Overcoming Vengeance: Esau and the Maccabees

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our Friday service on December 13th. Rabbi Lizzi recounted the ancient tale of the rivalry between Jacob and Esau in light of the Festival of Lights. Just as Jacob learned from his youthful mistakes and Esau put aside vengeance, the rabbis learned from the mistakes of the Maccabees, and their rather loose retelling of the Hanukkah story continues to this day to urge us to rethink what was and what can be.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Every week when rabbis set up to write sermons for Shabbat there’s always a lot that feeds in– first and foremost, the Torah portion (this week– Vayishlach, the week that Jacob goes to meet his estranged brother Esau, and on the way wrestles and angel and gets a new name). Secondly, you ask if there are any holidays coming up to think about (Hanukkah, coming up in just under 2 weeks), and thirdly, you look at what’s going on in the world, or maybe in your own life, and what feels live and in need of exploration. Sometimes it’s really hard to figure out the throughline that connects these somewhat arbitrarily-linked realms…but this week there’s an alignment between the stories that feels almost divinely ordained, as if to send us a message. The question is what’s the message. 

So this week we open up the Torah and find our protagonist Jacob, Ya’akov, preparing to meet up with Esau, after decades of estrangement. We haven’t talked much about this so I want to rewind a little and give some back story. Also for anyone in the room who’s not super familiar with Judaism or with Torah, now is a good time to tell you that the characters in these stories are not angels. Well, except for the angel, who is an actual angel. But most of the characters are just people– flawed, deeply flawed people, who teach us about how to live as much by their mistakes as by their examples. Jacob perhaps the most. So who is this guy? 

Jacob is the younger of two fraternal twins born to Rebecca and Isaac– his older brother, older because he came out of the womb first, is born with hair all over his body, and they call him Esav, in English, Esau. Jacob comes out reaching, grasping, at Esau’s heel, so he is named Ya’akov, which means heel grabber. And he spends his whole childhood in Esau’s shadow, while Esau is outside fighting and hunting, Jacob is simple, stays inside, cooks, shepherds, and does whatever one does in tents in 2,000 BCE,. It’s interesting– in that the Torah is a mythology of our people and of humanity, Esau represents the hunter/gatherer, more short-term, physical approach to survival, and Jacob represents the development of agriculture, cooking, planning, having a longer time horizon for what survival is about.  

We see this in a few examples– when the kids are still teenagers, we see Esau come home famished from a day of hunting, and Yaakov is in the kitchen cooking lentil stew. When Esau says, hey can I have some soup, I’m so hungry– Jacob takes advantage of his brother’s fatigue and says I’ll give you some soup if you give me your firstborn birthright. And Esau takes the deal. The dangers of giving into immediate gratification. And indeed, Esau lives to regret this hasty decision.

Later in the story, decades later, Isaac is on his death bed and all he wants is some meat hunted by his son Esau. He sends Esau out to go hunt for him, and Rebecca (Isaac’s wife, Esau and Jacob’s mother) sidles up to Jacob and says “your brother is out– quick, go in there to your blind sick father, Isaac, pretend to be Esau and get his blessing.”

Jacob protests– mom, he’s hairy, I’m not, our voices are different, dad won’t believe it! But Rebecca gets in there, gets some of Esau’s hairy clothes, grabs an animal from the herd outside, cooks it, and Jacob goes in there with the meal and lies straight to his father’s face, telling him yes it’s really me, Esau, yes this is the food you asked for… and Isaac is clearly confused, but ultimately gives Yaakov the blessing, thinking he’s Esau. 

And no sooner does this happen then Esau comes home with the meat his dad asked for, excited to get his blessing, and Isaac shakes with violent trembling upon realizing what happened, but it’s been done. He can’t take back his blessing. Esau is devastated, distraught, understandably. Isaac is mortified, feels betrayed by his own son. Esau turns from sadness to plotting his revenge, and vows to kill his brother Jacob. Rebecca, understanding he’s serious, pushes Jacob out the door and sends him to her brother Lavan, both for safety and so that at least hopefully Jacob will one day marry someone in the family, even as this family has now been ripped apart. 

