Esav Reconsidered
By Michelle K Wolf, November 20, 2021
When it comes to Essau, our sages never missed a chance to disparage him, and they projected all types of evil onto him. In fact his Talmudic nickname was עשו הרשע “Esav the Wicked”.
According to Rabbi Barry Dov Walfish at thetorah.com ,only a few other truly nasty dudes are given the same appellation:
- Pharaoh (b. Sotah 12a), enslaver of the Israelites, murderer of their baby boys;
- Balaam (m. Abot 5:19), who wished Israel evil, and managed to seduce them into idolatry;
- Nebuchadnezzar (b. Berakhot 57b), destroyer of the First Temple;
- Haman (b. Megillah 10b), who hatched a plot to destroy the Jews and convinced King Ahasuerus to enable it;
- Titus (b. Gittin 56b), destroyer of the Second Temple;
In the Roman period, Edom and Esau come to represent Rome. While many factors led to this identification, one major factor was the position of Herod, who was appointed by Rome as the king of Judea, and who was from a family of Edomite/Idumean converts to Judaism.[8] He and his descendants were hated by many Judeans, and their acting as Roman proxies helped solidify the Edom = Rome equation.
The rabbis were heirs to the disdain for Herod, and the midrash and Talmud take the equation of Edom and Rome for granted. Living in the time after the destruction of the temple and the quashing of the Bar-Kokhba uprising, Rome, in the guise of Edom, was despised.
This negative view of Esav is expressed nowhere more forcefully than in Rashi’s commentaries, writing in the 11th century, Rashi has trouble saying anything good or even neutral about Esau. Conversely, Jacob is portrayed as a righteous soul without a blemish on his character. Although typically Rashi only made use of midrashic sources when they help to solve a difficult explanation of a text, or fill an important gap in the narrative,[15] it seems clear that when it comes to Esav, Rashi reads verses against their plain meaning in order to impress upon the reader the utter wickedness and depravity of Esau.. For example the midrash on Toldot which says that when the twins were in Rebecca’s womb, Esau kicked when his mother passed a pagan temple. Even more far-fetched, Rashi at one point argues that Essau’s redhair shows that he is bloodthirsty.
From his commentaries on Psalms and Isaiah it is clear that Rashi accepts the identification of Esau with Christianity/The Church, and seeks to give his readers encouragement by showing that in the end Israel will prevail, and the Christians, symbolized by Esau/Edom, will lose their advantage and their dominion will in the end be terminated.
But the constant drumbeat of negativity around Essau is a stretch at best. For example, although it is true that Esau said he will kill Jacob in retribution for his brother’s act of deception, the fact is that Esav takes no actions to kill Jacob, and when they ultimately reconcile in today’s parasha, Esau comes to greet him Jacob with great affection, albeit accompanied by a 400-strong security force.
בראשית לג:ד וַיָּ ָרץ ﬠֵ שָׂ ו לִ קְ ָראתוֹ וַיְחַ בְּ קֵ הוּ וַיִּ פֹּל ﬠַ ל צַ וָּארָ ו וַיִּ שָּׁ קֵ הוּ וַיִּ בְ כּוּ.
Gen 33:4 But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.[5]
And while the cynics among us might say that Esav shows affection only because of the many presents Jacob has sent to him, Esau clarifies that he has no need for those presents and is happy with his lot:
בראשית לג:ט וַיֹּאמֶ ר עֵש ָּ ו יֶשׁ לִ י רָּ ב אָּ חִ י יְהִ י לְ ךָ אֲשֶׁ ר לָּךְ.
Gen 33:9 But Esau said, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”
Later on, Esav is even described as joining Jacob in the burial of their father after his passing (Gen 35:29). All in all, this hardly seems like the portrait of a wicked villain.
The twins are presented as polar opposites: Esav is hairy, Jacob is smooth. Esav loves the outdoors and hunting, Jacob prefers to stay close to home in the tents and more of an intellectual. Jacob is a crafty, long term strategic thinker while Esav is more of a short-term, immediate gratification kind of guy, and so on.
Perhaps the most extreme difference is that their Dad Issac favors Esav and Mom Rebekkah favors Jacob.
This complicated sibling relationship culminates in this week’s wrestling match. Jacob’s opponent is Esav’s Guardian angel, some say Samuel. This seems to provide additional proof that Esav is a decent guy, meriting his own angel.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory has another take on the Jacob and Essau dynamic:
My argument is that we can only understand the (angel wrestling) passage against the entire background of Jacob’s life. Jacob was born holding on to Esau’s heel. He bought Esau’s birthright. He stole Esau’s blessing. When his blind father asked him who he was, he replied, “I am Esau your firstborn.” Jacob was the child who wanted to be Esau.
