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GENESIS — 27:34 sobbing

GEN1253 Consider … the scene that transpired immediately after Jacob left his father. Esau returned from hunting and brought Isaac the food he had requested. Genesis 27:33 – 36. It is impossible to Read Genesis 27--the text as it stands without commentary--and not to feel sympathy for Isaac and Esau rather than Rebecca and Jacob. The Torah is sparing in its use of motion. It is completely silent, for example, on the feelings of Abraham and Isaac towards the trial of the binding.   Phrases like “trembled violently” and “burst out with a loud and bitter cry” [these verses] cannot but affect us deeply. Here is an old man who has been deceived by his younger son, and a young man, Isaac, feels cheated out of what was rightfully his. The emotions triggered by this scene stay with us long in the memory. Then consider the consequences. Jacob had to leave home for more than twenty years in fear of his life. He then suffered an almost identical deceit practiced against him by Laban when he substituted Leah for Rachel. When Rachel cried out, “Why did you deceive me [rimitani]?” Laban replied: “It is not done in our place to put the younger before the elder” Genesis 29:25 – 26. Not only the act but even the words imply a punishment, measure for measure.   “Deceit,” of which Jacob accuses Laban, is the very word Isaac used about Jacob. Laban’s reply sounds like a virtually explicit reference to what Jacob had done, as if to say, “We do not do in our place what you have just done in yours.” The result of Laban’s deception brought to grief to the rest of Jacob’s life. There was tension between Leah and Rachel. There was hatred between their children. Jacob was deceived yet again, this time by his sons, when they brought him Joseph’s bloodstained robe -- another deception of a father involving the use of clothes. The result was that Jacob was deprived of the company of his most beloved son for twenty-two years, just as Isaac was of Jacob. Asked by Pharaoh how old he was, Jacob replied, “Few and evil have been the years of my life” Genesis 47:9   He is the only figure in the Torah to make a remark like this. It is hard not to read the text as a precise statement of the principle of measure for measure: as you have done to others, so will others do to you. The deception brought all concerned great grief, and this persisted into the next generation. My reading of the text is therefore this. The phrase in Rebecca’s oracle, verav yaavod tzair, Genesis 25:23, is in fact ambiguous. It may mean, “The elder will serve the younger,” but it may also mean, “The younger will serve the elder.” It is what the Torah calls a chidda, Numbers 12:8, that is, and opaque, deliberately ambiguous communication. It suggested an ongoing conflict between the two sons and their descendants, but did not foretell who would win. SACKS 35-7

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GENESIS — 27:41 then

GEN1256 Maybe the only reason [Joseph] had not yet taken revenge [against his brothers for selling him into slavery] was respect for Jacob. There was a convention in those days that there was to be no settling of scores between siblings in the lifetime of the father.  We know this from an earlier episode: after Jacob took his brother’s blessing, Esau said [this verse]. SACKS 71

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GENESIS — 29:31 hated

GEN1302 Was Leah hated? No. The previous sentence has just told us that she was loved. What then does the Torah mean by “hated”? It means, that is how Leah felt. Yes she was loved, but less than her sister.  Leah knew, and had known for seven years, that Jacob was passionately in love with her younger sister Rachel. The Torah says that he worked for her for seven years “but they seemed to him like a few days because he was so in love with her” Genesis 29:20 Leah was not hated. She was less loved. But someone in that situation cannot but feel rejected. The Torah forces us to hear Leah’s pain in the names she gives her children. Her first she calls Reuben, saying “it is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.” The second she calls Simeon, “Because the Lord heard that I am not loved.” The third she calls Levi, saying, “Now at last my husband will become attached to meGenesis 29:32 – 35. There is sustained anguish in these words. We hear the same time later when Reuben, Leah’s firstborn, finds mandrakes in the field. Mandrakes were thought to have aphrodisiac properties, so he gives them to his mother hoping that this will drive his father to her. Rachel, who has been experiencing a different kind of pain, childlessness, seize the mandrakes and asks Leah for them. Leah then says: “Wasn’t it enough that you took away my husband? Will you take my son’s mandrakes too?” Genesis 30:15 The misery is palpable. Note what is happened. It began with love. It was about love throughout. Jacob loved Rachel. He loved her at first sight. In fact, there is no other love story quite like it in the Torah: Abraham and Sarah are already married by the time we first meet them; Isaac has his wife chosen for him by his father’s servant. He is more emotional than the other patriarchs; that is the problem. Love unites but it also divides. It leaves the unloved, even the less-loved, feeling rejected, abandoned, forsaken, alone.  That is why you cannot build a society, a community, or even a family on love alone. There must be justice-as-fairness also. SACKS 43-4

