Sympathy for Our Enemies?

Our tradition favors Jacob.  It looks askance at Esau.  Jacob becomes Israel.  He fathers thirteen children (twelve sons and one daughter) who become the tribes of Israel.  Esau becomes a symbol of Rome who persecuted the Jews and destroyed the Second Temple.  Jacob is us.  Esau is our enemy.  The rabbis read the biblical tales of these two brothers through this lens.  Esau is forever a violent idolator.  Jacob is and always was the mild-mannered studious man.  He is the rabbinic archetype.

Esau returns from hunting.  He is famished.  He says, “Give me some of that red lentil stew to gulp down, for I am famished.” (Genesis 25) Jacob insists that he sell him his first-born birthright.  Esau responds, “I am at the point of death, so what use is my birthright to me.”  Jacobs makes Esau swear.  Esau does so.  The Torah concludes, “Thus did Esau spurn the birthright.”

In the rabbinic imagination, Jacob’s tactics are justified.  Esau is a good for nothing.  He has no commitment to his legacy or furthering the Jewish people.   The rabbis see Esau through their pre-conceived ideas.  The medieval commentator Rashi suggests that Esau sold the birthright on the day of his grandfather Abraham’s death.  Jacob was dutifully preparing a meal for the mourners.  Lentils are still the traditional meal in Sephardic homes.  In this retelling, not only did Esau spurn his birthright but he was unfeeling towards his father Isaac and disrespectful of his grandfather! 

And yet if we read these stories in an unbiased fashion, without the lens of thousands of years of Jewish interpretive tradition, Esau becomes a sympathetic character.  We feel his pain and heartache.  Jacob, the hero of our people, becomes a trickster.  The Torah states it in plainly.  Jacob, with the help of his mother Rebekah, tricks his blind father.  He pretends to be Esau so that he can cement his hold on the birthright.

When Esau discovers his brother’s trickery, “He burst into wild and bitter sobbing, and said to his father, ‘Bless me too, Father!’” (Genesis 27) How can we not be sympathetic with Esau’s plight?  In the Torah account, he did everything right.  His father asked him to go hunting and prepare his favorite dish.  Esau does so dutifully.  While he is preparing his father’s last meal, Jacob takes a goat from their flock and slaughters it.  Rebekah then prepares the meal for her husband, Isaac.

Esau’s cries are about his brother’s deception.  His wails are about his mother’s betrayal.  All his father Isaac can say is what’s done is done.  I feel sorry for Esau.  My tradition suggests I should not. 

I struggle with the tradition’s refashioning of the Torah’s words.  How did Esau become our enemy?  Was this destined from the beginning?  When Rebekah was pregnant with Jacob and Esau God told her this would be their fate: “Two separate peoples shall issue from your body; one people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.” (Genesis 25)

But Judaism does not believe in fate.  We do not think things are preordained.  If we did the High Holidays would be meaningless.  The repentance we are urged to perform on these days would make no sense if everything was written from the beginning.

How did we lose sympathy for Esau?  How do we so easily forgive Jacob’s actions?  Is it possible that our enemies are fashioned by our actions.  Did Jacob make Esau into an enemy?  Did the children of Israel make Rome into the enemy they became?

We hesitate to ask such questions.  We often label them as blasphemous.  We prefer the lenses of our inherited tradition.  They obfuscate such troubling questions.  They allow us to rest easy.  They permit us to remain comfortable and sure.  We pronounce, “Jacob’s actions were justified.  Esau deserved what he got.”

For a brief moment I am trying to remove the lenses and look at the Torah’s words anew. 

And there I find a measure of sympathy for our enemy, Esau.