Sermon: Kissing and Biting- VaYishlach 2009

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 7 December 2000

This is not a new joke.  Once in a pleasant London suburb there was a Catholic Priest, a Church of England Vicar and a Rabbi.  The three of them shared a tricky problem – mice – mice infesting the priest’s presbytery, mice scampering around the vicar’s vestry and mice running too and fro in the Rabbi’s synagogue.

This had been a long running problem for all of them and they had discussed it during their interfaith clergy meetings several times.  The time had come for severe action.  The Catholic priest went and bought hundreds of mouse traps and laid them around the presbytery to catch the mice – but it didn’t work.  After just a few days the brave mice learnt how to avoid the traps, run around them and they were back.

The Vicar went out and bought a rifle and started shooting the mice whenever he saw them in the vestry.  Trouble was he wasn’t that great a shot and so each time he hit a mouse he also succeeded in making a hole in the wall – through which within a few days new mice would come.

The only clergyman who succeeded in getting rid of his mice permanently was the Rabbi.  The Priest and Vicar were enormously impressed as they met in the now mouse free synagogue with the Rabbi.  “How did you do it?” they asked.  “Well” said the Rabbi, “I thought and thought what to do then one night it came to me and this is what I did – I found out each mouse’s birthday, carefully taught him the sedra from the Torah for the week, painstakingly taught him how to read Hebrew, how to chant the blessings, how to wear a tallit, how to daven.  I gave each of those mice a Barmitzvah and from that day onwards I have not seen hide nor hair of them in Synagogue.”

The final words of each Bar or Bat Mitzvah ceremony are words of blessing but they are a blessing that some of our young people run away from straight away.  They are like Jacob in the Torah portion two weeks ago today who, when his blind father Isaac has pronounced his blessing (thinking that it was Esau that he was blessing) gets up and runs away and does not stop running for twenty one years – when our portion finds him ready to return to the Land of Canaan to face the music from his brother Esau.  It would seem that he is running away from his blessing too.

But if he had run away from his blessing there is no way that Judaism could have continued.   Jacob was the man who was to become the third patriarch – father to the children whose names are borne by the twelve tribes of Israel.  He was the man who was describe confronted by the wrestling angel and given our name – Israel – the people who struggle with God.  Jacob did not run away from his blessing – in truth he ran with his blessing.   It was together with his blessing then that he came to meet his brother Esau

Poor Esau got awful treatment in the Midrashim.  It was all to do with his name – or rather the area of land that Esau was said to rule as tribal chieftain in the Torah – Edom.

This is how Edom is spelt in Hebrew.  This is what happens if you take the letter Alef off it.  And this is what happens if you sort of leave the tail off the Dalet – yes it becomes Rom – Rome the Roman Empire.  Esau’s legacy, according to the Rabbis who composed the Midrashim was the Roman Empire – domination of Israel by empire, the corrupt practices of emperors and prefectorae and the violence of gladiators and circuses, the power that in the time that they were writing was full of oppression and strife.     According to the Biblical Scholar Neima Novetsky the roots of the transfer from Esau to Rome go through Herod, the Hasmonean King who gained his position and power from his accommodation with the Roman authorities and who was himself from Edom – Idumea.

That, said the Rabbis, was why Jacob did the right thing taking his father’s blessing from Esau.  Keeping the heritage of Judaism safe from the influence of Rome.  It meant that they did not believe that Jacob and Esau truly kissed when thy met as a straight reading of the Torah portion Vayishlach tells us.  Rather the word for “they kissed” , carries a superscription of unique dots in every Sefer Torah.  So the Rabbis said they did not kiss (yishakehu) instead Esau bit Jacob (which with a change of one letter from a cuf to a caf is also yishakehu).  When it says in the Torah text that Esau fell on Jacobs neck after they kissed , this, the rabbis said is because Jacob’s neck turned to marble.  When it says in the Torah text that they cried, the Rabbis said that this was because all of Esau’s teeth fell out and Jacob cried from despair that Esau, Edom, bore him such ill will.

