Mitzvah d'var

My Torah Portion is called Toldot in the book of Bereisheet/Genesis.  In my Torah Portion we are focused on Issac, the son of Abraham and Rebecca and their two sons Esau and Jacob.  The Jewish concept of birthright is central to my Torah portion.  In early Judaism, being the first born had many benefits.  The first born son receives a double share of the wealth from the father, and he also gains authority over the family.  However, there was also a spiritual component to birthright.  The first born son also was the spiritual leader of the family.   

In Isaac and Rebekah’s family, both of these components were a very big deal.  Issac inherited great wealth and power from Abraham, AND Isaac inherited the blessings that God had given Abraham. My Torah portion begins with Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, marrying Rebekah when he was 40 years old.Issac prayed to God because Rebekah was not fertile. God accepted Isaac’s prayers and Rebekah became pregnant. God told Rebekah that she would have twins and that the older one would serve the younger one. 

Then Rebekah gave birth to twins. Esau was first. Jacob came second.  The boys grew up, and their very different personalities emerged.  Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a scholar.

One day when Esau came home from hunting he was starving and asked Jacob to give him some food.  Jacob asked Esau to sell him the birthright of being the first born in exchange for the food. Esau didn’t value his birthright and didn’t want to do service to God, so he went ahead and sold his birthright to Jacob. 

Jacob cares so much about his family’s relationship to God that he feels the need to trick his brother in order to obtain the blessing and keep his brother from squandering it. In contrast, Esau cares so little about his family’s relationship to God that he just hands it away for food. 

One day Issac called upon Esau to give him a blessing.  He asks Esau to prepare a meal for him before giving Esau the blessing.  Esau goes out to hunt for food. Rebecca hears this and calls upon Jacob to put on Esau's clothes and use the skin of baby goats to mimic the feel of his brother's hands. Rebecca prepares Isaac’s favorite meal so that Jacob can give it to him. When the meal is ready Jacob takes it to his father, and convinces him that he is Esau. Isaac then gives Jacob a blessing that transfers Isaac’s authority and wealth to Jacob, the blessing that Esau was supposed to get as the oldest child. Esau then comes back, and Isaac realizes he has been deceived. Esau begs his father Isaac to help him. Isaac tells his son that there is nothing he can do. Esau is very angry at Jacob, and says that when Issac is dead, then he will kill Jacob. Rebekah hears this and tells Jacob to go stay with her brother Laban until Esau cools down. Before he leaves, Isaac tells Jacob to take a wife from amongst Laban’s daughters, and he blesses him a second time.The second blessing passes on the blessing that God gave to Abraham and that Isaac inherited from Abraham. It is at this point that the spiritual leadership of the family is transferred from Isaac to Jacob. This is where my Torah portion ends.

The main question I had when I read my Torah portion was: Why didn’t Issac take his blessing back from Jacob once he realized that Jacob deceived him?If my friend pretended to be someone else to get something from me, I would go take it back.  So I was wondering why Issac didn’t just take back the blessing. I did some research and found a few answers. The first answer I found was that the Torah distinguishes between 

• lies about descriptions   AND   lies about the future. 

In the Torah portion, Abraham, his wife Sarah, their son Issac, his wife Rebekah, and their son Jacob all tell descriptive lies to protect each other and their family. All of them have relatively good intentions when they tell these descriptive lies, but they are still lying. I actually appreciate that the Torah doesn’t pretend that everyone is honest all the time.  In real life everyone lies all the time -- to themselves and to others -- about small things and sometimes about big things. By telling the truth about how much lying there is in the world, the Torah is able to communicate when lying is NOT acceptable and when we should demand complete honesty from ourselves and others.This is what the second commandment of the 10 commandments is all about.  The second commandment is NOT that: ‘Thou shalt not lie’. The second commandment is that: ‘Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain’.  And in the Torah and even today in this service the God’s name is used when we are making promises, saying blessings, and making oaths.For Issac to have given Jacob a blessing in the God’s name and then to have taken it back would have been for him to have taken God’s name in vain.

