Parshas Vayishlach - Yaakov and Esav, continued
מיכאל ריטש
4) After the blessings
Even after Yaakov took the blessings, it still seems to me that there was hope for Esav, if he had taken it.
כז(לד-לז) כשמע עשו את־דברי אביו כו‘ ויאמר לאביו ברכני גם־אני אבי. ויאמר בא אחיך במרמה ויקח ברכתך. כו‘ ויאמר הלא־אצלת לי ברכה. ויען יצחק ויאמר לעשו הן גביר שמתיו לך כו‘ ולכה אפוא מה אעשה בני.
27(34-37) When Esav heard the words of his father... he said to his father, “Bless me as well, Father!” He answered, “Your brother came with trickery and took your blessing”... He asked, “Haven’t you saved me any blessing?” Yaakov answered Esav, “Behold, I have placed him as a ruler over you... now, my son, what is there for me to do?”
Yaakov Avinu is not saying that there is no place for Esav. He is telling him his place: a servant to his brother. When he does that, he won’t have a blessing of his own. But as I wrote elsewhere, he won’t need it: he’ll be connected to his brother and share in his blessing, ועבד לשחוור כו' (the slave of a ruler is nobility too).
There is no other answer for Esav; his father has told him that twice.
But the Torah continues anyhow,
(לח-מ) ויאמר עשו אל־אביו הברכה אחת הוא־לך אבי ברכני גם־אני אבי וישא עשו קלו ויבך.
ואז ויען יצחק אביו ויאמר אליו הנה משמני הארץ יהיה מושבך ומטל השמים מעל. ועל־חרבך תחיה ואת־אחיך תעבד והיה כאשר תריד ופרקת עלו מעל צוארך.
(38-40) Esav said to his father, “Do you have only one bracha?! Bless me too, father!” And Esav lifted up his voice and wept. Then his father Yitzchak said to him, “Behold: the fat places of the earth shall be your dwelling place, and the dew of the heavens above. You shall live with your sword, and serve your brother. But if he becomes unworthy, you will cast the yoke from your neck.”
I have heard it said that we should learn from here the power of prayer. One should keep praying even after the din has been sealed, for prayer always helps - as it helped Esav here.
It is certainly true that prayer always helps. But, I don’t think this is a good example. Yitzchak already explained his place to Esav - serving his brother, becoming part of his blessing. But since Esav refused to accept that, his father gave him a different role - but not a good one. This is the role of the Enemies of Israel. They also serve Hashem (involuntarily), and there is unfortunately sometimes a need for them: if Israel sins. Then these nations come to punish them, giving them kapparah, bringing them to teshuvah, and in the end helping them to their ultimate purpose.
Esav chose this role, outside the family of Yitzchak, outside the World of Torah, and outside the reward coming to servants of Hashem. It wasn’t really a bracha; as Yitzchak said, there is only one bracha in the world.
Yeravam ben Navat made a similar choice: (Sanhedrin 120a) “Hakodosh Baruch Hu held Yeravam by his cloak, and said to him, “Do teshuvah! You and I and David Hamelech will walk together in Gan Eden!” He said to Hashem, “Who will walk in front?” He answered, “David will be in front.” He said, “If so, I’m not interested...”
5) Esav and Dinah
Rivka said to Yaakov,
כח(מד-מה) וישבת עמו ימים אחדים עד אשר־תשוב חמת אחיך. עד־שוב אף־אחיך ממך ושכח את אשר־עשית לו כו‘.
(28(44-45)) Stay with him (Lavan) for some days (ימים אחדים) until your brother’s rage resides. Until his anger turns from him, and he forgets what you did to him...”
And so it was; in the end Esav’s hatred ebbed slightly, so that it was possible for Yaakov to appease him - with great difficulty. Of course, it is a halacha that Esav hates Yaakov. But he loved him too, and hugged him and kissed him, and they both cried. See the words of Yaakov; they loved one another. (Chazal understood all these verses in a very negative way, but it seems to me that that has to be approached subtly; בס"ד, I’ll discuss it later.)
Our sages say that Yaakov should have allowed Esav to marry his daughter Dinah: she was his zivug after Leah, and maybe she could have brought him to teshuvah.
Great acharonim ask on this: “What father marries his daughter to a rasha?”
The truth is that I don’t really understand the question. We have a precedent: someone who did exactly that, Bava Metzia 94a. Rabbi Yochanan said to Reish Lakish the armed robber that if he will do teshuvah, he would give him to marry his very beautiful sister - and he did it. If Rabbi Yochanan was able to pull this off, able to oversee his student’s growth and see that he was doing proper teshuvah, perhaps Yaakov Avinu could have done the same.
A good woman can work wonders. Dinah herself, competely against her will, brought the entire city of Shechem to circumcize themselves. Unbelievable. How can we know if Chazal did not see in her the power to turn even Esav around?
In truth, it would seem to me that Esav hadn’t turned completely wicked yet. He had already made serious blunders, and begun on a bad road. Still, it isn’t clear that his wickedness had gone from potential to actual, to a level that could not be fixed. The most important thing: the verse testifies that he still had not left the family of Avraham, to go to his own land in jealousy of his brother. That happened years later, after Yaakov returned 36(6-7) “He went to (some other) land before Yaakov his brother. For their possessions were too much for them to dwell together.”
Esav had already descended one level, and was no longer able to be Yaakov’s brother and quasi-equal, and marry Leah. Yaakov had to fill his role in that, as I’ve written earlier. Still, perhaps he could have found a place as Yaakov’s son-in-law one level further down.
