Esau and Jacob, twins, come into the world wrestling with each other, striving in Rebecca's womb. Esau emerges first. Jacob comes in a close second, grasping Esau's heel.
When the boys are grown, Esau trades his birthright for a bowl of stew prepared by his crafty brother Jacob.
Time passes and the rift between brothers only widens. As their father lies on his deathbed, Jacob approaches in the guise of his brother to receive the dying Patriarch's final benediction. Calling himself Isaac's firstborn, Jacob wrests the blessing from his brother. Now stoked into a murderous rage, Esau declares: "Let the days of mourning for my father come, and then I will kill my brother Jacob" (Gen. 27:41).
Toldot means "a family story." Sadly, too little has changed from the Bible's family stories to the "family story" of the Jewish people today. We speak often of K'lal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people; the principle is one of WRT's five pillars, core values of our Reform Jewish congregation here in Scarsdale. But too often the Jewish People acts in a manner that bespeaks all that divides us against ourselves.
I was there when they shot Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin fifteen years ago today, November 4th, 1995.
It was my first year of rabbinical school and I was living in Jerusalem not even three blocks from the Prime Minister's residence. Some of my classmates in fact attended the peace rally where last he spoke in Kikar Malchei Yisrael, since renamed Kikar Rabin, "Rabin Square."
The hours that followed plunged the little nation into anguish and turmoil. Eager to implicate the Palestinians, we learned within a day the lone assassin’s name—Yigal Amir. A Jew. A religious extremist, to be sure, but a brother nonetheless. We saw in the horror of our realization Esau and Jacob intertwined once more in their unending, murderous dance.
The image that haunts me most comes from the day after the assassination. A young man sat silently cross-legged in the most crowded square in Jerusalem. Around his neck he wore a sign, and on the sign a single Hebrew word in blood-red paint: BUSHAH. "SHAME."
The next day the man was gone, the sign with him. But fifteen years later you can still find the same extremist yeshivas—indeed, with more students—the same extremist rabbis like the kind who encouraged Amir, many of them further entrenched in West Bank settlements surrounded by millions of Palestinians, proclaiming that their version of Jewish law takes precedence over the democratic law of Medinat Yisrael. In moments of strife, Jews continue to call other Jews “Nazis," as the Gaza pullout illustrated a few years ago; they scream the word, just like they did about Rabin at a rally I had watched from my apartment terrace one week before his murder.
"Let the days of mourning for my father come, and then I will kill my brother Jacob" (Gen. 27:41).
How little has changed.
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Rabbi Jonathan Blake
