Family…It’s Complicated

This year, of course, has reminded me of the importance of family, especially as we approach a season that, at least in the United States, people associate with family. Whether it's the family you were born into, the family you chose, or even the family that chose you, family is an inescapable reality in life. Still, family can be incredibly complicated, as the Torah reminds in this week's portion—Toldot. This week's portion begins with a joyous event, the birth of two sons—Esau and Jacob. But by the end of the parsha, that same family is broken and scattered, mourning the death of their patriarch Isaac while nursing long held wounds in isolation from each other.

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Family is complicated, difficult, and inescapable. We’re all connected to other people in this world. Whether those connections are frayed and broken, or hard and fast, we all have family of some type—the family we were born to, the family we chose, even the family that chose us.

This year has reminded me of the importance of family. At the start of 2020, I took a random trip to visit my parents in Tennessee, expecting to be back just a few months later for a Passover Seder, but like most other Jewish families around the world, our 2020 Seder was held over Zoom. And as awesome as it was to spend Passover with family I normally don’t see during the holiday, the lack of physical proximity definitely changed the experience.

Next week, I’m headed to the Massachusetts Berkshires, to spend a long Thanksgiving with my in-laws, the family I chose, in an attempt to salvage some semblance of our normal Thanksgiving rituals. This year there will be no parade to watch, and I stopped watching football years ago and won’t again until Colin Kaepernick, the first quarterback to take the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl since Steve Young, gets a job as a starting quarterback in the league, without being force to compromise his stance on social and racial justice.

A week after that, my wife and I will travel to Tennessee, after being tested for COVID, to spend two weeks with my parents. The plan is to finally start recording on a long dreamt of project, and the reason this podcast you’re listening to right now exists in the first place. It’s a podcast called 72 Miles, and tells the story of our interfaith Jewish family’s life in southern Kentucky.

This week, the Torah offers us stories of Isaac and Rebekah, and their sons Jacob and Esau who are locked in a constant battle for dominance over each other and their father’s blessing, from the moment they were born into this world.

Esau was the physically powerful eldest child, while Jacob was the frailer but craftier younger brother, who with his mother’s encouragement, steals Esau’s birthright.

But Esau and Jacob’s relationship isn’t the only problematic family relationship we find this week. Standing at his father’s deathbed, long after his younger brother had tricked him our of his birthright, and just after his own mother helped that same younger brother supplant him to receive Isaac’s blessing, Esau pleads with his father.

Genesis 27:30

No sooner had Jacob left the presence of his father Isaac—after Isaac had finished blessing Jacob—than his brother Esau came back from his hunt.

He too prepared a dish and brought it to his father. And he said to his father, “Let my father sit up and eat of his son’s game, so that you may give me your innermost blessing.”

His father Isaac said to him, “Who are you?” And he said, “I am your son, Esau, your first-born!”

Isaac was seized with very violent trembling. “Who was it then,” he demanded, “that hunted game and brought it to me? Moreover, I ate of it before you came, and I blessed him; now he must remain blessed!”

When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst into wild and bitter sobbing, and said to his father, “Bless me too, Father!”

But he answered, “Your brother came with guile and took away your blessing.”

[Esau] said, “Was he, then, named Jacob that he might supplant me these two times? First he took away my birthright and now he has taken away my blessing!” And he added, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?”

Isaac answered, saying to Esau, “But I have made him master over you: I have given him all his brothers for servants, and sustained him with grain and wine. What, then, can I still do for you, my son?”

And Esau said to his father, “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” And Esau wept aloud.

And his father Isaac answered, saying to him, “See, your abode shall enjoy the fat of the earth And the dew of heaven above.

Yet by your sword you shall live, And you shall serve your brother; But when you grow restive, You shall break his yoke from your neck.”

Now Esau harbored a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing which his father had given him, and Esau said to himself, “Let but the mourning period of my father come, and I will kill my brother Jacob.”

Esau and Jacob’s relationship only deteriorates from here, as Jacob flees to his Uncle Laban in Paddan-aram, and Esau, incenses with his entire family, actively flies in the face of his father’s wishes, and takes a Canaanite women to wife, Mahalath, the daughter of Ishmael, son of Abraham.

And that’s where our Torah portion this week ends, after taking us on the long, emotional journey of our forebears from a strong and cohesive family welcoming the birth of two newborns to a broken and scattered family mourning the loss of their patriarch in isolation from each other.

We can take solace, though, from the fact that we know how this story ends. Two weeks from now, after experiencing his own family drama in the house of Laban, Jacob returns with his wives Leah and Rachel, to the land of his birth, and sends envoys to make peace with Esau, a decision that Jacob literally wrestles with, before presenting himself to Esau who embraces his brother Jacob as the two weep together.

It’s hard to imagine a gulf wider than Jacob and Esau’s and we know from the midrashic tradition that however deep their embrace was, those scars remained, and were adopted by their children, and after Esau and Jacob died, on the same day, the feud continued into future generations.

Before Jacob died he made his son Joseph promise to return his body to Canaan, so that Jacob might be buried alongside his wife Leah, his father Isaac, and his grandfather Abraham in the burial space that Esau had sold Jacob in their youth. Esau, however, felt the last space in the cave was his own, by right, as Jacob had already buried Leah in the Cave, using the space he had purchased from Esau.

A struggle ensued, and one of Jacob’s grandchildren—Chushim, son of Dan—drew his sword in a fit of misunderstanding, and slew Esau.

Thousands of years later the saga providing us with an example of how pervasive and steadfastly destructive impact our actions can have on our family relationships, even family members that have yet to be born, and extended members of the tribe, like you and me.

Targum Jonathan, Genesis 50:13

“When Jacob’s sons had brought him into the land of Canaan, and the news was heard by Esau the Wicked, he journeyed from the mountain of Gebala with many legions, and came to Hebron, and would not suffer Joseph to bury his father Jacob in the Cave.

Then Naphtali and ran, and went down to Egypt, brought the Deed that Esau had written for Jacob his brother in the controversy of the Cave. And immediately he beckoned to Chushim the son of Dan, who unsheathed the sword and struck off the head of the Wicked Esau, and the head of Esau rolled into the midst of the cave, and rested upon the bosom of Izhak his father; and the sons of Esau buried his body in the double field, and afterward the sons of Jakob buried him in the cave of the double field; in the field which Abraham bought for an inheritance and burial ground, from Ephron the Hittite.”

Family, as I said, is complicated, and the stakes are high. It’s hard to fully escape family for the entirety of your life, at some point you’re going to have to face your parents, your siblings, your aunts, uncles, and cousins, even if it’s after they’ve died. And as the Torah teaches us, that death won’t mean the end of your complicated relationships, if anything it makes it worse.

This is not to say that everyone should run out and embrace their parents and siblings. There are people in this world who have every right to never speak to their parents or siblings again, and in some particular cases that’s totally fine. Still, for most of us, the gap can be bridged, just as Jacob and Esau will, even temporarily, in a couple weeks.

One thing is for sure, thousands of years later we still refer to Esau as a wicked person, aligned with Satan, and anti-thetical to Jewish values, and I have to wonder how Jacob would have felt about the way we treat his brother, and how his actions as a young man have affected the course of human history.

Shabbat shalom

¹Please note, this is not a true transcript. I usually make editorial changes during the recording process to my written d’var. Sometimes I remember to update the file later, but there are often small discrepancies between the two.