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January 16, 2006
Week 1 Comments
I’m bad at responding to comments. I like this method better than adding to comment chains. All the same, it’s a bit of a long entry so I apologize.
Funke is right. Happy meals are a gateway drug to gambling. I see kids exchanging those toys in back-alleys. It’s almost as bad as those Yu Gi Oh cards.
Donovan also had comment:
ED: I find it particularly interesting that Isaac in that interpretation is treated as a positive figure, whereas Christian commentaries I've seen usually stress his lack of discernment in giving the blessing to Esau rather than Jacob, contrary to the divine will (though it's debatable, of course, whether he was in fact aware of the prophecy). Other than that, is Isaac seen doing much in the Genesis account?
I’ll take a crack at an answer but I’ll start with a preface. I don’t have the benefit of Jewish schooling or even of regular synagogue attendance so everything that I write should be taken with the idea that, well... there is every chance that I don’t know what I am talking about.
So who is Isaac and how does Jewish Tradition handle Esau?
First, Isaac.
He stays in the land specified by G-d and he digs wells. Prior to this, he differentiates himself from his brother Ishmael in a single moment when he allows himself to be given over as a sacrifice at his father’s hand. At this point he is 37 years old.
The sacrifice is interesting. I’d always thought that he was much younger, an infant or a kid. That’s how he was pictured in the Catholic school books. The struggle was supposed to be Abraham’s alone. This does not seem to be the case and, while the event takes place early in his life (he lives to 180), it takes place at an age where he is conscious of the sacrifice that he is asked to make. Tradition further asserts that Isaac becomes aware of the situation after he asks Abraham about the sacrifice and Abraham responds "G-d will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." This is taken from the following line “and they both went together.”
From Rashi:
…will provide for Himself the lamb. i.e., He will see and choose for Himself the lamb (Targum Jonathan), and if there will be no lamb, my son will be for a burnt offering. And although Isaac understood that he was going to be slaughtered,“ they both went together,” with one accord (lit. with the same heart). - [from Gen. Rabbah 56:4]
He also digs wells. We have the birth of Jacob and Esau and a section where Isaac repeats Abraham’s stunt of passing his wife off as his sister but it is the well digging that is interesting. He digs wells and the Philistines stop them up. He decamps to a nearby valley and digs the wells again. This is backbreaking labor but essential (water is more essential than food or shelter) to establishing a community. I think of the wells as anchor points for the Jewish people. They are also notable because they represent a boring, long term struggle, possibly useful as a metaphor for the boring, tedious aspects of religious practice essential for maintaining and promoting Jewish traditions in the face of diaspora.
So what about Esau? I have a great deal of sympathy for him. His anguish at being denied his father’s blessing is palpable. Jacob comes off as conniving. This is no way for a major religious figure to behave.
Jewish tradition seems hard on Esau. He often gets positioned as a second sort of Cain, which is both unlikely and uninteresting. The best explanation I've recieved for the loss of birthright is that, if the Jewish people were going to survive they were going to require leadership that possessed a certain amount of ruthlessness. Esau was happy out in the field, a hunter-gatherer. He gives away his birthright and does not pursue Jacob after Jacob steals his blessing. Jacob is more suited to the travails of leadership.
From the Lubavitchers:
The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that the fact that Esau was naturally inclined toward idolatry was not, in and of itself, a negative thing. It meant that his ordained mission in life was the conquest of evil rather than the cultivation of good.
and
Jacob and Esau are the prototypes for two types of souls, each with a distinct role to play in the fulfillment of the Divine purpose in creation. Maimonides calls these two spiritual types "the perfectly pious" and "the one who conquers his inclinations"; Rabbi Schneur Zalman refers to them as the "Tzaddik" and the "Beinoni." Humanity is divided into these two types, writes Rabbi Schneur Zalman in his Tanya, because "there are two kinds of gratification before G-d. The first is generated by the good achieved by the perfectly righteous. But G-d also delights in the conquest of evil which is still at its strongest and most powerful in the heart, through the efforts of the ordinary, unperfected individual."
It is also worth noting that the events in this section of Genesis are specifically human. After all, it would have been easier to allow Jacob to be born first. Instead he comes out after Esau, holding on to his heel.
Isaac’s words to Esau are also interesting:
“And you shall live by your sword, and you shall serve your brother, and it will be, when you grieve, that you will break his yoke off your neck."
In the Catholic tradition, this is considered a reference to the first Christian community, which would break Jacob’s yoke as its members gathered together and decided to follow Jesus, at great personal risk and at a time of doubt and grief ( and also buttressing the positive “I will follow you” with the negative “I won’t follow the rules of the Jewish community”), in the hours after his death.
As someone who favors well digging I like to think of Isaac’s message as a very personal warning to Esau about the costs of religion. I can see him years later, pausing in his labor, bent double in grief for the life of a hunter that he lost, separated for a second from the community that defines the borders of the possible, alone again. He has been led into well digging instead of hunting. Jacob is “Tzaddik” and is led by G-d to establish the Jewish people. We can assume that he lacks some of Esau’s perspective. He is less aware of the hunting, of the open fields, of the span of his loss. In establishing himself, Jacob has followed G-d’s will and walked away from Eden. Esau stops and looks back and grieves at the view, breaking for a second a yoke fashioned at the time of the fall, which pulls him like a mule from the primitive to the modern.
Pointless Pontificatin | By jb | 03:16 PM