Two Households, Both Alike in Tears
The Sufferings of Love in the Lives of Esav and Jacob
And Esau said to his father, “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” And Esau lifted up his voice and wept.
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר עֵשָׂ֜ו אֶל־אָבִ֗יו הַֽבְרָכָ֨ה אַחַ֤ת הִֽוא־לְךָ֙ אָבִ֔י בָּרְכֵ֥נִי גַם־אָ֖נִי אָבִ֑י וַיִּשָּׂ֥א עֵשָׂ֛ו קֹל֖וֹ וַיֵּֽבְךְּ׃
(Genesis 27:38)
Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept.
וַיִּשַּׁ֥ק יַעֲקֹ֖ב לְרָחֵ֑ל וַיִּשָּׂ֥א אֶת־קֹל֖וֹ וַיֵּֽבְךְּ
(Genesis 29:11)
And it came to pass, when David had made an end of speaking these words unto Saul, that Saul said: ‘Is this thy voice, my son David?’ And Saul lifted up his voice, and wept.
וַיִּשָּׂ֥א שָׁא֛וּל קֹל֖וֹ וַיֵּֽבְךְּ
(1 Samuel 24)
When Abraham’s wife, Sarah, dies, he weeps for her (v’livchota) (Genesis 23:2). But most of the crying in the Book of Genesis is of a different register than mourning. Hagar cries out in the wilderness in exasperation and desperation. Esav cries out when he discovers he’s been deceived out of his blessing by Jacob. Jacob cries when he meets his soon-to-be-wife Rachel. And Joseph cries (and fights back tears) while struggling to conceal himself from and reveal himself to his long lost and formerly traitorous brothers. Crying is relatively uncommon in the Torah, such that when it happens it is poignant. Last week, we read of Esav’s tears in parashat Toldot, and this week in parashat Vayeitzei, we are greeted with Jacob’s. Both twins cry and the text describes their tears in parallel, using the same words and grammatical construction. They don’t just cry—they lift up their voices and cry. Idiomatic translations might parse this as “X wept bitterly” or “X wept immensely” or “X wept uncontrollably.”
Esav and Jacob are the only two figures in the Five Books of Moses who lift up their voices and weep (vayisa et kolo vayevch). We also find this same construction a handful of times in the Book of Judges and Samuel. Saul’s tears as he recognizes the superiority of David and his own downfall suggest a literary and moral parallel between the Saul-David rivalry and the Esav-Jacob one, as though the two kings were like twins, too close for comfort. But for today, we won’t focus on the Tanakh as a whole, just on Jacob and Esav. What does the Torah want us to think about the parallel tears of the two brothers? My hypothesis is that it seeks to tell us something about love. Esav is loved conditionally and suffers as a result. Jacob is loved unconditionally and so is able to overcome a life of hardship.
Isaac loved Esau because he had game in his mouth. But Rebekah loved Jacob. (Genesis 25:28)
The Torah tells us explicitly that Isaac’s love is conditional. And what is this condition on which he bases his love? Tzayid. Game. Hunting. Isaac loves Esav for his capacity to hunt. This motif follows Esav throughout his life.
“When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter (ish yodeah tzayid), a man of the field (ish sadeh)…” (25:27)
When Esav returns from the field (sadeh) famished and tired, Jacob offers him the bowl of lentils (25:29). The field is the place where Esav the hunter lives, not the home. This hunting activity defines Esav. Esav loses his birthright here in the very moment that he is conducting the activity for which he is beloved. It’s heart-wrenching.
Before Isaac bestows his paternal blessing, he sets up a test. It’s an easy one: Esav is to do the very thing that he is excellent at and for which he is so beloved:
Take your gear, your quiver and bow, and go out into the open and hunt me some game (tzayid). (27:3)
Isaac says to Esav go hunt so that I may justify and experience my love for you, hunter who makes me proud. One argument for why Isaac loves the hunter is that it epitomizes the opposite of himself, a sacrifice. Isaac is passive, the hunter is active. But another possibility, suggested by Leon Kass, is that Isaac loves the son who feeds his family precisely because he himself cannot or does not do this. In a striking role reversal, Isaac, the patriarch, instead of providing for his family, enjoys his son’s ability to do this. He is blinded in his judgment of Esav because his love comes from a place of need and neediness. He loves Esav not for being Esav, but for feeding him. Isaac, who was unnurtured as a child, needs to be nurtured. He uses his son to detrimental effect for all. The recurrence of the keyword tzayid tells us all of this.
