YAVNEH STUDIES IN TOLDOT Yosef Blau

The central motif of the sedra of Toldot is the struggle between Jacob and Esau for Isaac’s blessing. Isaac and Rebecca each favors one of the sons, and we receive an impression of poor communication between the generations.

The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the foundation of the Jewish people in a theological as well as factual sense. God’s name is attached to theirs at the beginning of the amida and it is by dint of their merit alone that the Jews, according to the Torah itself, will eventually emerge from the diaspora. While both Isaac and Jacob are considered heroes in Jewish tradition, the descriptions of their behavior would seem to belie this image.

Isaac is described as an ineffectual person, in fact as a totally passive person. In comparison with the bulk of material, on Abraham and Jacob, details of his life are very sketchy. His great moment, the akeda, where he is almost offered as a sacrifice, is seen by the Bible totally from the perspective of a test of Abraham. Completely overshadowed by his father, in his encounter with Abimelech, the King of the Philistines, he emulates his father’s tactics, declaring his wife as his sister and then reopening the wells his father had dug. He neither selects his own wife nor those of his sons. He is completely fooled by Esau, and when he realizes that Jacob has fooled him and received the blessings, he passively accepts this result saying, “and indeed let him be blessed.”

If anything, Jacob’s behavior is on the surface more reprehensible. Under his mother’s guidance, he resorts to trickery, even dishonesty, to receive his father’s blessing. He is the “perfect” or “simple” man, the “dweller of tents”; yet in all his actions he is the crafty one. Cleverly he played on Esau’s impetuousness to purchase the rights of the first son for a bowl of soup.

A closer analysis of the text gives a greater insight into what transpired and therefore into the character of the protagonists. While Esau is described as Isaac’s favorite, Isaac was aware of his son’s faults. He was openly dissatisfied with Esau’s Canaanite wives; their behavior was contrary to that which Isaac, who was so attached to Rebecca and his saintly mother Sarah, would demand from those who were to continue his traditions. When Jacob comes for the blessing, it is his uttering the name of God that makes Isaac suspicious of whether it is truly Esau standing in front of him.

The actual text of the blessings given Jacob in the guise of Esau contains no mention of spiritual matters. Carrying on the traditions of Abraham and receiving Abraham’s blessing is introduced at a totally different occasion when Isaac commands Jacob to go to Laban, his mother’s brother, to find a wife. The first blessing is “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fat places of the earth and plenty of corn and wine. Let people serve you and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers and let your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be every one that curses you and blessed be every one that blesses you.” The second blessing is “May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you and may you be a congregation of peoples. And may He give you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your seed with you, that you may inherit the land of your sojournings which God gave to Abraham.” The original blessing is purely material and stresses domination within the family. Unquestionably, Jacob had always been selected to be the last of the patriarchs and the founder of the Jewish people. Isaac attempted to make Jacob dependent on Esau and bound to him so that Esau would thereby be kept close to the tradition. But Rebecca, who had been brought up in the house of Besuel and Laban, recognized that there are occasions when one cannot save and it becomes necessary to cut asunder. She realized that no external pressures could unite the diverse Jacob and Esau and the future depended on Jacob’s ability to struggle with the world in both spirit and material terms.

Jacob on his own would not have attempted to fool his father. He had perceived the inevitability of the struggle his father wanted to deny but hoped to gain the material strengthening needed to confront Esau in a legal way. He purchased the rights of the first son, its material benefits, from his impetuous, hedonistic brother. Esau was unconcerned with this agreement because “he despised the bechora, the rights of the first son.” Under his mother’s influence Jacob accepted the necessary deception, referring to the rights of the first son in his very lie. With all these justifications, Jacob is punished for his action. He struggles constantly for any material wealth and spends his life in wandering and sorrows, finally dying in a foreign land.

Isaac is passive, but this does not negate his heroism. Perfection cannot be maintained while being engaged in constant combat with the hostile world. In order for the insights of Abraham to have permanence, they needed the refinement and preservation that only an Isaac, removed from strife, could provide. Kabala has ascribed to Isaac the characteristics of gevurah, the Jewish notion of strength, strength of will and control. The American temperament admires the activist and we find it difficult to fully appreciate the passive, contemplative life. We recognize the Abraham and ignore the Isaac.

Such a man as Isaac could struggle in his own way to keep the active Esau. In his eyes, Jacob, the dweller of tents, was the continuation of himself but Esau had the spark of Abraham. Jewish mysticism considers Jacob tiferet, the amalgam of the unbounded chesed - kindness that spreads outward - of Abraham and the gevurah - strength - of Isaac. On one hand the ish tam, the perfect unblemished man, a dweller of tents like his father, yet Jacob was sufficiently sophisticated to struggle with Laban and Esau in their world, even when necessary on their terms.

In attempting to analyze the behavior of Isaac and Jacob and to understand their conflict, I have intentionally limited myself to the simple meaning of the Biblical text and have not used the wealth of the medrashic literature. The narrative itself, when properly understood, gives insight into the different great personalities who played roles in the formation of the Jewish people: human, containing blemishes, but each striving to serve God the maximum of his potential, fulfilling his role in accordance with his nature.