Toldot: Jacob the yeshivah bocher

This week’s portion, Toledot, describes “the line” or “the story” of Isaac—that is to say, the line of his descendants. In other words, the birth of Esau and Jacob.

Certain elements of the story are oddly familiar. Like Sarah, Rebekah is barren; we’ll learn that she is like Sarah in other ways as well. And the episode in Gerar at the beginning of chapter 26, in which Isaac passes Rebekah off as his sister, is an almost exact double of one involving Abraham and Sarah, which itself doubles one that takes place with them in Egypt. This version of the story has an interesting wrinkle: there is a famine in the land, but God tells Isaac, “Do not go down to Egypt” (26:2).

The themes of sibling rivalry and of unequal treatment of siblings that were implicit in the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael are more explicit here, because Esau and Jacob are sons of the same mother, in fact twins.

Jewish tradition has struggled with the fact that Jacob obtains Isaac’s paternal blessing through trickery. It expands on the paucity of information given in the text to argue that he was inherently more deserving, or at least preferable to have as the ancestor of our people.

For example, the ease with which he obtains the birthright from Esau in exchange for some lentil stew is often cited to characterize Esau as a person of base and uncontrollable appetites. The text itself suggests a connection between Esau’s ruddiness and the nation of Edom; the names of both Esau and Edom have been used as euphemisms for entire nations that oppressed the Jewish people, especially the Roman empire.

The characterization of Esau as undeserving to be a Jewish patriarch is not too different from the traditional response to another problem involving siblings, the question of why Abel’s sacrifice is preferred over Cain’s. Although modern readers may draw inferences from the differences in the sacrifices themselves, many traditional commentators argued simply that Abel was somehow better.

In the case of Esau and Jacob, much has been made of a single verse: “When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors, but Jacob was a mild man, who stayed in camp” (25:27). The JPS translation, although it probably succeeds in conveying the intended meaning, obscures the literal sense, on which a great deal of midrash has been built.

A more literal reading would be, “a mild man, dwelling in tents,” with tents in the plural. Because a single tent would be sufficient for sleeping, early commentators concluded that Jacob used a second tent as a place of study, a beit midrash, and thereby turned him into the paragon of a yeshivah bocher, even arguing, irrelevantly and without foundation, that Esau was illiterate.

The Biblical text wants us to join it in favoring Jacob over Esau. Furthermore, as teachers we naturally appreciate “mild” students who prefer to stay in the tent of study (the classroom) and are easy to teach. But we’re equally responsible for teaching the students who would rather be outdoors perfecting manual skills, as well as those not-so-mild students who may gravitate to study but who challenge our ideas.