Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

     An enigma is forever hovering over the decree laid upon our forefathers: They must be always extracting the precious from the low-grade, through their unceasing struggle against evil, all the while raising aloft the banner of good.

      Choice among our forefathers is Yaakov, whose very name testifies to this: Yaakov Yisrael. Yet both of these names exude a scent of life-threatening peril, both in this lowly world and on high, for both worlds seem to have joined forces – as in “airailim with mitsukim” – to stand in his path.

      “Few and bad have been the days of the years of my life.” “Yaakov sought to dwell in tranquility; the anguish of Yoseph pounced upon him.” Yaakov’s father seeks to pass on the powerful key of blessings, from father to son, from Yitzchak to…the wicked Esav? ...rather than to his perfectly righteous son who walked perpetually in the path of God. Only his mother, specifically – Rivka, whose roots originated in a family of wicked people – only Rivka loved the correct son.

      “Why do I thus exist?” Rivka complains, when she discovers that she must play the role of introducing order and method into the relations between good and evil. Until the birth of Yaakov and Esav, good and evil had been interwoven and intermingled within one another, to the point that people could ruin their own paths by attempting and intending to hold onto good, and discovering instead that they had grasped evil. In order to ease the task of free choice, Rivka was charged with the role of bringing forth into the world a good and evil that were utterly different from one another, not only in substance, but also in form. Good would have an address of its own, and evil would have its own address. One would be hairy and one would be smooth, i.e. tocho cevaro, “his inner like his outer”.

      Esav attempts, in the way of all evil, to hide behind good’s back. From here onward, though, his task would not be quite so easy. Aside from errors he would make regarding himself personally – errors thoroughly capable of turning him in, and exposing his true face, such as selling his right of first born for a lentil stew – Yaakov would also be required to work against him: Yaakov must deepen the gap between Esav’s base deeds, and the necessarily desirable results of his own deeds.

      “Have you also murdered and also inherited?” will no longer succeed. Despite Esav’s bitter outcry, which holds on to incidental impressions, Yaakov holds on to Esav’s heel, and exposes the true unfolding of events beneath the surface. Yet it is no use: There is no logic, and there are no facts strong enough to convince the one who prefers to choose evil.

      Already in Parashat Lech Lecha we had paused to examine this principle: That good and evil must necessarily be neighbors, not only in order to give man an opportunity to gain merit by taking the trouble to make choices, and thereby earn reward, but in order to preserve and define the good – a task that is reserved for evil.

      From the darkness, the light pierces through. From evil, good escapes, to guard its own vital essence. The dynamics created by the titanic struggle between these two antagonists, assists in defining them and in preserving the difference inherent between them.

      At the stage of Yaakov and Esav: “And his hand was grasping Esav’s heel.” On the surface it appears that the bond between them deepens to the point of permanent dependency, yet nevertheless, the differentness, and the antagonism in their very substance, deepens as well, to the point that their external proximity would be incapable of blurring the differences, and would only make them absolutely clear; the effect of their being close neighbors would only be to emphasize this. From Esav, you learn to cherish Yaakov’s qualities, just as from the materiality of the earth, you have the pleasure of discovering the pristine blue of heaven.

      Rivka: From her experience in her father’s house, she recognizes that it is risky to have evil breathing down good’s neck, and she knows there is no escaping the need to separate them, to sever these twins whom she has carried together in her womb. The tsadeket in her overcomes the mother in her.

      Yitzchak knows that there is no such thing as evil in substance. He hopes to be able to expose the good that is buried even in the inner essence of Esav. It is not reasonable to assume that his purity of perfection blinded his eyes to such an extent that he actually believed Esav to be a tsadik. In Esav’s taking the trouble to pay respect to him and to serve him, he glimpses signs of good, flickering and rising through the cloak of wild hair that covers him. The brachot that Yitzchak planned to give Esav were meant to assist him to sanctify physical matter, to impenetrate the quality of truth into the quantity of brute force that his cloak exuded. A container for content: This is how Yitzchak would view the relationship between evil and good. Thus perfection would return to the universe, and evil would serve good. “The elder would serve the younger.”

      It is interesting to point out that though it was Rivka specifically who received the news about this ideal relationship, she actually refrained from revealing what she had heard in Shem’s hall of study. This was because she believed, apparently, that the moment had not arrived, that the time for this vision’s fulfillment was still to come. It would be compulsory, for their own educational good, to separate them, to distance them from one another within the immediate present reality. “The elder would serve the younger” only when the younger would reach maturity, and crystallize into perfection. At the time when “the voice would be Yaakov’s voice”, rising from study halls, then “the hands that would be Esav’s hands, would have no control.” Yet for the moment, it would be necessary to immunize the younger, and to teach him the habits of confronting evil in its more continuous form – not in its murderous form, which does not allow good to defend itself, but rather evil in its devious form, with her brother, the swindler. Only after staying at Lavan’s house for many long years, for as long as it would take him to learn this lesson, would he succeed in confronting Esav, and not before.

      “ ‘And the Lord will give you…’ It also wishes to show that he blessed him with spiritual and with material blessings. Corresponding to the spiritual ones, it says without clarifying, ‘he blessed him’. And corresponding to the material ones, it says ‘and God will give you,’ adding the ‘and’, meaning: Not only shall you have the higher world, which Avraham chose for his children, and which is the essential of the purpose of the seed of Yisrael, but furthermore, ‘and God will give you’ in this world.” (Ohr HaHaim)

      “And Yitzchak felt horror, great horror… ‘and he shall indeed be blessed.’” Yitzchak was happy and satisfied at having blessed Yaakov. If so, why the horror? It seems that according to Yitzchak’s approach, one could not separate the service of God through the physical from the service of God through the spiritual. Direct service of God without anything material, as in Rabi Shimon Bar Yohai’s approach, is flawed. Also a service that bypasses spirituality, that serves through materialism alone, Yitzchak rejected with “very great horror”, because he realized the difficulty in it, which could render all of its success null and void.

      Now here he stands before half a choice. After all, Yaakov – he has already blessed with the perfect blessing. What then remains for Esav, if not the blessing of the bypass method, whose success is dubious? “He saw hell opening under Esav.” (See Gur Aryeh.)

      Indeed, many have attempted the direct service of God, through spirituality alone, and have not been successful. Many more have stumbled over service of God through materialism, and their end was hell’s heritage. Yitzchak is horrified over Esav’s fate. He is anxious over the possibility that Esav might not succeed in controlling his own wickedness, and that his end would be gehinom. Therefore, Yitzchak perseveres with his own approach. He binds Esav’s fate to Yaakov’s success: “And if you shall grieve, you shall dismantle his yoke from upon your neck.”

      This means you have no chance whatever of serving God through materialism, out of good intentions alone. You will be required to continue to lean on Yaakov, the perfect (direct) tsadik. God’s servant must hold on to Torah and mitsvot, and draw existential reality upward through them. He must force the dimension of height upon existential reality, and impenetrate the meaning of value-based/spiritual quality into it. Without this meaningful content, physical matter is left prey to brute-force wickedness and cruelty. Then the good in man becomes enslaved to evil: With the good that is in him, he becomes compassionate to the cruel, and cruel to the compassionate, and fails to distinguish between a good deed and an evil deed. Very few indeed are the wicked who recognize their own wickedness, or the swindlers who do not consider themselves to be utterly sincere, to hold the mida of truth in their very pockets. In their eyes, direct tsadikim seem to be either na?ve or hypocritical. This explains Yitzchak’s anxiety over his son Esav’s fate.