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GENESIS — 31:19 idols

GEN1335 [One of the features of the ethic of Torah that makes it transformative and uniquely sustainable over time … is] a strange feature of the book of Genesis. We normally think of Judaism as Abrahamic monotheism, and monotheism itself as a rejection of and protest against the polytheism of the ancient world. Yet Genesis contains not a single polemic against idolatry. Other than an obscure reference to Rachel stealing her father’s terafim,   “household gods” or “fetishes” [this verse], there is not even one mention of it. Yet there is no doubt that the story of Genesis from chapter twelve to the end is about a single and singular family that lives differently from the nations and cultures that surrounded. Of what does this difference consist? There is a connecting theme. Whenever a member of the covenantal family leaves the matrix of the family, he or she encounters a world of sexual anomie.  Three times Abraham and Isaac are forced to leave home because of famine and on each occasion feel themselves to be in danger of their lives. They will be killed so that their wives can be taken into the royal harem Genesis 12,20,26. When two strangers, who turn out to be angels, visit Lot in Sodom, the people of the town surround Lot’s house demanding that he bring them out for the purpose of homosexual rape. When Dina goes out to visit Shechem, she is abducted and raped by the local Prince. When Joseph, in Egypt, is left alone with his master’s wife, she attempts to seduce him and when he resists has him imprisoned on a false charge of rape. Even the members of Abraham’s family themselves become corrupted when they live among the people. Lot’s daughters get their father drunk and have incestuous relationship with him. Judah, who has left his brothers to live among the Canaanites, feels no qualms about having sex with a woman he takes to be a prostitute. A truly remarkable idea is being formulated here: that there is a connection between idolatry and sexual lawlessness.   SACKS xxvii [Continued at [[GEN969]] Genesis 18:19 instruct SACKS xxvii-viii]

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GENESIS — 32:8 afraid

GEN1360 There is an important thought experiment devised by Andrew Schmookler known as the parable of the tribes. Andrew Bard Schmookler, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (Berkeley: University of California, 1984). Imagine a group of tribes living close to one another.   All choose the way of peace except one that is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. What happens to the peace-seeking tribes? One is defeated and destroyed by the violent tribe. A second is conquered and subjugated. The third flees to some remote and inaccessible place. If the fourth seeks to defend itself it too will have to have recourse to violence. “The irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power.” Schmookler, 21. There are, in other words, for possible outcomes: (1) destruction, (2) subjugation, (3) withdrawal, and (4) imitation.” In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes. (Ibid., 22).   Recall that all but one of the tribes seek peace and have no desire to exercise power over their neighbors. Nonetheless, if you introduce a single violent tribe in to the region, violence will eventually prevail, however the other tribes choose to respond. That is the tragedy of the human condition.   As I was writing this essay in the summer of 2014, Israel was engaged in a bitter struggle with Hamas in Gaza in which many people died. The state of Israel had no more desire to be engaged in this kind of warfare than did our ancestor Jacob. Throughout the campaign I found myself recalling the words earlier in Parashat Vayishlah about Jacob’s feelings prior to his meeting with Esau: “Jacob was very afraid and distressed” [this verse], about which the sages said, “Afraid, lest he be killed, distressed lest he be forced to kill” (quoted by Rashi ad loc.).  What the episode of Dina tells us is not that Jacob, or Simeon and Levi, were right, but rather that there can be situations in which there is no simple right course of action. Whatever you do will be considered wrong; every option will involve the compromise of some moral principle. That is Schmookler’s point, that “power is like a contaminant, a disease, which once introduced will gradually but inexorably become universal in the system of competing societies.”   Shechem’s single act of violence against Dina forced two of Jacob’s sons into violent reprisal and in the end everyone was either contaminated or dead. It is indicative of the moral depth of the Torah that it does not hide this terrible truth from us by depicting one side as guilty, the other as innocent. Violence defiles us all. It did then. It does now. SACKS 50-2

