Dvar Torah on Parshat Toledot

This week we are introduced to Yaakov and Esav, twin brothers, children of Isaac and Rebecca, who are already at odds in their mother's womb. The Torah tells us that Rebecca suffered from their strange in utero hijinks - the Rabbis posit a fetal Esav trying to get out of the womb in order to go and worship idols, while Yaakov wanted to go learn Torah in a Yeshiva. Immediately after their birth, we are told that Esav, the first-born, was a man who knew how to hunt, a man of the outdoors, while Yaakov was a simple man, a stay-at-home, "dwelling in tents". The Rabbis see Esav as being more than just your run-of-the-mill hunter: he in fact 'hunts' Isaac, his father, taking every opportunity to trick and mislead him about who he, Esav, really is. The Rabbis tell us that Esav would act as if he were extremely religious, asking his father how one tithes salt and straw (items which are actually exempt from the law of tithing - Esav is thus shown as both a phony and a halachic ignoramus), in order to mislead him about his true personality and behavior. Later on, the Torah tells us that, at the age of 40, Esav married two Canaanite women, much to the displeasure of his parents. The Rabbis point out that Isaac also married at the age of 40, and posit that here, again, Esav was trying to imitate his father in order to produce a false, positive, picture of who he really was. Again, as with the salt and straw question, he seems to fool Isaac, but the reader knows that he has actually failed, marrying at the right age, but the wrong people.

A pattern emerges: Esav, by his nature, is not Isaac-like: he is wild, aggressive, very physical, (the Rabbis describe him as a lascivious murderer, but they have already decided that he is not one of us), not a natural candidate to succeed his father as the man of God. His solution to this obvious failing of his is to imitate his father, to try and behave just as he thinks his father would, to be like him. Although he does seem to fool his father, (though, interestingly, not his mother), and Isaac does want to bless him, and not Yaakov, as his successor, he ultimately fails, and Yaakov takes the birthright and blessing away from him.

Why? What's wrong with Esav's plan? In a way, he really is trying, by doing what his father before him had done, to do the right thing, to be dutiful, to go in the right path, his father's path. And he almost succeeds - it does seem to work on his father, who accepts him as his rightful heir - but, of course, he ultimately fails, as Yaakov manages to take everything from him, and the Jewish tradition sees him as almost irretrievably other. Why can he not build a successful, acceptable 'Jewish' personality this way? Why is he doomed to not be accepted as a real heir, a real son of Abraham and Isaac, as his brother Yaakov is?

Perhaps what's wrong with Esav is precisely the fact that his behavior is so consciously imitative, so unnatural to him, so not his own. Esav fails to figure out how to express Isaac's values in his own way (whatever that would have been). He does not work through the very real differences he has with his parents' world view. Instead, he remains who he is, with his own values, and fails totally to integrate his parents' values. Instead, when trying to live up to their standards, he engages in fruitless, pointless, imitative behavior. To ask how one tithes salt is to miss the point - every halachist knows that salt is not subject to these laws, (salt is also, suggestively, the opposite of fruitful - salt in the ground makes the soil barren). Esav's attempt to be like his father by marrying at forty again misses the point, as he marries two idol-worshipping women, which is completely at odds with the wishes of his parents. Rather than taking his father's legacy and really living it, he fails to make Isaac's values his own, and all his imitative Isaac-like behavior rings hollow, false, ridiculous.

Yaakov, on the other hand, really is like Isaac, in that he tries in his own way to claim for himself his father's relationship with God. He outwits Esav, first by buying the position of first-born (the one who inherits) from him for a bowl of soup when Esav was very hungry, and famously, by tricking Isaac into thinking he is Esav and thereby receiving the blessing Isaac meant to give to his oldest son. Even when Yaakov is going against his father's wishes, he is more like him than Esav is, more in tune with his values and goals, in that he truly wants to become the heir to the covenant. Yaakov is an appropriate heir to Isaac precisely because he is not exactly like his father - he does it his way. He is a good son because he acts independently and authentically, making his parents' values his own. Esav, with his empty, unintegrated imitation of his father's actions, ends up being no son to him at all.

Sadly, Isaac (unlike Rebecca, who does distinguish between Yaakov's real behavior and Esav's empty posturing), doesn't see this, and wants to privilege and bless Esav as his true heir; he seems, after all, so like him in so many ways. It's not easy for Isaac, or any parent, to let go of his natural desire for his kids to be like him, to believe and act and think just like him, and, instead, encourage them to integrate the values he has given them into something honest, something real, something that's truly their own.