Dvar Torah on Parshat Vayishlach

In the parsha of Vayishlach, Yaakov returns to Israel with his family, after an absence of two decades. The first thing he must do is deal with his brother Esav, whose murderous intentions towards him were the reason he left home in the first place, and whom he must face as he first re-enters the land.

There is a classic Rabbinic formulation which describes the strategy which Yaakov used to get through this encounter with his brother. It is a three-part strategy - tefilah, doron, ve'milchama - prayer, gifts, and war. Before the encounter, he prays to God to save him from the hands of his brother. He also gathers together hundreds of sheep, goats, rams, camels, cows, and mules, and sends them ahead to Esav as a gift, in an attempt to mollify his anger. And, at the same time, he prepares for a fight. The preparations for battle are not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, but are inferred by the Rabbis from Yaakov's determined statement that, if Esav manages to destroy part of his family, a part will nonetheless remain, implying that he would fight Esav, rather than allow him to take from him everyone and everything he has.

The Rabbis in the Midrash, Talmud, and later Medieval commentaries - notably the Ramban - make it clear that, for them, Esav stands for the eternal 'other' - the non-Jewish society with whom the descendants of Yaakov will always have to deal. It is worth noting that the Rabbis, by underscoring Yaakov's three different, and somewhat contradictory responses to his meeting with his brother, communicate to us the opposite of an absolutist approach for dealing with the 'other'. On the contrary, they are saying to us that Esav can take on many guises, and Yaakov, therefore, must respond in a variety of ways. There are times when Esav can be placated, dealt with diplomatically, bought off. There are times when we must fight Esav, and try by desperate means to salvage whatever we can from a sworn enemy. And there are times when we will be reduced to looking heavenward for salvation from an Esav who is an implacable, unbeatable foe. Yaakov prepares for all three eventualities.

After preparing for these different possibilities, for these different Esavs, which one is it, ultimately, who Yaakov meets? Well, the Rabbis are conflicted in their interpretation, but a straightforward reading of the text gives us a friendly, warm, placated brother - "And Esav ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and they wept" - a brother who not only wants to let bygones be bygones, but who, after first refusing Yaakov's gifts, finally, upon Yaakov's insistence, takes them, and offers Yaakov what looks like real friendship - "Let us be off, and go, and I will go with you".

What is Yaakov's response to this? It would seem that nothing in his planning prepared him for this Esav, so how does he respond to this unexpectedly friendly brother?  Simply put, he once again deceives him. Esav wants to join up with him, travel together with their flocks, be a family. Yaakov prevaricates: "You know, sir, that the children are frail, and I have many suckling sheep and cattle, if I drive them hard for one day the entire flock will die. Let my Lord, I pray you, pass before his servant, and I will lead on slowly, according to the pace of the cattle before me and the children, until I come to my lord in Seir [Esav's homeland]". Yaakov, however, never intends to join Esav in Seir. Rashi quotes the Midrash which understands this promise as referring to the end of days, when "...saviors will arise on Mt. Zion to judge Mt. Seir". In other words, this is to be understood as a veiled, sarcastic threat, something along the lines of "yeah, I'll visit you on Mt. Seir all right, and give you what's coming to you!"

Yaakov's response to this unexpected aspect of Esav seems to me to be tragic. Yaakov, who had prepared himself for an encounter with the Esav he thought he knew, whom he feared and mistrusted, was unable to respond to what was, as far as one can tell, a moment in which Esav felt true love and sympathy for his brother. As the Rabbis say: "The halacha is that we know that Esav hates Yaakov, but his mercy was stirred at this moment, and he kissed him with a whole heart." Who knows what might have happened had Yaakov had it in him to respond fully to the truth of that moment, to the strength of that emotion? Who can tell what Jewish history might have been, had we been carrying around with us, in our collective memory, the consciousness of a moment of true communion between Yaakov and Esav, a moment when Esav's love was met fully by Yaakov's, when Yaakov was able to get beyond his fear, his hate, his sense of Esav's strangeness, and, instead, embrace the 'other' as his brother? I would like to think that we, even after all we have suffered from the hands of the descendants of Esav, all the hate and mistrust, may be able, somehow, to affect some small 'tikkun' to Yaakov's inability to reach out to Esav, by remembering what might have been, had Yaakov been able to respond differently to his brother. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix