me, today. And Esau said, Here, I’m going to die and what use is this that I have a birthright? And Jacob said “Swear to me today.” And he swore to him and sold his birthright.” (25:31-33).
This is comic relief, not something meant to be taken literally. Here I am arguing against every interpretation I have ever read. Why do I say this? First, Esau as a hunter knows that he isn’t going to die from being hungry. As a proficient hunter, he would know when animals are weak from hunger and therefore are easier targets. He would have a clear understanding of times of plenty for wildlife, and times of greater hunger, and how that drives animal behavior. Hungry or sick animals who die from hunger show lots of signs of starvation first. There’s nothing to indicate that he is showing any sign of starvation. There’s no talk of famine in the land the way there was during Abraham’s life and will be in Jacob’s later life. Esau is hungry, not starving, and he exaggerates the way young people will and everyone understands it is just an exaggeration.
Further, if Esau really sold the birthright, the elaborate deception that Rachel and Jacob undertake would not be necessary. Jacob could simply assert that he and Esau had made a deal about the birthright and provide the proof. But there was no real deal.
Lastly, Esau’s bitterness about not being blessed by his father also testifies to Esau’s expectation that he will receive the birthright. “When Esau heard his father’s words [that Isaac had blessed Jacob thinking that he was Esau], he cried—a very big and bitter cry. And he said, “Bless me, also me, my father.” And he [Isaac] said “Your brother came with deception and he took your blessing.” (27:34-35)
I think we should also not read Esau’s supposed threat to kill Jacob for stealing the birthright literally. (26:41,42) There’s just no evidence that Esau is the kind of man who would kill a brother. He was mad at him and his folks, and then got over it. That’s exactly who we will see in Chapters 32 and 33. Rebecca’s telling Jacob that Esau wants to kill him is one more piece of her manipulation because she wants him to go to Paddan Aram and marry from her family and not from amongst the Canaanites.
My core objection here, as elsewhere, is sometimes Jews read the Torah with the conclusion already in mind (Jacob good, Esau bad or YHVH’s anger is always justified, to give two examples) and then offer interpretations which seem to me to just wildly misread the text. I am preaching a fidelity to encountering the text without whitewashing the problematic parts and also with an openness to learning something that I did not know or to having my mind blown. After all, if you already know the answer, why bother reading?
What encounters have you had, reading or otherwise, that completely changed your mind? Where have you been convinced that you knew something and later changed your mind or realized you didn’t know anything at all?
Every person has the birthright of a unique purpose for which they are alive at a particular place and in a particular time. Let’s take a look at how this plays out here for Isaac and Rebecca. Rebecca, like Sarah before her and Rachel and Hannah afterwards, is barren. Isaac prays to YHVH for her and she becomes pregnant. But it isn’t an easy pregnancy. “The children struggled inside her, and she said, “If it is like this, why do I exist?” (25:22). Now, I would have thought that this is a sentiment she would have expressed before she became pregnant, but I’ve never been pregnant and have no biological children, so what do I know? Ramban, a great Medieval mystical commentator interprets this verse as Rebecca asking why she is in this world. YHVH responds to her question by saying “Two nations are in your womb, and two people will be dispersed from your insides, and one people will be mightier than the other people, and the older the younger will serve.” (25:23)
The usual way to read verse 23 is that YHVH is saying that Esau will serve Jacob, since Jacob is our patriarch but Esau is not. However, Friedman argues the Hebrew is ambiguous. He writes that it could be translated as “the elder will serve the younger” but that it could equally be translated as “the elder, the younger will serve.” Rebecca clearly interprets YHVH’s words as her as saying that her purpose in life is to ensure that Jacob is Isaac’s rightful heir, even though he will be the younger son. Teubal argues, as we discussed in Chayyei Sarah, that this is an example of ultimogeniture, the practice in at least one matrilinear society that the youngest inherits, rather than the oldest. Maybe, but her favoritism of Jacob still seems weird and uncomfortable to me.
Let’s turn to Isaac. Isaac is the patriarch about whom remarkably little is conveyed. We see him in the akedah, of course, but he seems remarkably passive. The JPS commentary rightly says that 26: 1-33 “is the only collection of biblical narratives centrally devoted to [him]. The narrative about him remarkably echoes the Abraham story; there’s a famine, he leaves Canaan and passes off his wife as his sister, only this time to the Philistines instead of the Egyptians. Then he miraculously gets rich, sowing in the land of the Philistines and reaping 100fold (26:12), an ecological impossibility. Then he redigs wells that Abraham had originally dug in what sounds like the area around Be’er Sheva and concludes a pact of peace with the local leader, also named Avimelech.
If I were Isaac, I’d be tempted to ask myself whose life I was leading? That sense of passivity is also strongly reinforced in his interaction with Jacob in Jacob’s attempt to fool him into thinking that he is Esau. Isaac is clearly highly suspicious (27:20-24), even saying to him “Are you really my son Esau?” But he goes along with Rebecca’s and Jacob’s deception, though he knows better. So what is Isaac’s unique purpose? Is it just to be bridge to Jacob? Isaac, to me, feels absent to his own life.
