Reclaiming Esav: Seeing People, Not Caricatures

5th Year Rabbinical Student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, David Baum's Senior Sermon. Delivered on November 22, 2008, at the Women's League Seminary Synagogue. The parashah that week was Toldot.

I welcome everyone here, family and friends who have come from near and far, and those watching at home (on videotape). In particular, I welcome our guests from Auburn Theological Seminary to our Synagogue. All of you have been my teachers, and it is an honor to repay you by serving as your teacher today.

A week ago, I led a Friday night service at the University of Florida and had an experience of connection.  Instead of sitting in a semi-circle or in pews, we sat in a circle.  I did not plan this out, it just happened to have been set up that way.   In this set up, I noticed some things for the first time.  I saw that everyone was equal, and everyone was forced to stare at each other.  I’ll be honest, it was awkward.  People tried not to look at each other, and afterward, one of the students came up to me and told me that the service was weird.  I asked him why he thought so, and he couldn’t explain it.  I told him that I think I knew why he felt this way:  looking someone in the eye is awkward, or weird as he put it, because there is something divine, there is something awesome in looking someone in the eye.  

Turn to the person next to you, and look them in the eye. Did you crack a smile? We smile because we are nervous and we are nervous because when we look at someone else in the eye, we are looking at a mirror, we see a part of ourselves in our fellow humans, and we also see a reflection of God.  

In this week’s Torah reading, Toledot, we meet twin brothers who famously do not get along.  Our teachers try to show us in almost counter intuitive ways that Yaakov is the hero and Esav is the villain. But how can Yaakov be the hero if he takes advantage of Esav’s hunger and buys the birthright?  A 19^th century biblical commentator, the Malbim, goes through this passage and textually proves that Yaakov did not sin because Esav did not want the birthright to begin with.  Not only that, but Esav desecrated the birthright, and he was happy when Yaakov took it from him.  In other words, Yaakov did not steal the birthright, he didn’t even fool Esav, he just took what was given to him without prodding.  This commentary has a solid textual basis, using vav’s and vowels to prove its point, but it is contradictory to the explicit meaning, the pshat, of the text. 

Later in the story in Genesis 33:4, when Esav and Yaakov see each other after Yaakov’s self-imposed exile, Esav puts his pain and anger aside and cries on his brother's shoulder.  This scene is beautiful and shows Esav's compassion and the true sense of the term, forgiveness is divine. But what do the Rabbis do?  In Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbi Yannai says that Esav tried to bite Yakov's neck when he reunites with him because there are dots over the word, “and he kissed him” in the Torah scroll.  I can list quotes from midrashim defaming Esav, saying he was guilty of rape, that he tore his mother’s uterus so she could not father the 12 tribes, the list goes on.  These interpretations may have textual basis, some of them better than others, but as we read the Torah from a pshat level, especially Genesis 33, can we say that the intention of the Torah was to make Esav the most evil man of his time and the father of future evil?

It is true that the Torah introduces Yaakov and Esav as the fathers of two nations. In Genesis 25:23, God tells Rebecca, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples will depart from your innards; and one nation shall grow stronger than the other nation, and the elder shall serve the younger." This is the beginning of Yaakov and Esav, two men who are destined to be the representatives of their peoples.  As we saw earlier, the Rabbis, the descendents of Yaakov who is later named Israel, paint Yaakov in a favorable light, the hero, and Esav as the villain. The Rabbis took this idea of these two figures being the representation of their people's to an extreme. Esav, the father of Edom, became the representation of Rome and Christianity.  

But in the Torah, Esav is a person first, and a father of a nation second. We know so much more about Esav from the Bible than we do about his uncle, Ishmael.  He was a man of the outdoors, who loved hunting, he loved his father deeply, and we know what he looked like: he was a hairy and red man.  Esav, speaks, he acts, and, most importantly, he changes.    After Esav finds out that Yaakov took his blessing, looks to himself to ask, why has this happened to me?  Esav marries Hittite women, which upsets his parents, but later on he tries to appease his father by marrying an Ishmaelite woman.  Perhaps he thought that his choice in marriage was why he did not receive the blessing?  Alas, it made no difference.  At the end of our Torah reading, Esav promises to kill Yaakov, but when they reconnect later in the story, he forgives Yaakov.

Esav is not simple, he is complex, he is a developed character.

The Torah itself is not interested in making these figures black and white, rather, we see Yaakov and Esav not as either hero or villain, but as complex characters that grow and develop within the story.

You may ask, where is the harm in making villains and caricatures?  Unfortunately, we have lived the consequences of being made villains and caricatures more than any other people.

I present to you a picture of a family. They look like normal people (but now brought to live action through AI).

This is my grandfather, Frank, and his brothers and sister, Bundy, Magda, and Emory taken in the spring of 1943, one week before this family was broken up and deported to concentration camps.

This is how we see them, but this is how their neighbors saw them: hook-nosed Jews who were inherently evil.

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, State of Deception lesson plan, Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This propaganda, which made Jews the villain by simplifying them and making them caricatures, was one of the ways that the Nazis were able to carry out the most systematic genocide in human history.  The crime of my family was that they were represented by this simple and dishonest caricature.  How did the people who broke up this family see them, which picture did they see?

We have to take the lessons of the Torah and our Rabbis to heart as we live in the modern world. I understand that our Rabbis saw Esav to be the ancestor of Rome and therefore made him a villain. There are many reasons why the Rabbis did this.  Our teacher, Gershon Cohen wrote that one of the reasons was to assert the Jewish people’s exclusive status as God’s chosen people, much as Christianity was doing at the same time, and Anti-Esav biblical commentaries may have emerged because of Christian persecution of Jews in Europe.  I do not look down upon these reasons; they were valid for the time.  

But we have entered into a different time, and a much different place.  As Jews living in America, we are turning into something that we are not used to:  normal.  We are a group living in a nation like many other groups, we live in this nation as equals. It is time for a shift in our thinking, to stop looking at other groups and other peoples in our country and around the world in a one-dimensional way.  

We have seen what happens when a people is looked at as a simplistic and dishonest caricature.  However, do we truly know the implication of looking at each person as a complex character?  

Perhaps we have to return to the Torah and start looking at other peoples not as hordes of good or evil doers, but as a group of complex personalities, much like our own Yaakov and Esav, in order to experience a new reality, different than even our recent past.  

The last mention of Esav is when he and Yaakov come together to bury their father in Genesis 35:29. They had reconciled their problems by that time and the issue of the birthright is behind them.  We can see this in the text because their names are put in their original order, “and he was buried by his sons Esav and Yaakov,” You see, Esav’s name comes first.  They came together out of love, realizing that they had a connection that could not be broken. It is time for us to look at all other peoples in the same way, as our brothers and sisters with whom we have a connection that cannot be severed. Our connection is strengthened by our complexities and the fact that we are all members of the human race.

At the end of parashat Toledot, Yaakov and Esav leave each other in a bitter way, but in parashat Va-Yishlach, they meet again.  When they meet, they have an interesting moment.  After years of distance, Yakov sees his brother Esav and tells him, “If you do me this favor, accept from me this gift; for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” In this pivotal moment, they left their fears behind to see the most basic thing that is in another human being:  Penei Elohim, the face of God.