Esau and Narratives

At our Monday Torah study group this week, we were discussing Toldot, the Torah portion which includes the birth of Jacob and Esau. While Jacob will remain an important figure throughout the remainder of the book of Bereshit (Genesis), Esau’s story is told almost entirely within these chapters.

Before they are even born, we seem to learn something about their relationship:

"But the children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?”"

The Hebrew word translated as “struggled,” is ‘va-yitrotsatsu,” which in the Midrash the rabbis derive from the verbal root ‘rats,’ to run. From there they create a midrash about Jacob and Esau.

There is an idea that the Rabbis have about Noah’s sons, Shem and Eber (Japhet). From the Biblical chronology, we can derive from the life spans mentioned in the genealogies that Shem and Eber would still have been alive during Rebecca’s pregnancy. The “running” that the midrash claims Jacob is doing in the womb is that every time Rebecca passed the Yeshiva of Shem and Eber (because what else would Noah’s sons be doing with their long lives other than teach Torah), Jacob struggled to get out of the womb to study with them. For Esau, his struggle was to emerge to enter into temples of idolatry. This midrashic tradition is very well known because it appears in Rashi’s Torah commentary.

However, the actual verbal root is ‘ratsats’ with two tsadis instead of one, and that root means to crush or oppress. Gersonides, another medieval French Torah commentator, who lived two centuries after Rashi, ignores the midrash and follows the actual verb root. He understood the verse to mean that the two moved about within Rebecca’s womb in a way that made her uncomfortable. A single fetus within the womb encounters only the walls of the womb as an obstacle to its movement. A twin encounters the other twin as well as the walls, but, as we know from our study of the development of children as babies, the understanding of any differentiation between self and other is beyond fetal awareness. While Jacob and Esau might have appeared to be struggling against each other, they would not have really been aware of each other.

Gersonides understanding is that Rebecca’s sense of oppression is focused on her own pain.

“Rebecca cries out to God and God responds to her:

‘Two nations are in your womb,

Two separate peoples shall issue from your body;

One people shall be mightier than the other,

And the older shall serve the younger.’”

Rebecca did not know that she was going to have twins. The prophecy that she received about them revealed to her that the pain that she is felt was related to the extraordinary qualities of the children that she would mother. Firstly, that there are two rather than one, and secondly that those children would become important people and that their lines would be of consequence. These are understandings that will be borne out.

However, the second half of the prophecy is less clear. If one will be mightier than the other, is this a description of a relationship that will be continuous or will the roles of mightier and weaker flip over time? What does it mean that the older will serve the young? Will they serve willingly or unwillingly? Will that be for the good or as the result of oppression?

God’s prophecy is helpful and unhelpful to Rebecca in equal measure. While it may have offered some relief, in that her suffering was given meaning, it also introduced grounds for anxieties about the lives of her children. In my teaching for the Torah study class this week, I wanted to place a greater emphasis on the way that what appears in the story of Esau is often drawn in gray rather than black and white. As we see in the midrash that Rashi brings, Esau is clearly the bad guy in the mind of the Rabbis. However, that is based on their interpretations, or rather their over-interpretations. The Torah text, as is, doesn’t carry the onus that the Rabbis yoke Esau with. He is imperfect. Jacob isn’t a perfect person either, The imperfections that Jacob shows in his interactions with Esau in this Parshah are far from his last.

Rashi is known as the master of the Peshat, the simple meaning of the text. In his interpretation mentioned above he veered sharply away from the Peshat. Gersonides brought out the Peshat.

Rabbi Golden has been joining me at the Monday Torah study. He brings his Mikra’ot Gedolot with him. Mikra’ot Gedolot (also known as The Rabbinic Bible) is one of the innovations brought into Judaism in the early years of printed books. Before that time commentators would write their commentaries in the margins of Torah manuscripts and over time their marginal notes would be collected into manuscripts of their own. Later commentators wrote their own marginal notes in either Torah texts or the texts of earlier commentators. Mikra’ot Gedolot placed the comments of many different commentators together on a single page. In that way, the disjointed discussion of the Rabbis over the centuries were brought more closely together.

Mikra’ot Gedolot is a magnificent tool for Torah study. Only in our time, with the introduction of the online resources, such as sefaria.org and alhatorah.org, have they been matched and bettered. Nevertheless, Mikra’ot Gedolot represents a combination of both gatekeeper and loudest voice in the room. If the commentators want to introduce an interpretation that runs counter to the Peshat (simple meaning of the text) they can bury that original meaning. Sometimes this is good, and sometimes this is not so obviously good.

In the book of Devarim (Deuternomy), we learn the law of the rebellious son (ben sorer u-moreh). The rebellious son is to be turned over to the leaders of the city and stoned to death. This is really horrific. The Rabbis first qualify the definition of the rebellious son to the point where one could only be considered a rebellious son in the most extreme circumstances. Then they simply write the relevance of the Torah verse out of existence by saying that, “There never was and never will be such a rebellious son.” This I approve of.

I have become more and more dissatisfied with the Rabbinic re-creation and demonization of Esau. In the Torah, Esau becomes the father of the Edomites. (Edom means red. Esau had red hair. He also seems to have a thing for red. When he comes in from the fields and finds Jacob cooking lentils he says, “give me some of that red red stuff.” Red red stuff, not lentils.) The biblical Edomites were not conquered by the Israelites on their way from Egypt into Israel like the Ammonites and the Moabites. God specifically tells the Israelites not to fight with the Edomites, “because they are your brothers.” Nevertheless, as the power on the southern border of Judah, the Israelites and Edomites found themselves in conflict throughout the First Temple period. They were defeated by the Babylonians and forced further south. In the Roman era, they were known as the Idumeans and were integrated into the Jewish population. They were never seen as the Israelites primary enemy.

The transition in the identification of Esau from rival to mortal foe came when the identification switched from the factual to the metaphoric. The Rabbis associated Esau with Rome and subsequently with Christianity. This led to the rise of Esau as a demonized figure. This narrative has been in place for so long that it is hard for anyone who is trained within the rabbinic tradition to escape from that tendency. To be clear, anyone calling themselves a Rabbi at this point, regardless of denomination, is working within the rabbinic tradition. As we were studying together on Monday, Rabbi Golden was easily able to find a contrasting interpretation to my efforts to humanize Esau. While I was trying to reveal the openness of understanding that I see in the Torah text itself, Rabbi Golden felt that it was useful to present the later tradition to emphasize the difference between the two approaches. “This and that are the words of the living God,” is an important part of Jewish study. From this point of view I agreed with him. However, it undermined a point that I was trying to make, a point that is important to me beyond Torah study alone. We are often, even perhaps usually, trapped within fixed narratives. These narratives then become tools that we apply in other situations without fully inquiring about their appropriateness in either the original situation or the novel situation.

Narratives can become dangerous things. Their power can be turned against those who originate them. Their power can overwhelm whatever value they may hold for those who live within them. The continuity of fixed narratives within the Jewish community worries me. As much as I seek value in the Jewish tradition, I value care in the application of the lessons that we draw from it. It is a tool of Divine origin/inspiration, but it is still a tool and tools can be misused.

(I had meant to draw more specific inferences, but these words are enough for one day.)