Toldot, Generations

✦  All insights are drawn from an article by Michael Berg published by the Kabbalah Centre, citing the Zohar and the Maharal of Prague.

Before Jacob and Esau ever meet the world, they are already in conflict. Rebecca becomes pregnant with twins, and something strange happens: "the children struggled together within her" (Bereshit 25:22). The struggle is so intense that she asks the Creator directly what is happening. The answer she receives is one of the most important lines in the whole book of Bereshit: "Two nations are in your womb… and the elder shall serve the younger" (Bereshit 25:23). Classical teaching reads Jacob and Esau as more than two brothers, they represent two forces present, in some form, inside every one of us: the pull of the body (instinct, appetite, immediate reward) and the pull of the soul (patience, meaning, connection to something larger). The portion doesn't pretend this conflict is easy or quickly resolved, it shows it starting in the womb.

Later in the portion, Rebecca receives a clear inner knowing that Jacob, not Esau, needs to receive Isaac's blessing. To do this, Jacob has to disguise himself and take the blessing meant for his brother. The Torah calls Jacob's nature tam, simple, someone who does not manipulate or deceive. This act is the opposite of who he is. Michael Berg teaches something remarkable: before Jacob goes in to receive the blessing, he prays, and his prayer is strange. He recites a line from Psalms: "save me from the language of lies." He is about to deceive his father, and his prayer is "protect me from lies." Why? Michael Berg explains, citing the Zohar and Rav Ashlag: the blessings Jacob was about to receive carried all the Light humanity would need to end pain, suffering, and death. And the Zohar teaches this Light could only be reclaimed through the same method the Negative Side had used to make Adam and Eve fall, deceit. Jacob wasn't choosing deceit for himself; he was correcting, at the deepest level, what deceit had once broken.

Michael Berg then brings in a teaching from the Maharal of Prague about two different levels of connection to the Light of the Creator: being yashar ("straight") and being tamim ("simple," having "simple certainty"). A straight person uses their mind every time to figure out the right thing to do, always thinking, always calculating. A person with simple certainty doesn't need to figure it out anymore, doing the right thing has become innate. Michael Berg writes: "every step towards simple certainty is not only a step closer towards Immortality." Jacob, he teaches, held both, simple certainty for his own path, and careful thinking whenever his choices touched others.

Near the end of the portion, Isaac re-digs his father Abraham's wells, which the Philistines had filled with earth. Two of them cause conflict; he names them Esek ("contention") and Sitnah ("hostility"). But the third well brings no argument at all. Isaac names it Rechovot, "open spaces", and says: "For now the Eternal has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land" (Bereshit 26:22). Later, when the deception is discovered, Isaac "trembles with a very great trembling", and yet he does not take the blessing back. He confirms it: "Yea, and he shall be blessed" (Bereshit 27:33). The struggle is real, even before we're born. The way through it is not clever calculation but simple certainty. And the blessing we earn, even through a difficult and complicated path, opens room, Rechovot, for everything still to come.

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