From Bribe to Blessing

Israel's Message to the Nations of the World: You can do it, too

Please accept my blessing which has been brought to you, for God has favored me and I have everything.” And when he urged him, he accepted. קַח־נָא אֶת־בִּרְכָתִי אֲשֶׁר הֻבָאת לָךְ כִּי־חַנַּנִי אֱלֹהִים וְכִי יֶשׁ־לִי־כֹל וַיִּפְצַר־בּוֹ וַיִּקָּח׃ (Genesis 33:11)

When we have acquired a true knowledge of God, and rejoice in that knowledge in such a manner, that whilst speaking with others, or attending to our bodily wants, our mind is all that time with God; when we are with our heart constantly near God, even whilst our body is in the society of men; when we are in that state which the Song on the relation between God and man poetically describes in the following words: “I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh” (Song 5:2):—then we have attained not only the height of ordinary prophets, but of Moses, our Teacher, of whom Scripture relates: “And Moses alone shall come near before the Lord” (ibid. 34:28); “But as for thee, stand thou here by me” (Deut. 5:28). The meaning of these verses has been explained by us. The Patriarchs likewise attained this degree of perfection; they approached God in such a manner that with them the name of God became known in the world. Thus we read in Scripture: “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. . . . This is My name for ever” (Exod. 3:15). Their mind was so identified with the knowledge of God, that He made a lasting covenant with each of them: “Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob,” etc. (Lev. 26:42). For it is known from statements made in Scripture that these four, viz., the Patriarchs and Moses, had their minds exclusively filled with the name of God, that is, with His knowledge and love; and that in the same measure was Divine Providence attached to them and their descendants. When we therefore find them also, engaged in ruling others, in increasing their property, and endeavouring to obtain possession of wealth and honour, we see in this fact a proof that when they were occupied in these things, only their bodily limbs were at work, whilst their heart and mind never moved away from the name of God. I think these four reached that high degree of perfection in their relation to God, and enjoyed the continual presence of Divine Providence, even in their endeavours to increase their property, feeding the flock, toiling in the field, or managing the house, only because in all these things their end and aim was to approach God as much as possible. It was the chief aim of their whole life to create a people that should know and worship God. (Maimonides, Guide III:51)

Twenty years have passed since Jacob fled Esav’s vengeful rage. Now, as he returns to Canaan with wives, children, and vast flocks, word reaches him that Esav approaches with four hundred men. The night before their reunion, Jacob divides his camp, prays, and sends ahead an extraordinary gift—over five hundred animals, carefully arranged in waves. Four times in Genesis 32, the Torah calls Jacob’s gift offering a mincha (מִנְחָה). This word, which we know as the name for the afternoon prayer service, itself a derivative of a Temple sacrifice, also has connotations of political tribute and appeasement. Cain brings a mincha to God (Genesis 4), Joseph’s brothers bring a mincha to Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 43:11). The conquered Moabites bring a mincha to King David (2 Samuel 8:2). Ehud brings a mincha to Eglon, king of Moab (Judges 3:15). In short, Jacob’s secular mincha reflects the power dynamics of a subordinate seeking to ingratiate himself to a more powerful political foe; but it also contains overtones of religious trepidation, the vulnerability of a devotee before God.

Yet after the Torah emphatically repeats that Jacob’s gift is a mincha, by the time we reach chapter 33, Yaakov urges Esav to accept what he now calls his blessing. “Please accept my bracha (בְּרָכָה)—my blessing—that is brought to you, because God has dealt graciously with me, and because I have everything” (Genesis 33:11).

From mincha to bracha. From tribute to blessing. What accounts for this transformation in language and attitude?

The word bracha reverberates through the brothers’ entire history. It was the bracha that Isaac intended for Esau—the blessing of “heaven’s dew and earth’s richness, an abundance of grain and new wine” (Genesis 27:28). It was this bracha that Jacob stole through deception, wearing his brother’s clothes and his brother’s skin, receiving words meant for another. When Jacob now offers Esau his bracha, multiple readings emerge from the tradition, each revealing a different facet of this complex moment.

The Midrash Tanchuma (Vayishlach 6) notes that Jacob employs a three-pronged strategy against Esav: prayer, division of his camp, and the gift. Malbim emphasizes that Jacob repeatedly calls Esau “my lord” and himself “your servant”—the language of subordination. The mincha is tribute paid by an inferior to a superior, a calculated bribe to save his life. In this reading, calling the gift a bracha is Jacob’s final tactical move—elevating his payment with theological language, making the transaction more palatable. After all, Jacob will immediately lie to Esau about his travel plans, promising to follow him to Seir but instead turning to Sukkot (Genesis 33:14-17). The supplanter has not entirely disappeared.

