This past weekend we discussed parshah Toldot, Genesis 25:19-28:9, which encompasses the birth of Jacob and Esau, up through the goatskin trick and all. Discussions at Temple Beth Bolshoi are more like participatory sermons, with Senior Rabbi determining in advance the focus of things, and asking questions intended to get the answers he’s looking for, rather than really opening up the room. On the other hand, they are often excellent participatory sermons. His point this week was that Esau had been given a bum rap, and that Jacob was extraordinarily vile (in his youth), and that he is punished for his vileness. He excoriated the Midrashic tradition for making up all the horrible stuff about Esau (and his wives), and declaimed that the Scripture “got it”, and the Rabbis missed it. They had a blind spot, he insisted, and couldn’t see that one of the patriarchs had misbehaved, so they misread the text to imagine that he had not misbehaved.
The interesting thing he brought up (which is the reason I am sharing this with you, Gentle Reader) was that the blind spot prevented their appreciation of the terrible poetic justice in the Jacob story. Jacob fools his blind father, and in return is fooled, not once but twice, by misinterpreting the evidence of his (perfectly good) eyes. Not only does he marry the wrong woman, and has to labor in the fields long years for his mistake, but he accepts the blood-drenched many-colored coat as proof of Joseph’s death, not only plunging him into deluded grief but condemning him and his children into years of poverty, eventually forcing him to seek refuge as a parasite on his successful but distant son. Few and evil were the days of the years of his life, and I must say he deserved them.
What about Isaac, though? There’s a version of Israelite history where the three Patriarchs are, in fact, Patriarchs of three different tribes, and when the three tribes merge in their escape from Egypt they find a way to combine their traditions by making their Patriarchs the three generations of one extraordinary family. It occurred to me this week, though, that you don’t really need Isaac-ites in that merger. If you have Abraham-ites and Jacob-ites, it makes perfect sense to come up with some figure to join them, rather than having them be father and son (for one thing, the Abraham-ites wouldn’t have agreed to letting Jacob make an ass out of their founder like that, and I don’t think the Jacob-ites would have been thrilled about the Binding). And Isaac is, in some ways, the kind of character you would come up with just to hold other people’s stories together. He’s kind of empty, actually.
On the other hand, what a pathetic figure. Blind, henpecked, treated as an encumbrance by venal and quarrelsome sons, treated with contempt by a deceitful wife, never knowing peace in the home. The Lord spares his life in childhood, and he must forever have lived with that knife over his head, and his father wielding it. Even his favorite son marries against his wishes. For all that Esau was his favorite, too, the text doesn’t indicate that he dislikes Jacob, who fools him and flees, and Isaac never sees his son again, not for twenty blind and lonely years. If Jacob is punished for his sins, how much is Isaac punished, and for what?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.