Parshas VaYeishev - a thought on the first Rashi

“And Yaakov settled in the land of his father’s residence, in the land of Canaan.”

Bereshis 37:1

Yaakov settled. “Another explanation of “Yaakov settled”; There was once a particular flax dealer whose camels arrived laden with flax. The blacksmith wondered: ‘Where will all this flax be stored?” There was a wise man there who responded: ‘Just one spark that goes out from your bellows can burn it all.’ Likewise, Yaakov saw all the chiefs of Esau enumerated above [enumerated in Bereshis 36:8 – 43]. He wondered and said: ‘Who could vanquish them all?’ What is written later? ‘These are the histories of Yaakov, Yosef.’ For it is written: ‘The House of Yaakov shall be a fire and the House of Yosef a flame, and the House of Esau straw.’ In other words, a spark will go out from Yosef and consume them all. ~ from an old edition of Rashi.”

- Rashi on Bereshis 37:1

It’s striking that the more things change, the more they stay the same. We read reports of the vicious anti-Semitism of Hamas, Hezbollah, the regime in Iran, and other prominent groups in Israel’s neighborhood. We learn about efforts by terrorist groups and governments bordering Israel to arm themselves with powerful weapons and to seek pretexts to launch them at Israeli civilian centers. And members of the Jewish community worry – how will Israel withstand these challenges? Will the US President support Israel properly? Will the American people continue to support Israel? Will American Jewry continue to support Israel? And what will all this mean to Israel?

 

Of course, there are no guarantees. And none of us are prophets. Yet Rashi’s comment tells us that, if the Jewish people are deserving, the largest and most disproportionate threat is easily dispatched. It is up to each of us to work on our own mitzvah observance, and our own faith in God, which in turn can make our people, collectively, deserving of such divine benevolence

Vayetzei - Difficult tradeoffs

In last week’s Torah portion we read how our patriarch Jacob, urged on by his mother Rebecca, presented himself as his brother to his near-blind father Isaac so that he (Jacob) could receive the blessing Isaac intended for Esau. Commentators through the ages have grappled with this difficult episode, as it appears to present one of our ‘founding fathers’ as a deceitful person taking advantage of his father’s infirmities, rather than dealing directly or honestly, in order to gain an advantage – however justified Jacob might have been in claiming the preferred blessing.

Nechama Leibowitz, in an essay “Your Brother Came with Deceit,”¹ suggests that scripture itself attests that while Jacob’s ends were just, the means he used to achieve them were quite unsavory. In a similar vein Rabbi Francis Nataf, in an essay “The Inevitability of Choice,”² draws on a number of sources and makes the claim that the personalities in Genesis were often faced with difficult choices. He asserts that they understood implicitly that a course of action favored by God could, nonetheless, involve painful trade-offs and difficult consequences. We can see this in the deceptions that afflict Jacob in this week’s Torah portion, such as the switch of Leah for the desired Rachel on the wedding night and his father-in-law’s repeated changes of his wages. We can also see this in the deceptions that befall Jacob later – his two sons’ peace treaty with and then stealthy massacre of the town of Shechem and the eleven brothers’ sale of Joseph and cover-up story that an animal devoured Joseph.

The message of the Torah is clear – if you start your ‘career’ with deception, it will gain a life of its own.

1.     New Studies in Bereshit (Genesis), by Nechama Lebowitz. Published in Israel, 1977 (?); p. 264–270.   

2.     Redeeming Relevance in the Book of Genesis: Explorations in Text and Meaning, by Rabbi Francis Nataf. Published in Jerusalem, 2006; p. 41-56.