Rashi notes a peculiarity in Jacob’s original statement about the gift: “I may appease him (akhap’rah panav, אֲכַפְּרָה פָנָיו) with the present that goes ahead of me” (Genesis 32:21). The verb here—k-p-r—is the root of kippur, atonement. For Rashi, the apparent atonement is functional; it’s not about Jacob’s remorse so much as it is about wiping away Esav’s anger, a kind of bribe.

Ramban takes Rashi in a different direction, arguing that Jacob is not merely bribing Esav but performing an act of real restitution—a ransom for the wrong he committed against his brother. This moment marks Jacob’s pivot from focusing solely on material appeasement or atonement to embracing a higher theological conviction. Jacob has ceased viewing his wealth as an instrument for bribery, and instead sees it as the visible evidence of his secure relationship with God.

But then comes Jacob’s extraordinary phrase: “I have everything” (yesh-li kol, יֶשׁ־לִי כֹל). Note the contrast with Esau’s earlier response: “I have enough” (yesh-li rav, יֶשׁ־לִי רָב, Genesis 33:9). Esau has rav—much, plenty, sufficiency. Jacob has kol—all, everything, totality. This is not mere material accounting. Jacob is making a theological claim. His abundance flows from a limitless source—”God has dealt graciously with me” (chanani Elohim, חַנַּנִי אֱלֹהִים). Because his security comes from the divine wellspring, he can give freely. The blessing is not a finite resource to be hoarded but an overflowing spring to be shared. In calling his gift a bracha, he may be saying: there is enough for both of us. I am the conduit of the blessing, but I am here to share it, not to make it about myself,.

But there is another way to read this moment, one that illuminates not just this reunion but the entire nature of divine blessing. Aristotle distinguishes between dynamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality)—the acorn contains the oak potentially, but requires soil, water, time, and growth to become what it already is in seed form. In Jewish thought, bracha operates similarly: it is not an outright, guaranteed gift of wealth, but a divine endowment of potentiality—a capacity for increase that still requires human actualization. The linguistic root of bracha supports this. Connected to bereichah (בְּרֵכָה), a pool or wellspring, a blessing is not a static treasure but a flowing source. It requires a receptacle, something to flow into and through. God’s bracha is the opening of channels, the removal of obstacles, the guarantee that diligent effort will succeed. But without the effort, without the vessel, the blessing remains pure dynamis—potential un-manifested. In fact, the blessing comes to demonstrate our capacity to make more with less, and to show Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations that more is not always more. Power without blessing will die out.

Today, the blessing has proven self-fulfilling. The children of Hittites, Hivites, Amorites, Jebusites, Philistines, Canaanites, etc. do not identify as such. Only rarified scholars study their Scriptures. The civilizations that worshipped bare power alone have died out, along with the names of their once high status deities. Those who sought to live life without blessing have failed to transmit their cultures. But the inheritors of blessing have been compounding its fruits for thousands of years, not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the world.

When God places Adam in Eden, it is “l’ovdah ul’shomrah“—to work it and to keep it (Genesis 2:15). Paradise required tending before the so-called Fall. Labor and blessing were never opposed; the garden needed cultivation from the very beginning. Divine gift and human work were always meant to meet.

Notice, too, that it was Isaac—the very father who blessed Jacob—whose own blessing manifested in precisely this pattern. “Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. The LORD blessed him” (Genesis 26:12). The sowing was required. Isaac did not sit idle and watch grain materialize; he worked the land, and the blessing multiplied his effort beyond natural expectation. Perhaps this reveals the nature of Isaac’s blessing all along: not a magical conferral of automatic wealth, but a potentiality that required cultivation. Isaac’s own life modeled what Jacob would spend twenty years learning.

The pattern stretches back further still. When God first calls Abraham, the blessing contains a crucial grammatical ambiguity: “v’heyeh bracha“—”and be a blessing” or “and you shall become a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). Abraham does not simply receive blessing as a passive beneficiary; he must become one. His presence in the world, lifts up others. His blessing is vocational, not possessive. It demands something of its recipient. This anticipates Jacob’s transformation: to have the blessing fully, you must give it. To possess it, you must become capable of bestowing it on others.