I think there are probably two parts to a response for folks who are absent in their own lives. If you think they aren’t present because they are too busy conforming to expectations, my approach would be to work on exploring their unique purpose in life. Exploring this isn’t just an intellectual exercise but involves accessing your whole self through things like artistic expression, wandering in the more than human world etc. However, it is also possible that they can’t even begin to explore this because they have been too traumatized. I’ve read interpretations of Isaac that argue that he has been traumatized by the akedah. I would suggest that he also has been traumatized somehow beforehand, given his lack of resistance to being bound on an altar.
What is your unique purpose in life? If you can’t readily answer this, think about the intersection between what moves you most deeply and what you are really good at that comes easily to you. Re Isaac, have you ever felt absent in your life or like you were living someone else’s life? Have you known people who just did not seem present, who kind of seemed to be just existing until they died? Where are you not present in your life?
We all also have a birthright to be at home in the more than human world. This part of our birthright is highly suppressed in our urban and disconnected modern world. Esau is clearly at home in the more than human world. “When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob was a mild man who stayed in camp.” (25:27) As Jews interested in being at home in the more than human world, that verse speaks well of Esau. But here’s what Rashi does with it: “A man of the field should be explained literally: a man with no occupation—who uses his bow to capture animals and birds.” Ugh. How is hunting for meat not an occupation? It’s been a major male responsibility for literally most of human history.
On the other hand, according to Rashi, Jacob’s being a mild man means he was someone “not shrewd at deceiving.” Really? Deceiving and being deceived is a core theme of the Jacob stories. What’s even more strange to me, is that Jacob’s future career in working with Laban shows him to be a superb shepherd. That is, he actually was at home in the more than human world.
My teacher, R. Zelig Golden is from the desert out west and when he went to college for a year in the east, he once told me, he felt completely out of synch. Northern California works for him, though it took some adjusting. I hated living in the northwest and all I wanted to do for the decade I lived in Washington and Oregon was scratch my skin because I felt so displaced. You might feel at home in a city with the buzz, the noise, the concrete, or at home in the desert, or in a lush rainforest. How we interact with the more than human world is also part of feeling at home. Esau hunts, Jacob is a shepherd, I raised cattle and now I struggle with how to replace that, other people do sit spot or track animals or forage wild plants or work with sustainable forestry. The numbers of ways to be at home in the more than human world are infinite. How do you know this path works better than that path? Be with your body. Being at home is a felt sense in your body.
Where do you feel at home? How do you feel at home in the more than human world?
Hierarchy, blessings and right relationships. Right relationships in the more than human world, it seems to me, function to serve the whole. Eco systems only work if all the components are healthy. We are deluded, we delude ourselves, if we think that one element of the system, (usually humans) can benefit at the expense of any other element of the system. There is no such thing as win-lose, only lose-lose, to use business language. Even mosquitoes are necessary. If one element of the system is sick or suffering, sooner or later, that sickness will spread.
The more than human world has both hierarchical and non hierarchical relationships amongst a species. The “pecking order” amongst chickens, the boss cow or matriarchs in an elephant herd, the alpha male who gets to breed (almost) all the females are examples of hierarchical relationships. Sometimes the relationships seem to us to be without hierarchy. Is one clover plant above or below another in a pasture?
The question I have about this blessing is whether this blessing promotes a healthy ecosystem.
Here's the blessing Jacob wins by deceit from Isaac. (27:28-29)
May God give you
Of the dew of heaven and the fat of the earth
Abundance of new grain and wine
Let peoples serve you
And nations bow to you
Be master over your brothers
And let your mother’s sons bow to you
Cursed be they who curse you,
Blessed they who bless you.
If this is the blessing of our lives, then we have indeed sold our birthright for a bowl of porridge. The master and the slave dynamic advocated in this “blessing” is a sick dynamic for both sides, as Hegel and then Marx taught us. Our birthright is to occupy our place amongst our fellow creatures in a healthy ecosystem that is in balance. The soil, the rocks, the birds, the corn plants, the deer, the squirrels, the insects and nematodes of the soil—they are all our relations, to use the Native American term. If this is our approach to our fellow humans, I don’t see how we don’t choose to dominate the more than human world by making it an object to be exploited, an “it” instead of a possible “thou.”
Where are you in balance with the more than human world, (if anywhere) and where are you out of balance? How are you blessed and how are you cursed? What can you do about it?
QUESTIONS
What encounters have you had, reading or otherwise, that completely changed your mind? Where have you been convinced that you knew something and later changed your mind or realized you didn’t know anything at all?
What is your unique purpose in life? If you can’t readily answer this, think about the intersection between what moves you most deeply and what you are really good at that comes easily to you. Re Isaac, have you ever felt absent in your life, or like you were living someone else’s life? Have you known people who just did not seem present, who kind of seemed to be just existing until they died? Where are you not present in your life?
Where do you feel at home? How do you feel at home in the more than human world?
Where are you in balance with the more than human world, (if anywhere) and where are you out of balance? How are you blessed and how are you cursed? What can you do about it?
