To Be Jewish is to Struggle

Toldot
Genesis 25:19-28:9

Précis: The introductory phrase to this parasha is “These are the generations (“toldot”) of Isaac.” What follows is the birth of the twins, Esau and Jacob. Their childhood is omitted from narrative, and we know only that Jacob was a quiet man while Esau was a cunning hunter, that their mother Rebecca preferred Jacob, and that Isaac preferred Esau. We then have the story of the sale of the birthright by Esau to Jacob for a bowl of porridge. A famine takes place, and Isaac journeys to the land of the Philistines where he claims that his wife Rebecca is actually his sister (as Abraham did with Sarah in Lech Lecha) and again, the woman escapes unharmed. The story then turns to the “great deception” where Jacob pretends to be Esau in order to obtain the primary blessing from his father Isaac. Esau hates Jacob and threatens him; Rebecca urges Jacob to escape to her family in Haran, to where he sets off at the conclusion of the parasha.


Gen. 25:22 “And the children struggled together within her; and she said: 'If it be so, wherefore do I live?' And she went to inquire of God.”

From a literary perspective, the Bible is a remarkable work, having the power to convey rich detail in a concise manner. On a thematic level, the parasha introduces us to the essential core of Jacob’s life: struggle. He struggles with Esau in the womb (as noted in the cited verse), is the object of struggle between his parents (Isaac preferring Esau, Rebecca preferring Jacob). He struggles with Esau (and perhaps with his father) over the blessing, with his father-in-law over his marriages, with an angel when his name is changed to Israel, again with Esau upon his return home, and with his sons over their jealousy of Joseph. His struggles culminate when, after his reunion with the long-lost Joseph, Jacob encounters Pharaoh in Egypt, telling the Egyptian king that “‘The days of the years of my sojourning are a hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life” (Gen. 47:8-9).

The concept of struggle, of course, has become the central metaphor of Jewish existence. Jacob’s second name, “Yisrael,” has been translated as “struggle with God” and our experience, both temporally and spiritually over the centuries, can be defined by struggle. Struggle, of course, continues today for Jews in Israel and around the world. Some of the current struggles have their roots in ancient times (some point to Esau as the progenitor of Edom, a traditional enemy of the Jewish People; others note that Ishmael, Jacob’s half-uncle, was the father of the Arab nation). Other struggles within the Jewish world have a more recent genesis.

Spiritually, the Jewish People have had to face the dislocation of the Babylonian Exile, where we “wept by the waters.” The destruction of the Second Temple created the struggle for continuity which found its expression in Mishna, Talmud, and rabbinic Judaism. In later times, the spiritual struggle was manifest in the epic challenges of denominationalism (Reform, Conservative, Orthodox), and today, the Jewish spiritual struggle seems to have adopted the same kind of partisan extremism which dominates American political discourse.


While, in Jacob’s words, one may view the Jewish “life” as “few and evil,” I submit that we can take heart and hope from the fact that we have survived the struggles of millennia, and remain confident in our ability to overcome the challenges we face today, and will inevitably face tomorrow. Judaism as a belief is profoundly hopeful, based at its spiritual core on the Covenant between the Jewish People and the Creator, and based on the knowledge that each of us has within us not only a spark of the Divine, but also the ability to continue the struggle begun so long ago.