Toldot: Do Parents Know Their Children?

It is commonly assumed that parents know their children much better than anyone else knows them. After all, parents have had the opportunity to observe their children from their earliest years, from their infancy, and in most instances observed them daily as they grew. 

Many mothers will insist that their acquaintance with their children began long before they were born. Even before the child emerged from the womb, it became apparent to them that this child would be active, stubborn, and rebellious, whereas this other child would be calm, complacent, and cooperative. 

As a parent myself and as one who has spent his professional life in the fields of education and child psychology, I have come to a very different conclusion. I now am convinced that relatively few parents really know their children and often are tragically oblivious to their child’s strengths and weaknesses. 

This week’s Torah portion, Toldot (Genesis 25:19-28:9), provides us with a window into the parent-child relationship in general and allows us to analyze and speculate about one particular such relationship. You guessed i—I’m referring to Isaac/Yitzchak and Rebekah/Rivka, parents of the twin boys, Esau/Esav and Jacob/Yaakov. 

At first, Yitzchak and Rivka had difficulty conceiving a child. They prayed desperately. Rashi imprints upon us the visual image of them both standing in diametrically opposite corners of a room, beseeching the Almighty for a child. 

That image is quite foreboding. It portrays two individuals with diverse expectations of the result of their fervent prayers. One might conjecture that Yitzchak stood in his corner praying for the type of child he would welcome, while Rivka stood “over and against him” in the other corner of the chapel with a very different sort of offspring in her dreams. 

Their prayers were answered, and both Yitzchak and Rivka had their dreams fulfilled. Twins were born, and from birth they displayed very different dispositions and behavior patterns. They were named Esav and Yaakov. The former developed into “a man of the field” and became a “cunning hunter.” The latter became a “quiet person,” a homebody. 

On this basis alone, one would predict that Rivka’s maternal instincts would cause her to favor Yaakov and would cherish his complacent personality. Yitzchak, we would suspect, would find Esav more to his liking since he too spent time in the fields, although he was attracted to the open spaces of nature not in search of hunting grounds but as quiet places, conducive to prayer and meditation. 

As we continue to read the text, we soon discover that our suppositions were correct: “Now Yitzchak loved Esav because he did eat of his venison; and Rivka loved Yaakov.” (Genesis 25:28, Soncino translation)

We have no trouble accepting that Rivka loved Yaakov, and it doesn’t occur to us to ask, “Why?”. Her love was based on every mother’s unconditional love for her son, especially since he was such a “good little boy.” 

But we are stumped when we try to understand Yitzchak’s love for Esav. Was Yitzchak’s love to be gained by an occasional treat of a few slices of venison? Surely, Yitzchak would have higher standards for his child than a serving of delicatessen! 

We are not alone when we are confounded by Yitzchak’s strange preference for his “cunning hunter” over and above his “dweller in the tents,” presumably the “tents of study and spiritual practices.” Numerous commentators have been similarly confounded and suggest in a wide variety of responses. 

One such response is offered by Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Salant, the Jerusalem teacher and preacher of two generations ago, in his two-volume commentary, Be’er Yosef.  

The basis of his approach is to be found in Maimonides/Rambam’s sixth chapter of his “Eight Chapters” of introduction to Ethics of the Fathers/Pirkei Avot.  

There Rambam reflects upon the following theological question: Who stands higher in the ranks of the righteous? Is it the person who is dispassionate, who faces no internal religious doubts or immoral urges? Or is it the person who knows temptation, who is beset by all sorts of illicit desires, but who suppresses them successfully and behaves properly? 

Rambam reports that there is a basic argument here between the “philosophers” and the “Torah sources.” The former believe that it is the pure soul who never experiences sinful inner tendencies who stands higher than the one who overcomes his nasty evil urges. 

The Torah, on the other hand, values the person who controls himself, refrains from acting on his passions, and behaves in a punctiliously correct manner. 

I must add that Rambam distinguishes between two types of sinful temptations. However, the eighteenth-century sage Rabbi Yaakov Emden in his gloss upon the “Eight Chapters” (to be found in the appendix to the tractate Avodah Zara in the standard Vilna edition of the Babylonian Talmud) supersedes Rambam’s distinctions and simply declares “lefum tzaara agra,” the more difficulty a person faces when he tries to act properly, the more the reward for overcoming those difficulties.  

After reviewing and explicating Rambam’s thesis and Rabbi Emden’s perspective, Rabbi Salant returns to our quandary: What was Yitzchak thinking when he favored Esav? What was the motive of his preference for the “cunning hunter” over and above the simple and straightforward Yaakov? 

Yitzchak, suggest Rabbi Salant, was aware of the theological question which was the focus of Rambam’s treatise. He knew full well that Yaakov was a “pure soul,” and Esav had many “hunting” urges of all sorts. But he saw Esav’s life choices as attempts to channel his urges in a positive direction. He is the model of the Talmud’s analogy of a person who is born under the constellation of maadim/Mars, the epitome of bloody warfare, in modern terms the genetically wired man of violence, who can sublimate his dark inner passions by choosing to be a ritual slaughterer/shochet or a surgeon who sheds blood but as part of medical operation, or a mohel who sheds blood for the mitzvah of circumcision (see Masechet Shabbat, 156a). 

Yitzchak interpreted Esav’s hunting as his struggle to channel his urges toward violence into the hunt for delicious food for his aging and blind father. From that vantage point, Yaakov took second place. He was thoroughly good and knew no wayward temptations. Fine. But Esav, from Yitzchak’s perspective, stood even higher because of his internal struggles.  

I leave it to you, dear reader, to ponder Rabbi Salant’s ingenious interpretation of Yitzchak’s love for Esav and to decide for yourself whether Yitzchak the parent understood his favorite son.