Vayetze 2017: In Memory of Professor Neil Gillman z"l

I would like to dedicate this dvar Torah to Rabbi Neil Gillman z”l who passed away yesterday.  He was a much beloved teacher of Jewish theology at the Seminary, a teacher who helped so many of his students, including myself, to appreciate and explore the concepts of God, mitzvah, and more, to go beyond the halakhah, the practice of Judaism, to create a meaningful and soulful Judaism.  May his memory be a blessing. 

Professor Gillman taught that we cannot see God on our own, with our eyes, but we can sense God’s presence in the relationships between us, in the invisible, mystical network that connects us all.

To illustrate the point, he gives us the image of a basketball game.  He explains we can know the score.  The game score is concrete, 24 points to 22, but when it comes to a team’s passing game, we cannot see that in one concrete number.  The quality of the team’s passing game is something we discover over the course of the game, as we watch how the players work together and move the ball up and down court.

This past week I was critical of Jacob who takes advantage of both his brother and his blind father.  But I would not want to end our evaluation of Jacob there.  As with the passing game, we need to see what Jacob chooses to do in another situation rather than focus on only two points in time.  He uses his cleverness for dishonesty, and now he uses his cleverness to get himself out of a bind as we see with Lavan, his uncle, Jacob has met his match and received a solid comeuppance for his past choices.  Midah k’neged midah, measure for measure, Lavan tricks Jacob, giving him Leah as a wife instead of Rachel and then he exploits the moment to demand an additional 7 years of labor from him.

But Jacob concocts a scheme to remove himself from Lavan’s clutches, and we should appraise him also how he handles himself when he is in an adverse situation.

When Lavan hears Jacob’s proposal for building his own wealth by taking dark colored sheep as well as the spotted and speckled goats, the Me’am Lo’ez commentary suggests Lavan is thrilled with the idea.  Lavan knows that these will be the vast minority of his flocks.  He accepts the deal quickly because he does not want to take the chance Jacob may regret the deal and ask for the real wages he deserves for 14 years of labor.  (Me’am Lo’ez p. 587, Genesis Vol. 2)

It appears God helps Jacob here, according to Rashi God’s angels help him collect the animals he requests out of the flock.  Somehow, through creative breeding, he builds up the special flock from a mere pittance of wages into a huge flock far exceeding the original take.

Here, Jacob’s cleverness enables him to escape.  And like a great Black Friday shopper, he finds a great residual value for a very inexpensive price. 

We celebrate achievements of this kind all the time.  We thrill at the way Batman and James Bond escape from elaborate death traps.  We see investors on the stock market who in a moment, or over time, build wealth through times of uncertainty. 

But is this enough to redeem Jacob’s character?  As Professor Gillman would say, we must explore the darker places of theodicy, of God’s justice in the world, and so we cannot fully evaluate Jacob until we see how he behaves in the Joseph stories, when Joseph comes forward as a foil to Jacob, teaching his brothers accountability, and when Jacob, as far as he knows, experiences a loss he cannot repair with his wits, a loss that impacts what we come to know as his fragile heart.

Gillman reminded us always of the heart, of context, of the humanity, the human condition in Judaism.  He was famous for his lively debates with Rabbi Joel Roth who takes the position that Jewish law is pre-eminent over Midrash and theology.  But the lesson of those debates, one of which I had the privilege to witness years ago, was that, again, like the passing game, we cannot have a meaningful Judaism that is all in one category, but rather, our Judaism, our religious lives and perspectives, draw from the deep wells of both law, tradition, ritual, midrash and commentary, and theology, our contemplation of the most vast and perplexing questions of existence that together we seek to answer week in and week out.

May his memory be a blessing.  Amen.

Esau the Superhero

 One thing about superheroes, especially in the 21^st century, is they’re not always as popular as we might expect within the stories we tell about them.

The last time Superman flew across the movie screen the world was calling for him to step down or go back home to Krypton.  The last time the Avengers fought against the forces of evil, the US government sought to rein them in as a result of unintended tragic consequences of their battle.  When Batman last faced the joker and faced criticism, district attorney Harvey Dent said, “Well, I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

Our ancestor Jacob appears this week in our Torah in a similar way, though it’s not the first time we see him in this light.  So many times Jacob accomplishes objectives by literally keeping others in the dark – which makes me think of the title of the Batman movie quoted above, ‘The Dark Knight’.  There are times that Bruce Wayne must act in a way that casts the guilt lens on himself in order to maintain the good image of another like Harvey Dent, but Jacob appears to pursue his goals primarily for his own good and at the expense of others.

He purchases the birthright from his brother Esau when his brother is exhausted and famished after the hunt.  For sure, he never says to Esau, are you sure you want to sell this to me?  Do you know what it means for you to sell the birthright?

And now, with Rebecca’s help he dresses up like his brother, and together they deceive and defraud both Esau and Isaac in one stroke.  We might say, Jacob already purchased the birthright in which case he’s entitled to the better blessing, but we can also say with assurance that the birthright wasn’t Esau’s to sell in the first place, kind of like the Brookly Bridge, although I hear it’s going for a great price this weekend in honor of TBEMC’s 100^th anniversary.

The darkness continues here as we retell the story of Jacob lying to his aged father who is blind.  We recall the instruction in Leviticus, Lifnay ee’vair lo titen michshol. Do not put a stumbling block before the blind.  Jacob, the one who as our tradition explains, stays in the camp studying Torah, clearly missed that key teaching.  Isaac is not as passive though as we might think.  The Mahari puts us inside Isaac’s mind as though Isaac says to himself, “Due to the fact that I’m doubtful about who is the person in front of me, I’m going to lengthen the conversation so that I can better know the voice and know who it is.”  But the Mahari also points out that Jacob is clever, and so he only answers in one word ‘Ani’ making Isaac’s job almost impossible.

The intention of portraying the superheroes as flawed makes them more like us, so we can better relate to them.  Jacob though he is our ancestor is out for his own interests, and we feel empathy for Esau as our Rabbis also did despite their criticisms of Esau and the way they connected him to Rome, the evil empire.

Just one example, a midrash tells us, “Esau shed 3 tears, one from the right eye, one from the left, and one down the middle of his forehead that was suspended between his eyes.  If that tear had fallen, the Jewish people would not ever have been redeemed from under Esau’s hands (Esau here as the embodiment of that later evil empire)…Due to those tears Esau inherited the fertile Mount Se’ir, and the Jewish people must, in their own tears that resulted from Jacob’s actions, request God to have mercy upon them.”(Yalkut)

How then do we read today’s Torah portion?  As an indictment of our ancestor, meant to encourage us today to hold ourselves accountable for the decisions we make?  Or do we read it simply as the mysterious unfolding of God’s plan that goes forward despite the pain of those who suffer in its wake? 

One other way we may read the story is by re-focusing our attention to redeem Esau in the hopes of restoring his image and integrity, the same way that the superheroes strive to redeem themselves when they cause harm.  Let’s remember how Esau redeems himself when he embraces his brother years later, and his only interested is greeting his brother and he has no interest in the gifts Jacob brings out of fear. 

Esau surmounts and surpasses his brother in that moment.  God must redeem and liberate us, but Esau finds it within himself.  That power, to find hope, to find the possibility of transformation within ourselves, is a superpower that we all have.