Jacob the Liar - Parshat Vayetze

Parshat Vayetze 2011/5772

Rabbi Neil A. Tow©

“Jacob the Liar”

Jacob is the second son of Isaac, and he is also Israel, the man who has struggled with God.  They are both the same person, but not the same character.

Jacob is a liar and manipulator who forces his brother Esau to sell his birthright, who colludes with his mother Rebekah to deceive his father Isaac, who enriches himself off the flocks of Laban and leaves Laban the leftover weakling offspring of Laban’s own herds. 

The Torah never calls Jacob a liar.  That moniker is the title of a 1969 novel of the same name written by Jurek Becker, a Polish born Jewish writer who survived Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen and eventually reunited with his father in
East Germany.  In this novel, Jacob, a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto, reports something he heard in the German police station and suddenly the ghetto community believes he has access to a radio.  And so he must invent news since he has no access to real news reports. He has to continue to invent news in order to keep up peoples’ hopes.

The Wikipedia article on this book suggests the ethical dilemma at the heart of the novel, “Does he act responsibly by lying, even if he has only good intentions?"

Does our Jacob, the Jacob of the Torah act responsibly by lying?  Does Jacob have good intentions?

When he compels his brother Esau to buy soup in exchange for the birthright, he is, in effect, lying about the value of the soup.  The sale violates principles of Jewish business ethics.

When he and Rebekah work together to deceive Isaac, they violate the principle in Leviticus, “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind.”  The Torah tells us, after all, that Isaac is going blind in his old age.

In both these cases, Jacob appears to have negative intentions.  However, we cannot dismiss the argument that God causes the birthright and blessing to go to the “more worthy” of the two brothers.  The Torah teaches “Esau spurned the birthright”.

We find ourselves, then, in a struggle.  Jacob, and Rebekah’s methods, involve manipulation and lying, while at the same time the Torah wants us to see that God’s plan favors Jacob. 

Perhaps we should dismiss the manipulation and lying as relatively gentle methods of adjusting history to fit God’s prophecy.  In the end, we could say that Jacob and Esau will reunite, each well-off and at the head of his own kingdom.

In the moment of reading the text, though, there is an irksome feeling about Jacob’s behavior.  When he creatively breeds huge herds from Laban’s herds and when he dismisses the weaker animals to Laban while keeping the sturdiest for him, there is an element of fraud involved.  Of course, Laban defrauds Jacob by giving him Leah instead of Rachel and then demanding an additional seven years of work.  Does Jacob, then, operate on the principle of midah kneged midah, measure for measure?  Can we argue here that fraud is acceptable since Jacob’s intentions are “good”, that he wants to have enough to support his wife and family and become his own person?

We can resolve the problem of Jacob’s behavior in each episode if we allow the Torah to teach in its own way rather than examining the Torah through a purely ethical lens.  The Torah is the story of the way God unfolds God’s plan for the world through the lives of people and nations.  In some cases, the methods are brutal, e.g. fraud, lying, manipulation, plague, massacre.  We must excuse the methods in favor of the message since we see that later Jewish thinking rejected these methods but retained the message.

We can also teach that although the methods fit into the course of God’s prophecy, which they bring on their own consequences good and bad.  Jacob’s forcible purchase of the birthright, for instance, causes enmity between brothers.

We live in a world that in some ways puts us in the same situation as Jacob the Liar from the 1969 novel.  Events overtake us and compel us to rethink reality and reevaluate our priorities, needs, expectations, and plans.  A need arises to find new ways to communicate and to rationalize our choices.  A time of transition helps us negotiate these exciting and stressful moments until we can discover the blessings and challenges of the new reality and the path that leads into the future.

For the residents of the ghetto who hear Jacob’s “radio” reports, does not the radio exist for them even if there is in fact no such radio?

For the other Jacob, Ya’akov Avinu, does not his eventful early life bring him to the point where he will struggle with God and himself and become a new person?

From particular to universal, from present to future, the Torah demands much from us as readers and people of faith.  It demands that we see a larger plan behind the individual events and it demands patience as the plan unfolds.  We should never, though, eschew the feeling of impatience and loving criticism that we feel when we look at Jacob and his behavior.