Zero-Sum Brothers
Jacob and Esau, Us and Them
The parasha starts with some of the strongest language around prayer that we find anywhere in the Torah. Isaac and Rebecca are married twenty years without having a child, and wait and pray. How do they pray? In each other’s presence.
לנכח אשתו. זֶה עוֹמֵד בְּזָוִית זוֹ וּמִתְפַּלֵּל וְזוֹ עוֹמֶדֶת בְּזָוִית זוֹ וּמִתְפַּלֶּלֶת:
“Isaac entreated in the presence of his wife” - This one stood in one corner praying and the other stood in another corner praying. (Rashi on 25:21)
They are answered. Pregnancy ensues, and then pain. She cries out one of the most poignant existential prayers ever uttered: אִם־כֵּן לָמָּה זֶּה אָנֹכִי - ‘If it is so, then why am I?’ What is the meaning of a world that necessitates such suffering? And finally, she goes lidrosh et Hashem, to demand God. Not to whisper praise or request politely, but to demand God - or, perhaps, literally lidrosh, to interpret God. She is looking for a theology of pain. The message that she gets is teleological: there is an ultimate purpose to her pain, and her suffering now is only an intermediate step on the way to something more profound. This is the prophecy she receives:
וַיֹּאמֶר יְ—הֹוָה לָהּ שְׁנֵי (גיים) [גוֹיִם] בְּבִטְנֵךְ וּשְׁנֵי לְאֻמִּים מִמֵּעַיִךְ יִפָּרֵדוּ וּלְאֹם מִלְאֹם יֶאֱמָץ וְרַב יַעֲבֹד צָעִיר׃
“Two nations are in your belly,
two tribes from your body shall be divided;
tribe shall be mightier than tribe,
elder shall be servant to younger!” (Gen. 25:23)
The pain of Rebecca is an expression of the contradiction she is carrying in her womb: not one child but two, not one future but two, and two that can’t live with each other. This phrase, ‘tribe shall be mightier than tribe’ expresses a relationship in which each brother can be mighty only at the expense of the other. The two brothers seem destined to be in conflict, and this is further confirmed when each of the parents picks their favourite child - Isaac with Esau and Rebecca with Jacob. One tradition even says that it’s a halachah, a law, that Esau hates Jacob (cf. Rashi on Gen. 33:4).
I want to point out the development of this tradition whereby ‘tribe shall be mightier than tribe.’ An ancient midrash, so ancient that it’s actually in the text of the Torah as a parenthetical statement, identifies the character of Esau with the nation of Edom, and this becomes expanded over time to include Rome, and even later, all of Christianity too. The conflict promised between these two children in the womb becomes a global one too. The Talmud says:
קֵסָרִי וִירוּשָׁלַיִם, אִם יֹאמַר לְךָ אָדָם: חָרְבוּ שְׁתֵּיהֶן — אַל תַּאֲמֵן. יָשְׁבוּ שְׁתֵּיהֶן — אַל תַּאֲמֵן. חָרְבָה קֵסָרִי וְיָשְׁבָה יְרוּשָׁלַיִם, חָרְבָה יְרוּשָׁלַיִם וְיָשְׁבָה קֵסָרִי — תַּאֲמֵן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״אִמָּלְאָה הָחֳרָבָה״. אִם מְלֵיאָה זוֹ — חֲרֵבָה זוֹ, אִם מְלֵיאָה זוֹ — חֲרֵבָה זוֹ. רַב נַחְמָן בַּר יִצְחָק אָמַר מֵהָכָא: ״וּלְאוֹם מִלְאוֹם יֶאֱמָץ״.