And I can understand that if everyone around Issac had seen that he gave and then took back a blessing in God’s name, then a few bad things would have happened: people would have had less faith in Issac’s word AND  people would have had less faith in Issac’s belief in God AND That could have made people question their own faith in God. 

So it was important that Issac maintain the integrity of his word. Promises like the blessing that Issac gave to Jacob are facts that we create by speaking them. Once we speak them, if our word is good, then people treat them like facts. If our word is not good, then what we speak will have no power Our word only has power if we honor it -- and that’s what Issac   was doing when he wouldn’t take back his blessing. 

I’ve come to realize that every time I don’t honor my promises, oaths, and vows, my word is diminished.  When I do this, people stop believing my word. They stop believing that I believe in what I am saying. Even worse, I stop believing in my own words.  I realize how much my mom, my dad, and so many other people around me honor the words that they say to me as promises, and I realize how important it is that I do the same for them. And while it may seem that I am saying that it is ok for people to tell descriptive lies as long as they honor their word about the future, I’m not, and I’ll tell you why. 

The second answer I found in my Torah portion was that while the Torah distinguishes between taking the name of God in vain from smaller lies, it still goes out of its way to show that all lies create great consequences. Jacob gets away with deceiving his father into giving him a blessing, but what happens to him next is that he is deceived by his uncle Laban who tricks him into marrying his eldest daughter Leah instead of his youngest daughter Rachel.  This creates bad feelings between Leah and Rachel and all of their children. 

The way that the story is written in the Torah it seemed to me like God was saying that even though Jacob was able to get away with his descriptive lie, there were still consequences from that lie that he couldn’t escape. Lies lead to more lies and his lie comes back to get him, like bad karma.

The only way that Jacob eventually finds peace is to fix the situation with his brother Esau many years later. Perhaps he and his mother Rebekah would have saved themselves 20 years of bad consequences if they had just been straight with his father in the first place.  But then again, it might not have been as interesting a story.

In thinking about my Torah portion I realized how many descriptive lies I tell, and how much potential there is for each of these descriptive lies to turn into big problems for me. 

When I see people telling me lies, I know that I feel less urgency to be honest with them.  I imagine that they must feel the same way about me. … 

The third answer I found was that even with the best of intentions, we might be creating more problems with a lie. 

I read two interpretations of Jacob’s story by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. 

The first interpretation -- which was the way I was originally seeing it, was that Jacob and his mother Rebekah -- lied, but in doing so they kept Esau from inheriting the blessing from Abraham which the Torah makes clear that Esau wasn’t fit to inherit. 

The second interpretation sees it differently, as a blessing about power and wealth, and not anything else.  Only when Issac later knew he was blessing Jacob did he pass on the blessing from Abraham. 

In that interpretation, Rebekah and Jacob’s deceit of Isaac created unnecessary problems. 

Issac saw the same evidence they did, that Esau was unfit for the blessing from Abraham.  His intention was to split his blessing up in a manner that would give Esau the power and wealth that AND Jacob the spiritual blessing.The fourth answer I found was that choosing not to lie even when we wouldn’t get punished for the lie and when it would benefit us more to lie is a test of our faith in God. XXXX said that the reasons that people tell the truth are that: 

It is in their self-interest to tell the truth. OR They are worried about getting punished for lying. 

To tell the truth when it is not in your self-interest to tell the truth and when you wouldn’t be punished is actually an act of faith in something greater.  Or else what would motivate you to do it?The reason that I tell the truth is that I can put myself in the shoes of someone that I am lying to. When I do that I feel bad about lying. What I have learned from all of this is that When I make a promise, my friends and family  count on it as if it was a fact -- so it is important that I make sure it is a fact Every lie has consequences, and they can be 1000 times worse than just telling the truth