Choosing Choiceless Choices — Toldot 5782
What does it mean to take advantage of someone? Are promises made or demanded in moments of hardship truly binding? We all face moments in our lives where we seem to have a choice—two roads diverge in the woods as Robert Frost might say. But are these moments really truly choices at all? Does our making a choice, like Frost alludes, make all the difference, or is our choice meaningless in the end? And what if there aren’t two roads, but only one, and the choice we’re facing isn’t one path or another, but whether to forge ahead or go back?
I think about this every time I update my phone. Every time I click agree on a terms and conditions statement I haven’t read. Every time I accept cookies on a website because there’s no, I choose not to accept your tracking every aspect of my life to more efficiently sell me products option. I click agree without reading because I recognize that unlike the idyllic world of Frost’s poetry, the choice I face is between moving forward, going backwards—which of course isn’t possible, or sitting down in the mud and crying.
Esau trades his birthright this week for a bowl of lentil stew—or alternatively Jacob takes advantage of his brother in a moment of need. Twice in the text Esau tells his brother he is famished. And what about after Esau sells his birthright, what does the text say? Let’s back up and hear it all in context.
Genesis 25:29
Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the open, famished.
And Esau said to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stuff to gulp down, for I am famished”—which is why he was named Edom.
Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”
And Esau said, “I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?”
But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob.
Jacob then gave Esau bread and lentil stew; he ate and drank, and he rose and went away. Thus did Esau spurn the birthright.
There was a famine in the land—aside from the previous famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham—and Isaac went to Abimelech, king of the Philistines, in Gerar.
It’s not just Esau’s hunger that makes this passage particularly problematic. His declaration that he was on the verge of death could honestly just be hyperbolic, two siblings engaged in some low key and perhaps even good natured sibling rivalry. Except the text makes clear in the very next line, juxtaposed his Esau selling his birthright, that there was famine in the land, and that it was a new famine, separate from the one which had plagued Abraham and Sarah a generation earlier.
Seen in a vacuum, it can be easy to dismiss Jacob’s cruelty as just good business sense, a kind of market savviness. But if you consider everything that happens between these brothers for the rest of their lives, and the even more dramatic scene of their funeral—it’s harder to forgive Jacob. If he’d been more compassionate to his brother, of he hadn’t taken advantage of the famine, even creating a scenario where he could maximize his advantage, well maybe he and Esau would never have feuded.
The rabbis go out of their way to excuse Jacob’s actions, and demonize Esau. They portray him as unworthy of the right and obligations due to a first-born, as wild and wicked. Ibn Ezra even points to Esau’s declaration that he’s near death as evidence that Esau’s wild and dangerous ways might lead him to predecease his father Isaac.
I’ll be honest. Isaac annoys me. He never really seems to play much of a role at all, at least not in his own. Sure his character serves as a foil for Abraham on Mt Moriah, reflecting back Abrahams loyalty to G-d, even at the cost of his son. Later, his deathbed serves as the scene of Jacob and Esau’s major split, the beginning of a feud that leads Jacob away from his father’s land, and towards his destiny of 12 sons who will foster a nation.
To me, this could be Isaac’s moment, a missed opportunity for him to have set the Jewish people on a course of equity, compassion, and trust. He could have stepped in and altered the conversation between his sons, explained to Jacob the Jewish values inherent in simple acts of loving kindness, like giving your hungry brother a bow of lentil stew when he comes home from hunting.
How different would our world could be today if Isaac had risen to his moment? I don’t honestly know, but I see in Jacobs actions, and hear in his words, the hints of morally unencumbered free market capitalism. You have something I want, even covet, and I have something you need, let’s make a trade. Sure maybe I set up my cook pot in front of your tent, and made sure to time it so that the aroma of fresh stew was irresistible to someone coming home tired and hungry in an already famished land. None of that matters.
You need stew. I have stew. Give me what you’d never give me in any other situation—like permission to track you across the internet for some free software—and I’ll give you stew, access to unlimited two-day shipping, and the choice of no choice at all.
We encounter these choiceless choices everyday, and for the most part we’re unable to stand up against them. What we can control are the choices we offer ourselves, and those around us. We can offer ourselves the choice to be kind, or not, to be empathetic to others, or not. We can choose to remember that we’re all trapped in a semi-hellish capitalist landscape, I mean that we’re all facing similar challenges navigating this digitally gilded age. Or we can choose to fight at each other, to lash out with the same tactics that trap all of us endlessly, to hold basic sustenance over people’s heads and squeeze, until we’ve juice humanity down to the pulp.
Let it be not so, and let us all find the way to choose another road, different than the one down which Jacob drags the Jewish people in this week’s Torah portion.
Shabbat Shalom.
