In Jeremiah 9:3-4, the prophet delivers a warning:
"Every man, beware his friend! Do not even trust a brother! Ki khol ach 'akov ya'akov - Because every brother will hold you back, v'khol rei'a rakhil yahalokh - every friend walks about dealing basely. One cheats the other. They will not speak truth; they taught their tongues to speak untruth and will tire themselves out doing evil."
The Hebrew wordplay, Ki khol ach' akov ya'akov - Because every brother will hold you back, directly connects this warning to Jacob's shameful deceit of his brother Esau and his father Isaac in this week's reading, Parshat Toldot. For Jeremiah, this is Israel at its worst.
Jacob steals Esau’s blessing, paving the way for us to become G-d's chosen people, but this chosen-ness came with costs. There is the cost of lying to a parent and tricking a brother and the cost associated with failing to recognize the simple human dignity that we owe people who are different from us.
I know that Esau is not one of us. He is not an Israelite; we are not his descendants. But Esau is still Jacob's brother. Many of us have family and know people in our communities so profoundly different from us that we reject them and turn away toward people who are more like us. There is a lesson about Jewish communal vitality and continuity here. In every generation since Jacob and Esau, there are Esaus born into our communities. In every generation, we continue to prefer, value, and uplift the Jacobs - the soft-spoken, the bookish, the meek - and we lose the Esaus. We let Jewish people slip through the cracks because our communal norms signal that we do not value them.
Esau was a good hunter, easily able to provide high-quality food to his family, but our Tradition writes him off as violent. Esau preferred being outside and was athletic, yet our Tradition labels him as boorish. He dutifully loved his father, but our text paints him as simple. Though we are taught not to place a stumbling block before the blind, our forefather Jacob - the G-d Wrestler Israel - put a stumbling block before Esau, the hard-working man, and steals his birthright while Esau was tired and hungry after a day in the fields. Jacob then takes advantage of his blind father Isaac and steals Esau's blessing. Esau's anguish and Isaac's pained confusion after realizing what Jacob did breaks my heart. Our forefather Jacob acted in ways that fly in the face of how we should live as Jews. The Torah teaches us to live not only by our ancestors' shining virtues but also by their glaring flaws.
In the heartbreak that I share with Isaac and Esau, we also get the Torah's first story of ritual creativity. I am always perplexed by how limited Isaac is and his inability to fix his mistake. It seems that the blessing Jacob receives is more powerful than Isaac himself; even though delivered privately with words only leaving Isaac's mouth and entering Jacob's ears, the blessing actually transfers power from father to son. As Esau weeps in front of him, Isaac is at a loss. I am with Esau. How is it that there is only one blessing? "Ha'brakhah achat hi l'kha avi? - Have you but one blessing, Father? Barkheini gam ani avi! - Bless me too, Father!" Ultimately, Esau's blessing is very similar in language to Jacob's, but I sense a tenderness in the poetry of Esau's blessing that contrasts with the formality of Jacob's.
I think Isaac wants to do his best to right the wrong done to Esau, but he is limited by his old age and the world he knows. The blessing he gives to Jacob as a transfer of power is formulaic and likely has many parallels in other ancient Near-Eastern cultures. Esau does not just demand a new blessing, he insists that blessings do something else - for blessings to take on new meaning, even while staying close to their original formulas.
In turn, what can we do with the power of our words to correct the wrongs we have done to other people? How do we ensure our Tradition's rituals feel authentic, familiar, and consistent with history while addressing our present-day challenges that the Rabbis did not predict? While there would undoubtedly be no Israel without Jacob, we might not have blessings without Esau.
Notice too how anguish is at the root of this creativity. Change and growth are often painful. In the Book of Samuel, Hannah – falling on her face in pain and anger, begging for a son - is credited as the first person to pray spontaneously. So too, Isaac is the first person to make a blessing creatively and spontaneously.
As Jewish communities continue to think about what we must do to ensure we stick around, I think we also need to ask what we are sticking around for. What is the purpose of our continuity? What blessings are we passing down, and to whom are we passing them? How do we define meaningful participation in the Jewish community, and who do we seek out as leaders? What attributes do we prioritize, and who are we leaving behind as a consequence? In each of our communities, we should be trying to listen for and then find the people crying out in anguish, "Give me community too! Bless me too! Let me experience Shabbat too!" The Jewish world is made for the Jacobs - those of us who like to pray from books and study the texts of our ancient wisdom in study halls, asking big deep questions. The anguished cries are coming from the people out in the fields and on the edges. Is there not Torah there too? Did G-d not also make all the beautiful nature that Esau surrounded himself with?
I think we stand to learn a great deal from the people we have been casting aside to our communities' margins. If we are to be a Light unto the Nations, we should remember that there are many kinds of people in this world. Each one should be able to see the best parts of themselves reflected in the Jewish people. Our strength lies in that diversity. We must go out to the fields and find the Esaus.