Even after hundreds of years, Israel called to Edom in the midbar (Bamidbar 20(14)), “Thus says your brother Israel...” Edom had the chance to be closer to Israel than any other nation. But they refused again, and chose distance and emnity - עברתו שמרה נצח. Now they are farther than ordinary non-Jewish nations, chaval.
[ע‘ דרשות הר“ן שנראה מדבריו שאינו מסכים לכל זה. ואולי הבין כפשוטו של מקרא ולפי המסקנה, ע‘ מה שאכתוב בסמוך.]
6) Darshanim the wicked (דורשין רשעים לגנאי)
As an aside, I’d like to mention an issue that I’ve wondered about for years, concerning the rules of how to do drashos.
Breishis 21(17) “Hashem heard the cry of the child where he is”. Rashi: What is Yishmael now, a tzaddik or a rasha? They said, a tzaddik...”
Clearly the drashos of Chazal about the wickedness of Yishmael (and Esav) must be subtle. Surely Yitzchak would not have loved a murderer, adulterer, and someone who did all the terrible things Chazal ascribe to Esav. Indeed, the Midrash says that the one he murdered was Nimrod, not an innocent man. See Tosefos Bava Basra 16b similarly about his adultery, etc. (The Ba’alei Musar make this point in many places.)
In the Ramchal’s Introduction to Agados, he says that we do drashos about tzaddikim in the direction of zechus and merit, and of reshaim in the direction of גנאי and guilt. (Shabbos 55b gives the opinion of R’ Shmuel bar Nachmeini, who darshans several tzaddikim l’chaf zechus even when there is a very strong lean in the verses in the other direction. It would seem that we accept that approach even though there are several tana’im there who disagree.) And this is how we darshan constantly about Esav.
Is this principle one of the rules for how Hashem buried levels of meaning in his Torah, like kal v’chomer or gezeirah shavah? It’s hard for me to understand that: Why would Hashem consistently write the Written Torah in a way that minimizes the wickedness of an Esav, hiding it away in drashos - and also hiding the righteousness of a tzaddik? It is actually hard for non-Torah-observant readers to know that Yaakov was a tzaddik and Esav was a rasha!
But perhaps a different approach is possible.
The Rabbeinu Yonah in Sha’arei Teshuva:
(לגבי ד' כיתות לענין בעלי לשה"ר) ונאמר (הושע א(ד)) ופקדתי את דמי יזרעאל על בית יהוא, הנה כי אף על פי שעשה יהוא מצוה בהכריתו בית אחאב, נשא עונו, כי גם הוא היה רב פשע.
(In the section about Arba’ah Kitos) “Hoshea 1(4), ‘I will visit the blood of Yizre’el on the house of Yehu.’ Behold: even though Yehu did a mitzvah when he destroyed the house of Ach’av, he is still punished, as he himself was very sinful.”
The Chofetz Chaim expands on this point from the Rabbeinu Yonah. If someone acts with קנאות, zealously, if he himself later commits a similar sin, he will be judged even on the zealousness itself, and punished for it.
I think this needs an explanation. Retroactively, did we find out that Yehu had bad intentions deep down all along in destroying the house of Achav? After all, we see later that he didn’t consider avodah zarah all that bad! It’s hard to accept that. Yehu was actually commanded by a prophet to destroy that house - and afterwards is praised for doing so!
Try this instead: Even though originally he actually did have the very best intentions, his actions of קנאות remain hanging in the balance. Zealousness is a double-edged sword. It can be a channel for great growth, for adding good upon good, as it was for Pinchas. But if the end of the story is that the קנאות didn’t lead to that kind of growth, certainly if the person himself fell prey to the same kinds of flaws he was attacking, then the zealousness itself is ruined retroactively.
Shimon and Levi: They were partners in their קנאות in the story of Shechem. Yaakov cursed the anger of both of them together. We see no distinction made between them at all. But a distinction arrives later. When Zimri of Shimon sinned by Ba’al Peor, his whole tribe was punished by being scattered without an inheritance of land - to keep them out of trouble. They had sinned in the matter that they had been zealous in, their zealousness had become a liability.
The tribe of Levi, on the other hand, did not sin; they acted with zealousness again in the story of the Calf. Their קנאות brought them to unsurpassed greatness.
That’s all just an example, but I’m wondering if the type of drashos I was discussing is similar. At the time, it was actually possible to understand the inner meaning of an event in either of two ways. But the correctness of a certain interpretation is revealed retroactively. It actually depends on what happened later. For example, if Esav had become worthy in the end, we would have understood his same actions in a good light. Tzaddikim you darshan positively, because their earlier actions became a springboard toward their later greatness. With Esav and other reshaim, in the end we can see how these same actions were flawed, and became part of the wrong path they eventually followed.
In another place I have written about the various understandings of the קדמונים about verses in the Torah that discuss wickedness in the future, such as “ועבדום וענו אותם” (“they shall serve [Egypt] and they will afflict them”), and “וקם העם הזה וזנה אחרי אלהי נכר הארץ” (“This nation shall rise up and turn away, after the foreign gods of the land.”) I point out there that there is one thing that all the Rishonim agree on: If the verses would have been full-fledged prophecy, that a particular individual was going to do that wicked act - then there would be no more room for free choice by that individual. In fact, the one who did it would be doing a mitzvah and not a sin at all. That is why the Rishonim had to find various reasons why that wasn’t the case in these examples.
That is true in the written Torah. But in drashos of Chazal, it seems to me that this may not be necessarily true. We can have a drasha that does not force the future. Not only wasn’t it clear at the time, until we finally figured it out retroactively. More: it is possible for the same verse to admit positive or negative interpretations, both true, but hanging and waiting until the future determines the correct understanding.