I wonder, for Rebecca in particular… Was it worth it? Through trying to engineer the unfolding of history by controlling and lying to the people around you– through teaching her favored son that the way you get ahead in this world is by tricking, even the people you love most, and then running away… This is how Jacob, our ancestor, learns that the world works. It’s this person, Yaakov, whose life was shaped by lies– his mother’s, his own, later on, his uncle’s lies, as Lavan tricks Jacob into marrying the wrong woman and becoming basically an indentured servant in order to marry the one he loves… Nonetheless, Jacob builds a big family– 4 wives, 12 kids, herds, flocks, wealth… and he has done it in a crucible of suspicion, control and deceit, whether his own toward other people, or other people’s towards him. This, he understands, is how the world works if you want to survive and succeed.

Take a minute and think about how you tend to walk through the world: are you fundamentally trusting of people? Suspicious? Do you assume people are fundamentally generous or selfish? I think about the line from that Taylor Swift song off Reputation, “This is how the world works, you gotta leave before you get left.” Fascinating! I never believed that’s how the world works. How did you come to form your basic beliefs about what to expect in the world– from your own family members, from school or work, the government, health insurance companies, people on the street. Were you were taught that people tend to be reasonable, if you can just figure out what’s motivating them… or that people are always out to get you, to put one over on you so you’d better be constantly vigilant and protective, controlling of every possible thing… Are people fundamentally good, and it’s just environments and systems that prompt them to make bad choices out of desperation, or perhaps that people are fundamentally selfish and need safeguards against our evil instincts… I tend to be the kind of person who leaves my keys in my car with the car running when I run inside to grab my Starbucks order, and fully expects my car to be there when I return. That’s me… that’s not Jacob.

And I give all this background here because fast forward to what we see in this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, Jacob is now decades out from that painful incident with Esau, they’ve both grown wealthy and have big families, and they’re going to meet up. Jacob hears Esau is coming with four hundred men and he knows what that means– Esau held a grudge this whole time and is now out for blood. So he splits up his family, his flocks, his servants, and sends a nice message and gifts ahead to Esau,  in the hopes of winning Esau’s favor with material wealth, but he’s scared. And what happens when they come in view of each other, each with their army of men behind them…? 

But the darndest thing happens– as they approach each other, each with their hundreds of back up men behind them– they embrace. Esau weeps on his brother’s neck. They kiss. Esau says to him, “Who are these people?” and Jacob says, “the family God has blessed me with,” and one by one they all come out of their hiding places and bow low. Esau says, “Why did you bring all these men with you?” Jacob’s like, to offer to you! So that you wouldn’t kill me!

But Esau says– I have enough! More than enough! Keep what you have. And Jacob insists– seeing your face is like seeing the face of God. And you’ve treated me well. Please take what I’m offering you! And Esau accepts. And then they have another argument as they leave where it’s like you go first, no no you go first! Okay we’ll go first but take some of my men, you’ll need help on the way. These brothers, despite a lifetime of Jacob being trained in the practice of suspicion and art of deception, and despite Esau’s very real animus toward Jacob and desire for revenge– these brothers manage to overcome their suspicion, anger and their fear to have a moment of authentic, vulnerable encounter with the other, that changes everything. I just want to underscore this: these men were mortal enemies– they were not being naive when they approached each other, they each had their army… but they also allowed themselves to open to the possibility that the story could change. That they could reconcile and that their future could be different than the past.

Jacob and Esau cry together, they meet each other’s wives and kids. Jacob experiences this as he says, as seeing the face of God, which is to say, having a revelation. And I think that revelation is that cunning, suspicion and assuming the worst of people for your own protection, may have gotten him this far but it’s not the way he wants to operate in this world anymore. Or, to quote a different Taylor Swift lyric, “Never be so kind you forget to be clever… but never be so clever you forget to be kind.” And meeting Esau has shown him this. Esau changed from the vengeful brother, to a generous and forgiving brother. Perhaps, Jacob thinks, I can change too. 