Regarding the Roman city of Caesarea and the Jewish city of Jerusalem: If one says to you that both are destroyed, do not believe him; if he says that both are flourishing, do not believe him; if he says that Caesarea is waste and Jerusalem is flourishing, or that Jerusalem is waste and Caesarea is flourishing, you may believe him… if this one is filled, that one is laid waste, and if that one is filled, this one is laid waste. Rav Nahman bar Yitzhak says: we find this idea in the verse “Tribe shall be mightier than tribe.” (Megillah 6b)
The relationship here follows the model of a zero-sum game, a mathematical model where the gain of one side is always equal to the loss of the other. Chess is a zero-sum game, one person winning means that the other loses. If there’s more people than food at kiddush in the synagogue, then the food that one person eats means that there’s less for the others. But not everything works like this, and some of our biggest frustrations are when we define success through zero-sum logic when it’s not appropriate. Friendship or loving relationships, for example, should not define success through loss and gain of points at the others expense. The biggest example of the misplaced use of this logic today is in attitude to war, of course. The side that creates the most damage is considered the winner of the war. Or, the side that suffers the most is the victim, and is the only one that deserves the sympathy of the world.
But the truth is that very few human relationships actually work like this, with one winner and one loser, each defined by the other. And even if we have sources in our tradition that use this language, our tradition is vast and multi-vocal, and covers the entirety of human experience. So alongside the texts that use Jacob and Esau as examples of an ‘us and them’ rivalry, we have other traditions that complicate and subvert this way of looking at the world. I’ll mention briefly just three:
First, in the rabbinic tradition, Esau is presented as the model of honouring parents. We have this later as part of the so-called Ten Commandments, ‘Honour your father and mother, that you may live a long life,” but when we look at models for how to actually do it, our tradition points at Esau as the role model. He is the one who hunts and brings home food, who feeds and is beloved by his father, and while Jacob later flees and goes on his adventures, Esau remains with his parents. It’s as if the ancestor of the Jews, the one who plays tricks and deceives his family and wrestles with God, he’s not the model that we want to emphasise for our children. Esau is the Other, but he’s the one we want to learn from, we actually need him.
A second example of the complex attitude towards Esau is found in the stories in the Talmud about Antoninus Pius, the roman emperor after Hadrian. In the rabbinic imagination, he is portrayed both as a friend of the Jews and a descendent of Esau. In one text (Avoda Zara 10b), he asks his friend Rabbi Judah the Prince whether he will merit to be with him in the world to come, and quotes a verse from the book of Ovadia that seems to indicate the contrary. Rabbi Judah says yes, he will be in the world to come, and when the verse speaks about Esau, it’s speaking about the wicked behaviour of Esau which will be wiped out, while the people themselves always have the possibility to change. Interestingly, the prophet Ovadia himself is considered to be a descendent of Esau too, who converted to Judaism, and was able to bring the message of God back to his people. Here again the absolute notion of Us and Them is challenged. Yes, Esau and Jacob are destined to be enemies, but Esau can also become Jacob.
This works the other way around too. In our parasha, when Jacob comes to trick his father and receive his blessing, putting sheep-skins on his arms to impersonate the hairy Esau, Isaac feels him and is confused.
וַיִּגַּשׁ יַעֲקֹב אֶל־יִצְחָק אָבִיו וַיְמֻשֵּׁהוּ וַיֹּאמֶר הַקֹּל קוֹל יַעֲקֹב וְהַיָּדַיִם יְדֵי עֵשָׂו׃
Yaakov moved closer to Yitzhak his father.
He felt him and said:
The voice is Yaakov’s voice, yet the hands are Esav’s hands!
This idea of a Jacob that looks like Esau is not only part of the plot, but if we look carefully at the text we see that Jacob really does integrate some of Esau into himself. At the beginning the two of them are presented as polar opposites: Esau the hunter in the field and Jacob the geeky boy in the tent; Jacob is more passive and Esau is active. But as the biblical story develops, after absorbing Esau’s hands, Jacob’s personality also becomes more active, he also becomes a man of the field. He grows into himself when he integrates some Esau-ness into Jacob - and it is at this point when he is called ‘shalem’, complete.
The message of this parasha is complex. Sometimes, the attitude of “it’s us or them” makes sense, is human. We need to erect boundaries, look inwards and look after ourselves first. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to talk simplisticly about ‘Them and Us’, and interaction with the others needs to allow for change, dynamic relationships, learning from the other and affecting them too. It really is complicated and there’s usually not a clear answer about which attitude to take, we do our best and pray that we’ve made the right choices - but even feeling that it’s complicated and not simple is already a good start.
Shabbat shalom!