Prenatal Predictions and Messianic Hopes
Parashat Toldot
As a recent father, I am preoccupied by the mystery of who my son is and who he will become. Are there traits that he possesses now that predict who he will be in 30 years? What will shape him? Who will inspire him?
Friends and family constantly look at him, squint, and then opine on whether he looks like my wife or me, whether his light hair can be traced to the fact that my father had blond hair as a child or that my wife’s paternal grandmother had red hair. They scrunch their noses and offer who they think he takes after at that moment, often accompanied with an apology to the parent who he does not presently resemble. Some split the difference and say it’s a mystery who he looks like.
I think that we like to offer these thoughts because the profound mystery of who a child is can be overwhelming. We always seek to understand the nature of the world, and a baby is particularly cryptic.
With Jacob and Esau, the Rabbis engage in a similar project: can we understand who they become based on who they were even before birth? And also, how could two children born at the same time diverge so radically? From Rebecca’s pregnancy, there are unsettling rumblings that these two might be engaged in perpetual conflict. Rebecca prays for a child, but when she becomes pregnant, we find out that “the children struggled in her womb.” I think that part of why the Rabbis want to understand the nature of the difference between these two boys is because the stakes are high: Jacob will later be renamed Israel, so he takes on the mantle of representing the Jewish people; Esau will come to be identified with those who oppressed the Jews, particularly Rome.
But the Rabbis are not interested in simple explanations. Though Jacob and Esau symbolize concepts beyond themselves, the Rabbis do not reduce them to archetypes but instead see them as people who are products of nature and nature and each possess the capacity to embark on an independent streak.
Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan see existential struggle from the beginning:
Rabbi Yohanan said, “this one tried to kill this one, and that one tried to killed this.”
These words are stark. The boys are placed oppositionally from the beginning and understand their primary responsibility to destroy or subdue the other.
From an anonymous voice, we see a less outwardly antagonistic approach but still two people with profound differences in how they approach the world.
In this portion of the midrash, we do not see the same fight-to-the-death mentality proposed above. They are two brothers drawn to two different paths—and the Rabbis aren’t shy about who they favor (Jacob). But they preserve room for the two to coexist, even if it is a precarious and uneven coexistence. In the entire midrash, however, their fates are clear from birth, and neither possesses much agency in carving his own path.
And yet, other voices within the midrashic tradition focus on how our history affects who we become. The focus turns to Jacob and Esau’s father and asks why “when Isaac was old, his eyes were too dim to see.” Unsatisfied with the idea that it might just be that aging affects our abilities, the midrash plumbs deeper:
This midrash offers two ideas about what caused Isaac’s eyesight to fade. In the first, the midrash finds an overlap with the two Hebrew words above and establishes a link between his eyes weakening and what Isaac witnessed. The traumatic image of Abraham holding a knife above him does permanent damage to his eyes. It is seared into his memory and manifests physically. In the second, Isaac’s eyes are physically damaged by the tears shed by angels at the sight of his near-death (in the midrash from Vayera, Abraham was the crier).
From both ideas, we see that Isaac did not spontaneously develop weak eyes, but his eyes were shaped by history. The hand of history intervenes to form the Biblical characters—and it offers a alternative view to the understanding of Jacob and Esau as essentially good or evil.
The Hebrew poet Hayim Gouri offers a synthesis of these two views:
Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed. / He lived many days more, / saw (life’s) goodness, until his eyesight dimmed.
But he bequeathed that hour to his descendants. / They are born / with a knife in their hearts.1
Gouri suggests that Isaac’s trauma has been passed on from one generation to the next.
We see further midrashim that show the depths of the characters of both Jacob and Esau which clarify that they are not monochromatic. Rebecca instructs Jacob to collect two kids so that she can prepare it for Isaac, as part of their ruse to trick Isaac into believing that Jacob is Esau. Jacob equivocates:
“But my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am smooth-skinned.”
Rabbi Yitzhak imagines Rebecca’s response to Jacob and Jacob’s reaction:
"It is upon me to go in and say to your father, ‘Jacob is righteous, and Esau is wicked.” “And he went and he brought the goats to his mother,” forced, bent-over, and weeping.
We see that Jacob, the righteous one, experiences significant internal moral conflicts over tricking his brother. Rabbi Yitzhak shows Jacob reluctantly following his mother’s orders with sadness. This is quite a departure from Rabbi Yohanan’s vision of one brother who wished to murder the other. Though the two brothers are placed in opposition to each other, Jacob experiences his conscience revolting against his own actions. This does not change the fact that Jacob goes through with this plan and ultimately betrays his brother. However, we see that the “hatred from birth” is not so ironclad.
Whereas this midrash showed us the complexity of Jacob by revealing his internal struggles, the next piece will reveal the depth of Esau by affirming his moral attributes. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel notices that when Rebecca is trying to trick Isaac by putting Jacob in Esau’s clothes, “Rebekah then took the best clothes of her older son Esau,” which means that while Esau is out working in the fields, he leaves his better clothes at home. He sees something powerful here:
Ironically, we have Jacob, soon-to-be Israel, guilty of deception and wracked by awareness of his sinfulness; at the same time, Esau, alleged representative of evil, is the paragon of filial piety. Gamliel’s statement is so striking because it not only includes an implicit critique of Jacob, but he indicts himself: he could not live up to Esau’s example.
Ultimately, these texts showcase complexity. Jacob and Esau are each marked by forces that predate their births— and their father is defined by what his father did to him. And yet, Jacob and Esau’s fates are not inscribed. Their positive tendencies do not help to avert the dramatic fissure that develops between them, but perhaps these moments set the stage for their reconciliation later: that Jacob’s pain at his actions lingers with him and Esau’s love for his father extends to his father’s other son.
A beautiful midrash suggests that their struggle might not be eternal:
Genetics and history mark us, but they do not guarantee who we are or what we are capable of in the future. Rabbi Acha gives us the messianic hope that someday, after all the struggle, the two brothers can sit together in peace.
Thanks to Rabbi Andrew Shugerman for introducing me to this poem from his reflection: https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/biblical-ptsd/.
Beautiful and thoughtful. You got me at the intro, of course, but I stayed and learned something with your clear teaching. The closing midrash gives hope. Thanks for that, and for this entire piece.