Parshah Commentary
Our parshah, Toldot, Hebrew for “generations,” begins with the expansion of Abraham’s line, now stewarded by Isaac and Rebecca. The Torah tells us that Rebecca, facing a difficult pregnancy, prays for help. God reveals that she is carrying twins—two children who antagonize each other in utero, a dynamic that foreshadows an enduring feud: “Two nations are in your womb, and two tribes from your body shall be divided,” God explains. “One tribe shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.”
Following their birth, the Torah is quick to juxtapose Jacob and Esau as opposing models of human nature and culture: Esau is the “rough” hunter, “a man of the field” who will come to “live by his sword,” while Jacob is described as a simple shepherd, a homebody who “dwells among the tents.” Early midrashic works, perhaps playing on the shared root of “dwell” (“yoshev”) and “yeshiva,” suggest that Jacob was in fact a Torah scholar, an idea taken up by later commentators who similarly characterize Jacob’s tent-dwelling as time spent in study, prayer, and contemplation. As later texts read this story, Jacob’s commitment to Torah becomes a further way of distinguishing him from Esau, who instead symbolizes the world of violence.
In one legal example, the Polish halakhist Rabbi Yechezkel Landau (1713–1793) uses the images of Jacob and Esau to support his argument prohibiting hunting for sport. Because Esau is a named hunter in the Torah, Rabbi Landau infers that this “is not the way of the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . . For how can a Jew kill a living thing needlessly?” Jacob’s legacy, this argument goes, mandates that Torah oppose violence. Indeed, rabbinic texts regularly transform militaristic language into metaphorical engagement with Torah, the model of Jacob eclipsing the model of Esau: “A man of war” becomes one whose erudite interpretations enable them to succeed in the battlefield of Torah debates, and “girding your sword” means decorating oneself in Torah’s ornamental splendor.
The portrayal of Jacob and Esau as interconnected-yet-irreconcilable twins echoes a midrash taught by Rabbi Eliezer: “The sword and the book descended from heaven intertwined.” While the midrash implies that the sword is given alongside Torah to threaten the Jewish people into following the commandments, one later interpretation by the medieval French sage Moshe HaDarshan instead reads the sword’s presence as a reminder that the Torah itself is under constant threat. In this view, if we do not keep the commandments, it is not our lives that are at stake, but that of the Torah, which would otherwise be swallowed by the sword’s violence. In both of these interpretations, the sword and the Torah are not interdependent; the sword’s presence is parasitic, threatening its host. In this vein, the Lithuanian Religious Zionist thinker Rabbi Yitzhak Ya’akov Reines (1839–1915) explained that the forces of Torah and the sword descend into the world as “opposites,” because ultimately “weapons are the sign of the destruction of the world,” and Torah is a tool for cultivating wholeness. This is perhaps why one Talmudic sage argues that “if one is a swordsman they cannot be a scholar, and if one is a scholar they cannot be a swordsman.”
Later in Breishit, we learn that whereas Jacob’s line produces the Israelites, his more pugilistic brother is the ancestor of the Edomites, and many later commentators associate Esau with the imperial violence of Rome. Esau thus becomes a figure who facilitates a Jewish claim to innocence; by framing an icon of aggression as an outsider, we shore up a contrasting image of ourselves as peace-loving. But Moshe HaDarshan’s and Reines’s readings of the Torah-sword dyad can help us recast the inextricability of what Jacob and Esau embody as something internal to our people. Under this view, we are not ethical paragons threatened by outside enemies, but rather bearers of both the Torah and the sword—keepers of a tradition that lives under constant threat of decimation by our own hands.
Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.
