Vahyishlach 14 Kislev 5768 / November 24, 2007

Recently, I head a lecture on the Bible which suggested that a central focus of the text is the triumph of the underdog. Repeatedly younger siblings rise to the top; those most in jeopardy ultimately triumph. And this is taken as a synecdoche for the destiny of Israel: though small and marginal, Israel, too, will ultimately overcome all of the adversity in its path.

This certainly seems to be the case, at least in the beginning of this week’s Torah portion wherein Jacob ends up wrestling with an angel and is transformed from the heel to the one who wrestles with God. His successful match—okay, it was a draw, and he does emerge with a limp, but against such a powerful assailant he must’ve been grateful to have achieved that much--presages his encounter with Esau. Fearful of Esau’s designs on him for revenge, Jacob will emerge unscathed: Esau’s burning desire for revenge has disappeared. And later on, despite the violence that is perpetrated by his sons in the wake of the rape/seduction of Dinah Jacobs escape unscathed, although, as he departs, he condemns his sons’ violent and brutal pillage of the nearby town.

Jacob seems to live a charmed life, except for the fact that he is conned by his uncle into marrying two sisters and that in this week’s portion, his beloved Rachel dies in childbirth giving birth to Benjamin.

And yet, as intriguing as is this perils of Pauline account of Jacob, I find myself drawn to another dimension of the text: how the other is depicted. And let me assert before I continue, we need to be careful how we come to the text. There is a predisposition, undoubtedly based on years of rabbinic stories which have overlaid our understanding of the text, to look at Esau and later Shechem as fundamentally wicked, if not evil. Certainly, as I’ve pointed on several occasions, Esau is seen as the stand-in for Rome, through a lengthy interpretive history and Rome was rabbinic Judaism’s antagonist. But if we set aside those predispositions, we will see that the Biblical description of the other is not quite so black and white. And that I would suggest to you has implications for us, today, as well.

Esau, when we last saw him, immediately after his discovery of Jacob’s trickery with regard to the blessing of the firstborn, and having already taken advantage when he sold his birthright to him, this very same Esau was thirsting for revenge. He must’ve been humming an early version of “Just you wait Henry Higgins.” Jacob was going to get his. No wonder that Jacob is the fugitive, arriving empty-handed at the doorstep of his uncle Laban: he had to get out of town quickly. And Jacob knew that he had gone too far with his brother Esau. He apparently lived in dread of the moment when he would encounter him again.

In the second Star Trek movie, the villain, Khan, asserts that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. Well, perhaps that was true for Khan, but it was not for Esau, as it is not for most of us. The passage of time cools us down; life overtakes us. Those who harmed us in the past are moved to a remote corner of our minds, as we get on with our lives. So, too, it is with Esau. Yes, he is coming towards Jacob with a full camp. But it is not a camp of war, but a camp of success. The man who was supposed to live off the land has in Jacob’s absence also grown rich in flocks and has a large and extended family. The Rabbis nonetheless thought the worst of Esau and therefore dotted the Hebrew word Vayishkayhu—and he kissed him; the kiss of reconciliation—to indicate that there was a special interpretive tradition about that word. The tradition understands the word as though it read slightly differently,--substituting a Chaf for a Kof-- Vayishchayu, and he bit him—the Dracula instinct in Esau, apparently coming to the fore. But this is to misread Esau. Jacob is the one fixed in the past; suffering the effects of a guilty conscience. He is excessively obeisant, bowing before his brother—an inversion of Isaac’s blessing--, calling Esau “my lord” and offering him lavish gifts, which Esau declines. Esau is forgiving: the past is past. And unlike Abraham and Lot, Esau is willing to live with Jacob and it is Jacob, who reverting to form, acts like the heel: he thanks his brother for the offer and assures him that he’ll play catch up and instead goes off in a different direction. Esau, the paradigmatic other, is by contrast a mensch.

As for Shechem the son of Chamor how do we perceive him? The Bible gives this character a problematic name: his is the same as the town of Shechem and his father’s name can be translated as ass. But if you read Anita Diament’s novel The Red Tent, you will recall a much more favorable view of Shechem. Diament transforms the abbreviated depiction of the encounter between Shechem and Dinah from a case of apparent date rape, to one of consensual sex, which later tradition had to view negatively. And frankly, I think Diament may be on to something here: trying to remedy the effort to paint the other in black terms. But even the Biblical text doesn’t totally denigrate Shechem. It goes on to say that he loves Dinah and is willing to do anything to win her over; he is willing not only to have himself circumcised, but to have all the males of the community also undergo this painful rite, so that he can win the love of his life. Admittedly, he sells the idea on utilitarian grounds: we give up our foreskins, and we gain the potential of marrying into the family of this rich Bedouin and we can thereby build up our fortunes in the process. Is the story of Shechem an early warning against inter-marriage? Hard to know. Complicating our understanding of the text is the fact that no such opprobrium is cast upon Judah when in next week’s reading he marries the unnamed daughter of Shua the Caananite; nor is there any condemnation offered when he marries off his sons to Tamar, who is also of local stock. You may even remember that line will produce the ancestors of King David!

In the Tanya, the classic work of the first Lubavitch rabbi, non-Jews are said to possess the souls of beasts. I would hope that we do not accept such an offensive view of the other. But what view of the other in whose midst we do, do we maintain? Part of the problem, frankly, is our ignorance. We know so little about the faith of others: what is important to them, beyond the superficial trappings. For example, a superficial understanding of our Christian neighbors would be they celebrate this winter solstice festival by stringing lights, putting out displays with reindeer, decorating a tree, usually indoors, and getting up early on the day after Thanksgiving to race out shopping for tons of mandatory Christmas gifts. And the central focus of their worship is some figure called Santa Claus who apparently is the god of gift giving who is celebrated by having human representatives in stores and on the streets and in countless ads. This may all be true, but it tells us nothing about the roots of their traditions; what the Gospels say about the birth of Jesus and the idea of the incarnation of God, indeed what Christmas really means in Christian thought. (But that is a talk for another day.) And if we are ignorant about Christianity, Kal V’chomer, even more so, are we ignorant about Islam, let alone other religions. And therefore it is so easy to demonize the other; to take the efforts of a small percentage of that world and say if that is religion x, then it is surely deserving of being reviled. If for example, Christians took the actions of some of the Satmar Chassidim who have allied themselves with the enemies of Israel, including Iran, as representative of Judaism, we would feel aggrieved and misunderstood.

The Biblical text offers us an unapologetic view of its figures: we see their virtues, but also their deficiencies. And that is true of those who in time become our ancestors, but also true of those with whom they interact; the other. At least in the Book of Genesis the other is not demonized—when we get to Exodus and Pharaoh, that is another story. It is important for us to realize that the other whether in the past or in our present is a complex figure and superficial understandings do us a disservice. We need to probe beyond the surface and truly appreciate the nature of all those non Members of the Tribe with whom our lives intersect.

Shabbat shalom.