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GENESIS — 33:11 blessing

GEN1406 Isaac fully understood the nature of his two sons. He loved Esau but this did not blind him to the fact that Jacob would be the heir of the covenant. Therefore Isaac prepared two sets of blessings, one for Esau, the other for Jacob. He blessed Esau Genesis 27:28-29 with the gifts he felt he would appreciate, wealth and power: “May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness-an abundance of grain and new wine”- that is, wealth; “May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you” - that is, power. These are not the covenantal blessings. The covenantal blessings that God had given Abraham and Isaac were completely different. They were about children and a land. It was this blessing that Isaac later gave Jacob before he left home Genesis 28:3-4: “May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples”- that is, children; “May He give you and your descendants the blessing given to Abraham, so that you may take possession of the land where you now reside as a foreigner, the land God gave to Abraham”-that is, land. This was the blessing Isaac had intended for Jacob all along. There was no need for deceit and disguise. Jacob eventually came to understand all this, perhaps during his wrestling match with the angel during the night before his meeting with Esau after their long estrangement. What happened at that meeting is incomprehensible unless we understand that Jacob was giving back to Esau the blessings he had wrongly taken from him. The massive gift of sheep, cattle, and other livestock represented “heaven’s dew and earth’s richness”- That is, wealth. The fact that Jacob bowed down seven times to Esau was his way of fulfilling the words, “May the sons of your mother bow down to you”-That is, power. Jacob gave the blessing back. Indeed, he said so explicitly. He said to Isaac: “please accept the blessing [birkati] that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have all I need” Genesis 33:11. In this reading of the story, Rebecca and Jacob made a mistake-a forgivable one, an understandable one, but a mistake nonetheless. The blessing Isaac was about to give Esau was not the blessing of Abraham. He intended to give Esau a blessing appropriate to him. In so doing, he was acting on the basis of precedent. God had blessed Ishmael with the words, “I will make him into a great nation” Genesis 21:18. This was the fulfillment of a promise God had given Abraham many years before when He told him that it would be Isaac, not Ishmael, who would continue the covenant Genesis 17:18–21. Isaac surely knew this because, according to a midrashic tradition, he and Ishmael were reconciled later in life. We see them standing together at Abraham’s grave Genesis 25:9. It may be that this was a fact that Rebecca did not know. She associated blessing with covenant. She may have been unaware that Abraham wanted Ishmael blessed even though he would not inherit the covenant, and that God had acceded to the request. If so then it is possible all four people acted rightly as they understood the situation, yet still tragedy occurred. Isaac was right to wish Esau blessed in the same way as Abraham had wanted Ishmael blessed. Esau acted honorably towards his father. Rebecca sought to safeguard the future of the covenant. Jacob felt qualms but did what his mother said, knowing that she would not have proposed deceit without a strong moral reason for doing so. Do we have to here one story with two possible interpretations? Perhaps, but that is not the best way of describing it. What we have here, and there are other such examples in Genesis, is a story we understand one way the first time we hear it, and a different way once we have discovered and reflected on all that happened later. It is only after we have read about the fate of Jacob in Laban’s house, the tension between Leah and Rachel, and the animosity between Joseph and his brothers that we can go back and read Genesis 27, the chapter of the blessing, in a new light and with greater depth. There is such a thing as an honest mistake, and it is a mark of Jacob’s greatness that he recognized it I made amends to Esau. In the great encounter twenty-two years later, the estranged brothers met, embraced, parted, and went their separate ways. But first, Jacob had to wrestle with an angel. That is how the moral life is. We learned by making mistakes. We live life forwards, but we understand it only looking back. Only then do we see the wrong turns we inadvertently made. This discovery is sometimes our greatest moment of moral truth.   Each of us has a blessing that is our own. That was true not just of Isaac but also Ishmael, not just of Jacob but also Esau. The moral could not be more powerful. Never seek your brother’s blessing. Be content with your own. [This message later became the 10th of the 10 Commandments]. SACKS 37-9

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GENESIS — 38:26 more

GEN1493 This moment is a turning point in history. Judah is the first person in the Torah to explicitly admit he was wrong. We do not realize it yet, but this seems to be the moment at which he acquired the depth of character necessary for him to become the first real baal teshuva.  We see this years later, when he--the man who proposed selling Joseph as a slave--becomes the man who is willing to spend the rest of his life in slavery so that his brother Benjamin can go free Genesis 44:33. I have argued elsewhere that it is from here that we learn the principle that a penitent stands higher than even a perfectly righteous individual. Berakhot 34b. Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Genesis-The Book of Beginnings (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2009) 303 – 314.  Judah the penitent becomes the ancestor of Israel’s kings, while Joseph, the righteous, is only a viceroy, mishneh lemelekh, second to the king. Thus far Judah. But the real hero of the story was Tamar. She had taken an immense risk by becoming pregnant. Indeed she was almost killed for it. She had done so for a noble reason: to ensure that the name of her late husband was perpetuated. But she took no less care to avoid Judah being put to shame. Only he and she knew what had happened. Judah could acknowledge his error without loss of face. It was from this episode that the sages derived the rule …: it is better to risk being thrown into a fiery furnace than shame someone else in public.   It is thus no coincidence that Tamar, a heroic non-Jewish woman, became the ancestor of David, Israel’s greatest king. There are striking similarities between Tamar and the other heroic woman in David’s ancestry, the Moabite woman we know as Ruth. The ancient Jewish custom on Shabbat and festivals to cover the challot (or matza) while holding the glass of wine over which Kiddush is being made is performed so as not to put the challah to shame while it is being as it were, passed over in favor of the wine. There are religious Jews who will go to great lengths to avoid shaming an inanimate loaf of bread but have no compunction about putting their fellow Jews to shame if they regard them as less religious than they are. That is what happens when we remember the halakha but forget the underlying moral principle behind it. Never put anyone to shame. SACKS 57-8

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