Dvar Torah on Parshat Toledot

This week, in Parshat Toldot, we read the tragic story of Yaakov and Esav. At odds from the womb, the brothers are destined to be rivals from the moment they are born and, by way of their descendants, down through history. The Torah’s narrative indicates this tension, when Rivkah, feeling something strange and wrong with her pregnancy, is told prophetically that there are two competing nations in her womb, who will be bitter enemies. The Rabbis elaborate on these pre-natal predictions, seeing Esav as a potential pagan and Yaakov as a budding Torah scholar. As they are still in the womb, this certainly presents us with a bit of a free will problem, which we will touch upon again later.

Once born, the boys are distinguished by their physical differences. It is only when they are older, however, that these differences are clarified in the Torah: “And the boys grew; and Esav was a cunning hunter, a man of the outdoors, and Yaakov was a plain man, dwelling in tents (Bereishit, 25;27).” The plain reading is clear enough: Esav is physical, dangerous, a man of the world of hunting, killing, at home in the great outdoors. Yaakov is a homebody, a simple, straightforward, inward-directed  person. The Rabbis embellish these differences, and connect Yaakov and the tent in which he dwells to the learning of Torah, while Esav is seen as deceitful and aggressive in his dealings in general, “hunting” his victims, and involved in idol worship.

The Midrash is interested in why the Torah tells us that “The boys grew” before revealing to us what their separate personalities were. Were these character traits not evident earlier? Do we really have to wait for the boys to become older before determining what they were like? After all, already in the womb they were distinguished as two rival forces, surely what those forces were, and what they represented, would have been visible at quite an early stage, why wait until they “grew” to clearly state them?

Rabbi Levi, in the Midrash Rabbah, explains by comparing Yaakov and Esav, respectively, to a myrtle and an עצבונית (Ruscus aculeatus, a bush which resembles the myrtle, but which is very thorny and lacks the myrtle’s pleasant smell. It is also known as the Butcher’s Broom and, with almost unbelievable irony, Jew’s Myrtle. Just as we see this second-rate thorny bush as representing Esav, Christians saw it as representing us!). Just as the myrtle and the ruscus grow together and look alike, and only when they mature can they be differentiated by the myrtle’s sweet smell and the ruscus’ thorns, so, too, Rabbi Levi says, for 13 years Yaakov and Esav went off to school together, and came home together, seeming to be more or less the same. It is only after 13 years, when they grow up, and  one goes off to study Torah, and the other goes off to the house of idolatry, that we can see who and what they really are.

The interesting thing is this: in the analogy, the myrtle and the butcher’s broom may be superficially alike (like brothers), but are, ultimately, two very different plants. Nothing can happen during the years before they mature and flower that will change that. The myrtle will ultimately smell sweet; the thorny riscus will not. If this is the case, Rabbi Levi seems to think that during Yaakov’s and Esav’s early years, when they attended school, they seemed pretty much alike, but, really, they were already quite different from one another. Once they mature, and leave school, this truth will become evident, they will make their adult choices, and then we will see them as they really are, as they really always have been, which is what the Torah reports to us – now we see the way they really are, Esav is out there hunting, Yaakov is in the tent. 

This understanding is not good for free will, parenting, or education. It would seem that all that schooling does for these kids is conceal, for a while, the awful truth. They may both behave like normative kids when they are young and in the framework of family, home, and school, but underneath, they are who they have been from the womb. Genes will win. One of them is good, and one is bad, and there is nothing that can be done to change that.

 Happily, however, the Midrash goes on: “Rabbi Eliezer says: a man must care for his son until he is 13; from then on he must say ‘blessed is He who exempted me from punishment for this one’”. This would seem to be a very different approach. For 13 years, children can be cared for, affected, changed, and we, as parents, are responsible to see that we do our best to work on them. The control and influence we have over them, our ability to mold and affect our children, is real. A child can be and should be educated; parents are responsible for his or her actions and development.

And then, at a later point, this relationship seems to end. Although I am sure it is a good idea to maintain a loving and caring relationship with one’s kids, once they reach maturity, the level of responsibility we have for them as children is no longer there; they have become who they have become, they their own people, for whom we are no longer responsible, for whom we will no longer be "punished" if they make wrong choices.

In fact, recognizing this later stage seems to be an important part of parenting. Rabbi Eliezer tells parents that they “must say” the blessing for having now been exempted from their responsibility for their now-adult children. By saying that, Rabbi Eliezer seems to equate the two obligations. First we “must” educate and manage them, and then we “must” understand that it’s over, we must let the child go, thank God for freeing us of this obligation by allowing our child to grow into maturity, and relinquish control.

It would seem that, once the children are grown, parents are done. Not with interacting with or loving or helping their children, but with raising and molding them to become who they essentially will be. This is much more positive than Rabbi Levi’s botanical metaphor; if we are responsible for the education of our young children, we must be doing something to them, having some affect. Once they are grown, we’ve done what we’ve done, they are now either a myrtle or a butcher’s broom, or something else, and our level of responsibility for them – not necessarily love and connection, but real responsibility – disappears.  

Rabbi Eliezer’s position is actually quite heartening. In spite of the from-the-womb rivalry between Yaakov and Esav, there was hope for Esav, he could have been successfully influenced by his parents and made into a better person. This takes the edge off the difficult free will problem that Esav’s pre-determined badness seems to present: it wasn’t really a completely done deal from the womb, it didn’t have to be that way, it was just a predilection, he could have been straightened out. Sadly, even after years of parenting by Yitzchak and Rivkah, that didn’t happen. Parents do their best, but it's the individual child who chooses, ultimately, who to be.

I also think it’s interesting that Rabbi Levi’s pessimism about the ability to change a thorn bush to a myrtle is rooted in the school experience – going to school doesn’t really do anything to Esav, the thorn bush – while Rabbi Eliezer holds out hope for parenting: although it didn’t work for Esav, a parent’s instruction and care could make a difference to a child, which is why we are obligated to try. Just as we are obligated, once they are grown, to cut it out, and let them be whoever we have helped to make them.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix