Parashat Toledot - Generational Cycles Congregation Kehillath Israel, Brookline MA 5779 / 2018

My grandmother is meticulous in her cleanliness. As a little kid, I have memories of her stopping mid-sentence to pick some invisible speck of something up off the floor and throw it away. And if I was the one speaking in the conversation when she spotted it, she would try to politely remain focused on what I was saying while obviously terribly distracted by the “eye-sore” piece of dust that was ruining her living room. Finally, I would stop talking and she, totally relieved, would walk over to the speck of dust, lick her finger, and lift the dust into the trash. As a teenager, I began to notice that my dad did the exact same thing. He would notice a smudge or a tiny piece of paper out of place and instantly stop everything he was doing to clean it up. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that I’d be attracted to someone with similar tendencies. But it did, and I still remember the first time when Matt stood up in the middle of a conversation to remove a relatively invisible something from the wall across the room. I couldn’t help but laugh.
It’s no secret that family systems and behaviors are cyclical. We often repeat the patterns of our parents who are likely repeating the patterns of their parents. And, according to Freud, we are likely to seek a partner who possess similar qualities, to then pass them on to future generations. And so, the cycle continues.
The entire book of Genesis tells a long story of generational cycling, and this week’s parsha is the first time we begin to see its effects. While up until now, we have seen the interacting of two generations (that of Abraham and Sarah as the parents of their son Isaac), Parshat Toledot begins by naming the next generation of our Jewish family and the evidence of cycling behavior patterns begins.
There are many moments of cyclical behavior in this week’s portion. Isaac tries to pass his wife Rebecca off as his sister, in the same way that his father Abraham tried to do with Sarah. Furthermore, he digs wells in the valley of Gerar, as was also done in the days of his father. As for Esau, he is called “אִ֣ישׁ שָׂדֶ֑ה”—a man of the field—taking to the fields as did his father, Isaac (as you might recall he was in the field meditating when he first saw Rebecca, and it is this field meditation to which our afternoon prayers are ascribed). We are even told that Esau marries at age 40, on which Genesis Rabbah depicts Esau as overtly stating “My father married at forty; I too will do the same.”
Then, of course, there is the conflict of birthright and the recurrence of broken sibling relationship. While Isaac was the first born to Sarah, he was not Abraham’s first born son—Ishmael was—yet it was Isaac who was given the birthright. While the details are different, we see this same saga repeat itself with Isaac’s sons: Jacob ultimately usurping the birthright of his brother, Esau.
But how did the break in Jacob and Esau’s relationship come to pass? And who was to be blamed for continuing the family cycle of rupture? Rashi comments that there was no recognizable difference between Jacob and Esau until they were thirteen, and only then, did they begin to display unique traits from one another. Midrash states that at thirteen years old, Jacob heads to the beit midrash to study, while Esau heads down a path of idolatry. This is a common theme in our traditional commentaries: Jacob is revered as a thoughtful, innocent, pillar of society, while Esau is vilified as an idolator, a brutish hunter, and even a kidnapper and violator of women. While the two are put at odds with each other in the text of the Torah, our tradition seems to exacerbate this difference, almost begging us to choose a side in the sibling rivalry (Jacob’s, of course), thus perpetuating the relationships fracture long into the future.
In learning this, I became fixated on the slanderous claims launched against Esau, and I got to thinking about the power of the stories we tell. From our text, it’s not so clear that Esau is so much worse than Jacob; if anything, the contrary is true—Jacob is the one who manipulates Esau into selling him his birthright and then it’s Jacob who dresses up in animal skins in order to fool his nearly blind father into giving him a blessing meant for his brother. Yet, our commentaries tear Esau’s character apart, turning him into the evildoer, while painting Jacob as an innocent bystander who simply got caught up in the deceptive influence of his mother. Our tradition has told us polarizing stories of these two (otherwise not so different) brothers, and as such, we’ve inherited notions of favoritism, hatred of the other, and familiar estrangement.
Cycles continue just as much by the behaviors we enact as by the stories we tell, and they are passed down not only through families (as we see in Genesis), but generationally through society at large. Our stories of vilification of the other—especially during election season—remove our sense of the humanity in those across the aisle, and create deep divides within our country that pit us in hate-filled opposition to one another. Likewise, if we tell racist stories about our world, it’s likely that those influenced by us will perpetuate racist tendencies. If we complement our young girls by telling them they’re so sweet and so cute, while complementing our young boys about how smart and strong they are, we continue the cycles of gender normativity that ultimately perpetuate patriarchy.
The stories we tell have the power to keep these cycles going…or, to disrupt them.
And this week it was particularly powerful to see interruptions to some of these cycles that trap us from generation to generation. We saw women—especially women of color— in unprecedented numbers step into political office that many of them never imagined they could hold because of the stories told to them about a woman’s role. We saw states lift up gay, Muslim, Native American, Hispanic, and Black leaders, while ensuring protections for access to voting rights, bathrooms, and much more, in large part because we’re slowly shifting the stories about whose voices matter.
But, when I woke up on Thursday to the news of yet another mass shooting in our country—one of over 300 mass shootings in the United States so far in this year alone—to news of twelve more lives taken prematurely—twelve of the over 12,500 people who have been killed by gun at someone else’s hand since January—when I heard this news, my heart sank, realizing the power of this unrelenting cycle of violence.
How can this cycle keep continuing? How can we live in a society that accepts this as “normal”? We tell ourselves stories that weapons will protect us, that it is our right to defend ourselves, that had one of the “good guys” had a gun, the violence, the horror would have somehow been lessened.
Maybe I hear these stories differently because of Pittsburgh. Maybe when it was suggested that congregants arm themselves—bringing weapons built to destroy life into a sacred space meant to uplift it—when it was implied that the fault somehow rested with the victims who carried siddurim rather than handguns, when it was violence in a place of worship and a place that so closely resembles the very building I enter everyday—maybe it was then that I was shaken from my resignation that this is just what it means to live in this country—to know that no public space is exempt from acts of unfathomable violence. This cycle (and so many others that our society has painted as normative) has to change—our lives depend on it.
And if this week’s news isn’t enough, I think our Parsha stands as a cautionary tale of what can happen when damaging cycles go undisrupted. The pattern of broken sibling relationship doesn’t stop with Jacob and Esau. Jacob’s sons will also turn against their brother Joseph, ultimately selling him into slavery with the hope of never seeing him again, and the cycle of usurped birthright continues through the end of the book of Genesis. Cycles are hard to break, and I don't pretend to know how to break them. But, through the support of communities like ours and by the strength that comes from those who are courageous in speaking out, we can choose what stories we pass on to our future generations—what cycles we continue and what cycles we insist on breaking.
May we be blessed with clarity of mind that enables us to notice the dangerous patterns we perpetuate. And may we be blessed with the boldness and the energy it takes to tell new stories that demand a new course forward, resisting the pull of those cycles we must never repeat.
Read more sermons by Rabbi EBC at https://baseboston.org/sermons