Parshah Commentary

After over 20 years away from home, Jacob gets word from God near the end of last week’s parshah that it’s time for him to return. Our portion, Vayishlach, opens with Jacob’s understandable anxiety about the prospect of seeing his twin brother Esau, whose vow to kill him prompted his flight. When his messengers report that Esau is approaching with 400 men, Jacob’s fear only grows. He divides his camp in two, in the hopes that at least one party will survive the expected attack; he then prays for protection and sends abundant gifts ahead to appease Esau’s wrath. Yet when Esau finally approaches, he seems only joyfully relieved to be reunited with his brother: “Esau ran to greet him. He embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him; and they wept.”

In the biblical text, the Hebrew word for “he kissed him” is written with diacritic dots above the letters, one of only ten words in the Torah with such “puncta extraordinaria,” as academics call them; this prompts the Sifre—the earliest Rabbinic text on our verse, from around the third century—to inquire into the meaning of these marks. The text claims the dots indicate that Esau “did not kiss him wholeheartedly,” but one sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, dissents. “The halachah is known that Esau hates Jacob,” he replies, “but his mercy took over at that moment, and he kissed him wholeheartedly.” After Rashi cited both of these positions in his commentary on the Torah, the slogan “the halachah is known that Esau hates Jacob” became a common trope. Given the association between Esau and the Roman Empire, and thus Christianity and the West as a whole, the statement has come to be interpreted as an eternal truism about gentiles’ enmity toward Jews.

Some who see this assertion as an immutable axiom have found support from Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai introducing the claim as “halachah.” In the early 1970s, for example, when the great halachic decisor Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was asked whether British Jews who believed Jewish private schools were being discriminated against in public funding allocations should sue the government in the European Court of Human Rights, he cautioned that this move would “likely cause the government to hate the Jews and cause far worse results.” He then quoted Rashi’s citation of the Sifre and commented on our phrase: “Just as halachah doesn’t change, so too Esau’s hatred of Jacob never changes. Even those who treat [Jews] well, their hatred is actually very great.” This view has permeated into more mainstream forums as well: Yoel Kretzmer-Raziel, a scholar of Rabbinic literature, has documented how popular pamphlets on the parshah distributed in Religious Zionist synagogues in Israel have portrayed the statement about Esau’s loathing “as a foundation-stone of the” proper “religious-political worldview”—even using the line in question to denigrate Arabs, who are traditionally understood to be the descendants of Ishmael, not Esau. He cites over a dozen examples of such texts using the line to discuss Jew-hatred, including one that deems it “the most decisive expression defining antisemitism and its features.” The pamphlet goes on to explain, “‘It is halachah’! Whether you like it or not—this is not a narrative story, not a casual remark, not a historical tradition: This is halachah! One must not budge from it, nor argue with it, nor ‘soften’ it or ‘refine’ it according to the needs of the generation.”

But as Kretzmer-Raziel points out, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s usage of “halachah” is unusual: The term generally refers to guidelines around normative practice for Jews, not the inner feelings of non-Jews. In fact, modern scholars have found that its appearance is the result of a textual error. As it turns out, only one manuscript of the Sifre—the one Rashi happened to have, and thus the version that was promulgated—contains the word, while all others render the line: “Is it not known that Esau hates Jacob?” It seems that a scribe abbreviated “is it not” (“ve-ha’lo”) as “ve-hal,” which a later scribe incorrectly interpreted as an abbreviation for “ve-halachah” (“and it is halachah”). Freed from the prescriptive flavor and sense of eternality introduced by the scribal error, the line refers not to an archetype of the non-Jewish Other, filled with irrational hatred, but to Esau the character, who hated his brother, as the Torah tells us, for a specific reason: Jacob denied him food when he was starving and then tricked their blind, elderly father in order to steal his twin’s birthright.

This manuscript blunder highlights the dangers of understanding our own world in terms of mythologized archetypes, an approach that is not unique to the right. For example, many more progressive benchers add an additional “haRachaman” (a petitionary request of God) to the traditional text of the Birkat HaMazon, asking for “the Merciful One [“haRachaman”] to grant peace between the children of Sarah and the children of Hagar”—that is, between Isaac, understood to be the ancestor of the Jews, and Ishmael, understood to be the ancestor of Muslims. However well-meaning, such textual innovations may strengthen a sense of today’s Israel/Palestine as defined by abstract, eternal typologies, rather than specific policies of dispossession and violence. Yet bringing about justice will depend not on untangling the knots of monotheistic history, but on confronting the concrete harm and the structures that produce it.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.