In brief:
Toledot kicks off the story of Isaac and his family of tricksters. I mean no disrespect here. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that everyone in this family is, well, one who tricks. Almost everyone that is. More on that in a moment.
We learn that Esau — Isaac and Rebekah’s eldest child — has traded his birthright to his younger brother Jacob for a bowl of stew. Which I think is so specific it has to be true. Or invented by someone who really loves stew.
There are inherited wells, stopped and unstopped, which is a metaphor and a half. Isaac shows that he’s picked up the trick of (deep breath here): pretending your wife is your sister in a way that makes people feel uncomfortable and/or angry and/or in debt to you.
And then we get to a moment as complex in its own way as Abraham and the binding of Isaac before it.
Rebekah tells Jacob to trick Isaac into thinking Jacob is Esau, so that Jacob might receive his father’s blessings and all that goes with them.
Did I mention that this is a family of tricksters? They are such tricksters that when Jacob shows up in disguise, Isaac suspects right away that something is up. ‘Are you really Esau? Seriously? You’re not pretend-Esau?’ You get the feeling this family is tricking each other all the time. Everyone that is except innocent Esau.
A couple of thoughts:
- In my hazy memory of this section from childhood, I carried a bias against Esau. Esau, who is so hairy, his name means “hairy.” Esau the violent, one assumes. The simple, perhaps. But reading the text this week, I met Esau the hunter, who’s really the hunted. Esau, unloved or at least underloved by his mother. Esau who’s so much an innocent sheep that if you want to convince your dad that you’re Esau, you put on sheep’s clothing. The story of Jacob and Esau has just begun in this week’s portion. But already it’s hard to know who to root for, and easy to see why their story has had power for so many years.
- The Torah experiences the past, present, and future as part of the same gust of wind. There are promises made to our descendants (…like stars in the sky and grains of sand on the beach). Land left by ancestors. Wells left with life-giving water. Birthrights to be bargained over. Blessings. Covenants. Curses to be endured. Our moment is a bead in a chain. And the awareness of that truth is what it means to live a human life. To remember and to receive — the good and the ill. To make our stand and then to pass things along — the good and the ill. I know we’re still only in the first half of the first book, but if we learn one thing from the Torah, I suspect that might be it. It’s a big ‘un. It’s mortality. And it brings with it appreciation, obligation, and the potential for peace, as we learned last week. The peace of Abraham.
If you’d like to join in… this is the place for comments and commentary on Toledot (Gen 25.9 – 28.9)
Next up: Va-Yetse’ (Gen 28.10 – 32.3)
-Cecil
I’m going to focus again on this idea of human relationships versus god relationships: I have always been bothered by what feels like Jacob cheating Esau and Rebekah’s blatant favoritism but as I read again I see instead a complex tension between focusing on earthly possessions and gods desire that we focus on the divine relationship.
In 25:23 we are told that these children represent two different focai in the world and that the “normal” expectation for relational structure will be flipped. Then almost immediately we see Esau willing to sell his birthright (that to be the name that carries on the way of his father – being a god follower) for temporary, earthly pleasures. Remember following this his requires faith and patience in future promises. Something we see Isaac doing in the whole next chapter as he moves around following and trusting god.
Then in 26:34, sort of offhand we see esau marrying local women (non-god followers), something specifically prohibited for his father.
What I find really interesting is that as he nears death Isaac wants to bless the son that can provide earthly pleasures whereas Rebekah concocts a complicated scenario in which the son who is hinting at being a god-follower will receive that blessing that makes him a patriarch of the faith – so it is a woman who preserves this god-centric relationship and perhaps it is even Rebekah who has nurtured it.
It is then not so much about being in this moment on earth, in our humanness as how even in our humanness we can look faithfully ahead and know we are working toward something beyond what we see today and likely beyond what we can comprehend.
It’s funny, you know from the beginning of the story that Jacob was chosen by God to carry the birthright(which I believe was the sacred writings that Abraham and then Isaac has telling the history of God and his chosen people- all the way back to Adam) as well as receive the blessing from Isaac. The Lord told Rebekah in her vision, and odds are she had at some point told her husband. Maybe that’s why they make a point of saying that Isaac loved Esau; he was choosing his favorite over the one God chose. Isaac was going to make a mistake and give all to Esau, but Rebekah also did wrong by using trickery to get Jacob the blessing.