Why? Because Esau was the elder. Because Esau was strong, physically mature, a hunter. Above all because Esau was his father’s favorite: “Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebecca loved Jacob” (Gen. 25: 28). Jacob is the paradigm case of what the French literary theorist and anthropologist Rene Girard called mimetic desire, meaning, we want what someone else wants, because we want to be that someone else.[1] The result is tension between Jacob and Esau which rises to an unbearable intensity when Esau discovers that Jacob has taken the blessing Isaac had reserved for him, and vows to kill him when Isaac is no longer alive.
Talk about your #dysfunctional family!
Another reason for the rough treatment of Essau is that the Rabbis thought that if Jacob is our hero, then his opposite character must be the villain. But really, if we just read the text, it is clear that Esav has both good and bad qualities, just like anyone else. He is more than ready to reconcile with his brother, who after all, stole almost everything that he was supposed to inherit.
In thinking about the Four Sons in our Haggadah, I would suggest that Esav is more of much more of the Tam then the Raasha.
Yeah, he made some bad choices when it came to trading his birthright away for a bowl of lentil soup and also in making appropriate decisions when it came to marriage, but overall, he’s a simple, loyal kind of a guy who matures and seems content with his own lot and mission in life.
It’s time to remove that nasty nickname of עשו הרשע and rebrand Esav as more of a middling soul who is just doing the best he can with the circumstances of his life.
Source materials
https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-denigration-of-esau
For example, Psalm 137, which describes itself as a dirge set in the Babylonian exile, accuses the Edomites of relishing Judah’s destruction:
תהלים קלז:ז
זְכֹר יְ־הוָה לִ בְ נֵי אֱדוֹם אֵ ת יוֹם יְרוּשָׁ ל ָ ִם הָ אֹ מְ ִרים ﬠָרוּ ﬠָרוּ ﬠַד הַיְסוֹד בָּ הּ.
Ps 137:7 Remember, O YHWH, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”
–Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
The sages said it was Samael, guardian angel of Esau and a force for evil (Bereshith Rabbah 77; Rashi; Zohar). Jacob himself was convinced it was God. “Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Gen. 32:31).
My argument is that we can only understand the passage against the entire background of Jacob’s life. Jacob was born holding on to Esau’s heel. He bought Esau’s birthright. He stole Esau’s blessing. When his blind father asked him who he was, he replied, “I am Esau your firstborn.” Jacob was the child who wanted to be Esau.
Why? Because Esau was the elder. Because Esau was strong, physically mature, a hunter. Above all because Esau was his father’s favorite: “Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebecca loved Jacob” (Gen. 25: 28). Jacob is the paradigm case of what the French literary theorist and anthropologist Rene Girard called mimetic desire, meaning, we want what someone else wants, because we want to be that someone else.[1] The result is tension between Jacob and Esau which rises to an unbearable intensity when Esau discovers that Jacob has taken the blessing Isaac had reserved for him, and vows to kill him when Isaac is no longer alive.
Jacob flees to Laban where he encounters more conflict and is on his way home when he hears that Esau is coming to meet him with a force of 400 men. In an unusually strong description of emotion the Torah tells us that Jacob was “very frightened and distressed,” frightened, no doubt, that Esau would try to kill him, and perhaps distressed that his brother’s animosity was not without cause.
Jacob had indeed wronged him. Isaac says to Esau, “Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.” Centuries later the prophet Hosea said, “The Lord has a charge to bring against Judah; he will punish Jacob according to his ways and repay him according to his deeds. In the womb he grasped his brother’s heel; as a man he struggled with God” (Hos. 12:3-4). Jeremiah uses the name Jacob to mean someone who practices deception: “Beware of your friends; do not trust anyone in your clan; for every one of them is a deceiver [akov Yaakov], and every friend a slanderer” (Jer. 9:3).
As long as Jacob sought to be Esau there was tension, conflict, rivalry. Esau felt cheated; Jacob felt fear. That night, about to meet Esau again after an absence of twenty two years Jacob wrestles with himself and finally throws off the image of Esau that he has carried with him all these years as the person he wants to be. This is the critical moment in Jacob’s life. From now on he is content to be himself. And it is only when we stop wanting to be someone else (in Shakespeare’s words, “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least”[2]) that we can be at peace with ourselves and with the world.