Now here’s the kicker. Is Esav in fact tired and famished when he returns from the field and scorns his birthright? Perhaps. But psychologically, a darker truth emerges: Esav is tired of feeding his father and his family. He is tired of being the nurturer instead of the nurtured. He accepts a measly bowl of lentils because he wants to be fed, because he is hungry for love. He accepts his brother’s dish because he wants to be his father’s son, not his father’s father. Does he know what he is doing when he sells his birthright? Let’s imagine that unconsciously he does. He is so burdened by the birthright that he is not scorning it so much as unloading it. Here, Jacob, you feel what it’s like to be loved conditionally, to get blessing and validation only insofar as you have a skill, only insofar as you meet a parental need. This is unconscious.
Still, conscious Esav yearns for love even if he doesn’t know what healthy love is. And so when he fails to receive his father’s blessing he is anguished. He doesn’t receive the quid pro quo that has defined him up until this critical moment. He doesn’t get the validation on which his ego depends. His tears are the tears of a wounded, fragile ego. In fact the denial of a blessing is the best thing he can hope for as it moves him from codependency to a sense of self-worth not tethered to his father’s approval. Jacob pretends to be Esav so that both can ultimately learn to transcend and unlearn the familial roles they’ve been type-cast into by virtue of birth order and physical appearance: Esav the brute, Jacob the clever.
But Jacob has an advantage over his brother in that he receives his mother’s love without a condition. And so the Torah uses the same language to describe Jacob when he meets Rachel as it does when it describes Esav when he realizes he’s been outsmarted and betrayed. How so? Esav’s tears are the tears of someone who is denied love. Jacob’s are the tears of someone who is afforded it. Esav cries: “Dad, won’t you love me?” Jacob cries: “Behold, I have found someone to love.”
The story tells us of multi-generational trauma. It tells us that blessing and burden, obstacle and breakthrough, come together. It also tells us that the way to heal is not by looking to receive something, but by proactively giving. Esav is too damaged in the moment that he lifts up his voice to ask how he himself can love. He is too busy looking to be loved. Jacob has his own share of difficulties, but he knows that Rachel is his ticket to transformation. Rashi cites the Midrash that Jacob’s tears are mournful: Jacob weeps for Rachel’s premature death, or else for the political schism that will befall her descendants. But even if we accept these rich leads, the text emphasizes Jacob’s and Esav’s tears as twinned. In some psychological sense, Jacob doesn’t need his father’s blessing either. He doesn’t need to trick his brother or deceive his father now that he has someone he can share real intimacy with.
But not so quick. As we know, Jacob won’t get to marry Rachel for some time and will be swindled himself, waking up with Leah, her sister, after his wedding. Like Esav, Jacob will experience the whiplash of looking for a certain kind of love and finding it has shape-shifted. Without knowing it, his tears upon meeting Rachel, echo the tears of his brother Esav, who, likewise, did not get the happy life he had hoped for. Jacob’s own family, filled with wife rivalry and sibling factions reverberates with the problems that vexed his own childhood. His own healing journey helps him cope with, but not control, the chaos into which he is thrown.
Why all this chaos? Perhaps to teach us the obvious but hard won lesson that love and control are mutually exclusive. You can’t control someone and love them. Loving someone means giving them space to be and discovering themselves. In Winnicott’s terms, love needs to create a “holding environment” in which the other has the right amount of space, not too much proximity. Isaac, marred by his near death experience during the Akeidah, no doubt craves control. But by implicitly seeking to love Esav in a way different than the way he was raised, he spoils him. He turns Esav into someone who knows only one thing: hunting. He doesn’t allow Esav to develop beyond his hairy, ruddy animality into a person with higher consciousness. Ironically, Jacob who is not loved by his father and ignored is inadvertently granted the holding environment, the “benign neglect,” needed to become himself.
If the story of Abraham and Sarah is a story of marriage, a journey to learn the importance of moving from mere sexual reproduction (which Abraham can do with Hagar and Sarah with Pharaoh and Avimelech) to spiritual partnership, the story of Isaac, Rebecca, and their sons is a story of parenting. This is what it means that “This is the story of Isaac, son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac” (25:19). Isaac cannot remain a son. He needs to become a father. He can’t parent as though he is a child. He must become an adult in his own right. By denying Esav a blessing based on his own need to he be fed he opens a path for Esav to be a knower of more than game, a path for Jacob to be more than an Esav impersonator, and a path for himself to know true love for both children.
Shabbat Shalom
Zohar Atkins
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