In these Midrashim Rome – Edom – Esau represents the society outside Judaism which the Rabbis living under oppressive Roman domination wanted to tell us – Israel – Jacob to spurn.   But for most Reform Jews we will not do that.    We are thoroughly at home with the society around us.  We do not spurn the heritage of Rome – the western society in which we live – rather we can take a plain reading of the Torah text – we embrace it.

And that, midrash aside, is just what Jacob does.  In the Torah itself He kisses his brother Esau, and they find a way of co-existence.  Indeed they stay in touch and come together a couple of chapters later to bury their father Isaac together.  But that does not mean that Jacob loses any of his identity as Israel.  Embracing Esau Jacob continues to establish Judaism for every generation after him.

Rabbi Richard Hirsh writes that: “The path toward the blessing for Jacob is not a straight one.  Although endorsed by heaven, Jacob must move from being given the blessing , to taking it by deception, to earning it by wrestling with his demons – and his angels.  Similarly, Jewish identity today can not merely be assumed as given – for example, as resulting from an accident of birth.  Nor can it be taken by deception or deceit.  It must be earned through study, reflection, action and involvement.  Like Jacob, each Jew has the potential to become “Israel” and, like Jacob, each Jew must wrestle with the challenge of living up to that responsibility and accepting as a blessing that opportunity.”

It means, in terms reflected by your quotation of Aviva Zornberg in your D’var Torah, Isaac, that we have to take seriously the idea that Esau might bite us just as much as embrace us – so that, at the same time as we embrace our heritage we also feel danger from it.  Last weekend I was in Worcestershire leading the Jeneration Bet Midrash for fourteen people aged from 18-25.  It was a beautiful weekend where together over three days we studied Jewish texts and ideas, questioned, argued, prayed and built friendship.  I taught together with Rabbi Chaim Weiner and Rabbi Judith Rosen Berry, each of us living and teaching a different perspective on Judaism.

Throughout the weekend it was clear that our students both embrace our heritage and our texts and also feel bitten by them as they do by the society around them.  Jewish traditional texts by turns fascinate and repel them.  They feel a right and duty to challenge everything – but also a compulsion to guide their lives through Judaism.   Their Reform Judaism is about the compelling commitment that they make to future – not based on a relationship to Orthodox Judaism (as in Orthodox Judaism minus) but a blessing which they run with both embracing and biting.

In our community in the past week we shared a related constructive dilemma – the result of which you can see on your Shul sheet this week.  Rabbis Josh, Laura and I have set up a rolling course for couples who are about to or have recently been married.  It begins on Tuesday night and then monthly.  The course teaches the foundation of marriage in Jewish texts, finding harmony in marriage and building the marriage ceremony.  Rabbi Josh titled the first session in the series with a phrase from the Talmud Yevamot:  “A person without a spouse lives without joy, without blessing, without peace.”  This statement reflects attitudes to marriage which many of us find horribly exclusive.  Yet it is there in our texts – like the dots over the word for embracing in the Jacob and Esau story and the subsequent midrashic condemnation of Esau.

It has the potential to bite us, yet if we are to seriously understand the guidance and ideas about marriage that have for millennia built the Jewish wedding, and to be part of the debate and argument about it, we must also embrace our texts from the past.  As Rabbi Josh’s publicity for this session says we explore the texts which say this kind of thing with a sense of the challenge that they give to us.

Judaism today – living Judaism – is about running with the blessing – like Jacob does.  Both embracing it and not being afraid that once in a while it may bite us.  For today’s Reform Jew all the Jewish textual landscape is open to us – it is not the property of some other part of Judaism.  We are not to be afraid to read, study, argue and discuss the whole of Jewish tradition.

In the earlier years of Reform Judaism clarity demanded that we left well alone that which did not enable us to synthesise Judaism with our surrounding culture – for the good of both.  Today with two hundred years of maturity behind us – as we reach the bicentenary of the foundation of the first Reform Synagogue by Israel Jacobson in Sessen in 1810 – like the twenty one years that Jacob spent running with his blessing – we can both embrace and healthily critique our heritage.    That is the way that our Rabbis teach at Alyth.  It is not either/or.

May we though our learning, practice and delight in the religion of Israel, once called Jacob, come ever closer to following God’s will in this world.