Toldot: Choosing Which Israel We Become

This past week was one of the largest gatherings of Jewish people and power in the world: the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly. For those who may not know, the Federation system distributes over $2.3 billion a year worldwide, a towering monolith within the Jewish nonprofit sector. A particular recording from the GA has been making the rounds. Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for both Obamas and the author of Here All Along and the new As a Jew, speaks about her take on this moment:

“The very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as antisemitism education in this new media environment…may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism…When they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.’ That’s not how the Holocaust happened…The Germans insisted that the Jews, about 1% of their population, were responsible for all of their problems, just like Israel, the size of New Jersey, is responsible for all the world’s problems today.”

To her, the lesson of the Holocaust is that non-Jews hate Jews and that the state of Israel is the essential bulwark against that hatred, so it, too, is hated. This treats antisemitism as an exceptional, omnipresent mode of hate rather than one form of human bigotry among others. Antisemitism is real, persistent, and dangerous, but claiming its exceptionality and omnipresence as the central message of Holocaust education, and framing all critique of Israeli state violence as antisemitism, obscures the material suffering unfolding in Gaza.

By asserting that antisemitism is the primary reason people protest Israel’s actions, Hurwitz obfuscates the true horrors Israel is committing, which she refers to as “a wall of carnage” that she believes should be viewed in context as justified rather than protested. This functions as a rhetorical smoke screen to deny the genocide Israel is enacting and attempts to hide Israel’s responsibility for this carnage.

The story of Jacob and Esau, as it goes in the Torah, is that Jacob impersonates his brother to defraud him of his inheritance. Some rabbinic commentaries try to excuse Jacob’s responsibility for this deception. Most pointedly, when Isaac, sensing that he may be being tricked, asks Jacob, “Esau, is it you, my son?” Jacob responds, “Ani,” “I am.” But the medieval commentator Rashi twists the language to overcome this lie, claiming, “Jacob did not say, ‘I am Esau,’ but ‘It is I.’” That is, according to Rashi, Jacob does not directly lie but instead allows his father to draw his own conclusions.

The true p’shat, the simple reading, is clear: Jacob tricked Esau and Isaac in order to inherit both the power and the wealth of Abraham. After this trick, Esau, in utter dismay, betrayed by his own brother, says to his father, “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” and weeps aloud.

A predecessor to Rashi, in his attempt to absolve Jacob of his wrongdoing, offers a conclusion recorded in another midrash: “It is halachah (a clear and unalterable law) that Esau hates Jacob.” As Professor Shaul Magid writes in his article "Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory," “In traditional Jewish circles, the phrase ‘Esau hates Jacob’ is often deployed as a theological maxim to define antisemitism… but Russian and Polish acculturated Jewish writers adopted popular conceptions of Esau from the rabbinic idiom and turned them into ethnic ones. Esau emerged as the Goy, the non-Jew, the quintessential Other. Zionist writer Hayim Nahman Bialik provided the equivalent in Hebrew, as did other authors.”

In short, the “why” of antisemitism here becomes the claim that inherent to Esau, the goy, or non-Jews, is a hatred of Jews. The obverse, in this line of thinking, becomes true as well: Jewish collectivity is predicated upon this same universal, eternal hatred. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, concurred, saying:

“We are a group, a historical group of people who clearly belong together and have a common enemy; this seems to me an adequate definition of a nation. We are a historical group held together by a common foe. This is what we are, whether we know it or not, and whether we desire it or not.”

While Herzl’s perception of real threats to European Jews was accurate, this construction of antisemitism does not base itself in material reality. It uses antisemitism as a rationale for reconfiguring European Jews into a nation, itself defined by antisemitism. This means the nation cannot truly seek to overcome antisemitism, because if it did, the binding force that is understood to unite Jews would lose its coherence. And so antisemitism must be an eternal reality; it must be halachah; it must be that Esau always has, and always will, hate Jacob.

In the plain reading of the Torah story, Jacob knows his own guilt and works to overcome the impulse toward deception within him. In doing so, as beautifully literary as the Torah ever is, he is given a new name which is the opposite of his old one. The commentator Ibn Ezra notes that the Hebrew root (akov) of Jacob can be read to mean “deceptive.” He also alludes to a midrashic reading of the root of the name Israel, which Jacob receives after he overcomes his deceptive nature: yashar, related to being upright or straightforward.

Esau had good reason to hate Jacob for his deception. Jacob overcame the nature that led to his behavior, received a new name, and then, as we later see in the Torah, they reconciled. This is not to say that the parallel with antisemitism works here. Antisemitism does not exist because Jews did something wrong; it is a form of bigotry like all others, with its own material circumstances and influences. The story of Jacob and Esau is not about antisemitism at all; it is about responsibility and personal growth. Had Jacob continued to evade his responsibility, the name Israel would not even exist. The only reason he was blessed with it was his willingness to take responsibility for his actions and to be righteous. Perhaps, then, that is our path as well. Even in the face of the bigoted hatreds of antisemitism that do certainly exist, we must follow Yashar-El, the God of uprightness, and be the ones to live in the image of Jacob, the true Israel.