Read in this light, Jacob’s twenty years with Laban were not a detour from the blessing but its very actualization. When he worked those years—enduring heat, cold, sleepless nights watching the flocks (Genesis 31:40)—he was not simply earning wages despite having received a blessing. He was transforming dynamis into energeia, bringing the seed to fruition.

The divine promise provided the potential; Jacob’s labor provided the vessel for that potential to manifest in the world. This is what Jacob means by kol. He has “everything” not because wealth magically appeared but because he coupled divine favor with decades of backbreaking work. His kol is a sense of earned fulfillment—the complete actualization of blessed potential. It is an existential security. And it is why the Jewish people, following the teaching of our ancestors, have thrived even under difficult conditions of persecution. It is the optimism of those who know that, over time, balanced, honest, cultures endure while anarchic and totalitarian ones cultures implode.

Maimonides, in the Guide of the Perplexed, offers a framework that deepens this reading. He argues that divine providence is not distributed uniformly but proportionally—the more one actualizes the divine image through wisdom and moral refinement, the more one falls under providential care. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses found a way to bring God-consciousness to every detail of their mundane lives, and thus brought great blessing into the world, commensurate with their way of being.

Providence, for Maimonides, is not magic but relationship: the person who cultivates their intellect and character becomes progressively more capable of receiving divine overflow. We are talking about masters of virtue. Jacob’s journey from Canaan to Haran and back is precisely such a process of qualification. The young man who grasped at blessing through deception was not yet capable of truly holding it. The Israel who limps away from Peniel, transformed by encounter with God and decades of faithful labor, has become a vessel adequate to the blessing he carries—and therefore capable of giving it away, of lifting others up.

Jacob’s own son would later embody this same truth. When Yosef served in Potiphar’s house, the Torah is explicit: “The LORD was with Joseph, and he became a successful man... his master saw that the LORD was with him and that the LORD caused all that he did to succeed in his hands... the LORD blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; the blessing of the LORD was on all that he had, in house and field” (Genesis 39:2-5). Here, the bracha is not hoarded but transmitted, multiplied by passing through faithful labor. Of course, it is a sad, if familiar, irony that only a generation later, the Egyptians will come to resent (or deny) the Israelites’ blessing.

When Jacob gives Esau this enormous gift and calls it his bracha, he invites Esav to see that blessing comes from working the land with divine favor, not from a magical incantation spoken over a bowl of stew. At Peniel, wrestling through the night, receiving the name Israel and the explicit divine blessing (Genesis 32:29), Jacob gains something more important than confirmation of his election: he gains certainty that his source is secure. The birthright cannot be taken back. The covenant cannot be revoked. And in Maimonidean terms, he has become adequate to the providence he sought—refined enough, through struggle and labor, to receive what was always potentially his.

This security liberates him. He can give away vast wealth because he knows it’s not the wealth itself that matters; it’s his connection to the source of potential increase. He can call his gift a bracha without fear because he understands that the true blessing is not the physical abundance but the divine relationship that generated it.

This understanding of bracha finds its clearest formulation in Deuteronomy: “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18). The verse holds both truths simultaneously: God gives the power (the dynamis), but the person must actively get the wealth (actualize it into energeia). The blessing needs us as much as we need the blessing. It requires our hands, our choices, our persistent showing up in the heat and the cold. Without human partnership, divine potential remains just that—potential..

Earlier in his life, Jacob grasped at blessing as if it were a physical object that could be seized and held. He dressed in Esau’s clothes, deceived his father, and fled with his prize. But blessing doesn’t work that way. By the time Jacob returns to Canaan, he has learned this. The twenty years with Laban, the wrestling match at Peniel, the terrifying vigil before meeting Esau, has taught him that the blessing he sought was not a thing but a relationship, not a treasure but a task.

When Yaakov gives Esav the mincha and calls it his bracha, he teaches that blessing cannot be depleted by sharing because it flows from an inexhaustible source. Blessing is not a scarce prize in a zero-sum game. But potential requiring partnership, the divine call meeting the human response.

“I have everything,” Jacob says, giving away a fortune. And he does. Because he knows where everything comes from, and what it takes to bring it into being.

Jacob’s transformation into Yisrael teaches us what it means to be a chosen people. We are to be a people charged with modeling the reality and actualization of blessing in the world. We are here to say, you and your children, and their descendants can choose to have a blessed life. You must work at it; it will be hard and trying. But once you stop measuring yourself against the false metrics of success held up by Egypt and Babylon, you will indeed know that you have everything.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Etz Hasadeh