The rest of the parasha and indeed the rest of the book of Genesis paints the picture of Jacob, a father who is older, wiser, learning to navigate the world with integrity, honesty and moderation while his children– who learned from their father “how the world works” of course, how to lie, trick and bully– create messes all around themselves and him which we see in story after story, as he gets more and more frustrated and hurt. We’ll get to more of  that week… 

I want to invite you to take a minute to reflect on something that you used to think was true, was “how the world works,” that you now understand differently, based on your life experience. Based on something happening that actually changed the way you understand the world. Take a second. (Introduce yourself to a neighbor, and share the gift of your hard-won wisdom.)

4-min of sharing. Come back share a few out. 

Gorgeous. So powerful. It’s really this incredible reminder that we can stretch and grow really until our last breath, we can have our minds changed, our hearts opened. We can evolve. 

So Hanukkah is coming up in just under two weeks. If you ask any kid what is the miracle we celebrate they’ll say, well, after the Macabees won the war (chances are they won’t know against whom, or even, necessarily, where) they needed to rededicate the Temple which had been defiled and desecrated. They looked among the ruins and found one little cruise of oil, which was only enough to last a night, but instead it lasted 8 nights. So to this day we light up one more candle each night for 8 nights. Beautiful. 

Fiction! Utter fiction! Probably.  Don’t tell the kids. In actuality, the original miracle of the Hanukkah story was the fact that against the backdrop of oppression and persecution of Jews in Israel by the Syrian Greek ruling government, led by King Antiochus, the Macabeean army,  this rag tag band of guerilla fighters, relentlessly fought the much stronger, bigger, more fortified Seleucid army and after a few years, won, and re-established Jewish rule. That was the original miracle, celebrating the unlikely military victory and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty once again in the land of Israel. You can understand why the early state of Israel embraced the Hanukkah story.

The only problem was that the Macabees might have been great warriors, but not such great statesmen. They could organize to fight against something… but once they were in power they were only “for” themselves. They were just as corrupt, violent, despotic and cruel as their predecessors had been, this time, to their own people. It went from bad to worse and within about 100 years this “miracle” crumbled, and the Roman army defeated and exiled the Jews from the land. What do you do with an 8 day holiday celebrating a military victory once the military has been defeated? You keep the inspiration, keep the light… but change the story.

And so, hundreds of years later, when the rabbis of the Talmud wrote the story of Hanukkah, they offered the story of the miracle of the oil. Maybe it’s fiction, maybe it’s not, but it is the truth: as we light up lights in darkness we remind ourselves that as reality changes, we can change reality, too. When we realize that the story we’ve been telling about ourselves, our family, our country, Israel, might have gotten us this far, but is no longer working, we can adapt, change those stories and change the future. We have to. Jacob did it, Esau did it. The rabbis who wrote our tradition did it, and as a result we have a more hopeful, resilient tradition that values peace as the ultimate achievement embraces honesty and vulnerability as paths to healing.  We too, can choose to shed old lenses and stories that no longer serve us, that are no longer true, or are no longer true in every situation. Each one of you has done this. We can move from suspicion to authenticity. We can move from fear to faith and maybe even trust, from isolation to partnership and allyship. We can move from being the victim to exerting our agency and reclaiming our power.

And I think Jacobs and Esau’s lesson, and the lesson of Hanukkah– is that perhaps that power is not so much might or control, as it is the power to grow, evolve, adapt and recreate ourselves in light of reality in front of us, to believe that it’s possible. The poet Nikki Giovanni said, “And as I have grown older, I refuse to let who I was at 25 inform or make me be who somebody else thinks I should be at 72.” Let this sense of our own light and our own power and growth light the way toward a more hopeful future for yourself, for all of us. May it be so– for all of us.