Eisav HaRasha?

I have a vivid memory of a poster of Eisav that hung in my Kindergarten classroom. Eisav, built like an ogre and covered in squiggly red hair, stands at the head of his four hundred men, a murderous scowl on his face. I was afraid of that poster, and would try to avoid looking at it.

The commentaries paint the picture of Eisav as an evil brute, and, in contrast, Yaakov as pious and saintly. Yet these seem to be informed attributes. Eisav never does anything truly evil, and Yaakov never does anything righteous. Quite the opposite. Eisav cares for his father while Yaakov sits in the tent. The commentaries assume that Yaakov was in some sort of early-day kollel, but the chumash never implies that.

When Eisav comes home, hungry after a day out in the fields, Yaakov refuses to feed him until Eisav parts with something of value. Sure, Eisav is rather callous towards his birthright, but that’s hardly evil. Yaakov’s refusal to feed Eisav, on the other hand… Imagine two brothers, living in their parents’ house. One is cooking dinner when the other comes home half-starved from a long trip and asks for some of the food. The cook refuses to part with the food until his brother hands him the title to his car. Which brother is virtuous? Which is evil?

There’s a midrash that tries to make Eisav extra-evil in this story by explaining that Eisav had just come from committing a murder. And who was it that he had killed? Nimrod, the man who had tried to burn his grandfather Avraham alive, a man who is himself portrayed as evil. Killing Nimrod may not have been good, per se, but it was hardly as if Eisav was out slaughtering innocent children for the fun of it.

Later Yaakov lies to his father to get the brochos. The commentaries scramble to explain why it wasn’t really a lie, but the justifications are laughably weak. When Eisav finds out he is murderously angry and Yaakov flees to his mother’s family. It isn’t good that Eisav wants to kill Yaakov, but it’s hardly unmitigated evil. Eisav is justifiably angry over having his inheritance stolen. Yet somehow, Yaakov is the virtuous one and Eisav is the evil one.

Years later when Yaakov is returning to his father’s house, he is told that Eisav is coming to kill him. Again, not a good thing, but it is understandable. Yaakov sends Eisav gifts and Eisav, far from what we would expect of a thoroughly evil man, accepts Yaakov’s apology and welcomes his brother home with love. The commentaries vilify Eisav by claiming he didn’t really accept the apology and that he was trying to bite Yaakov rather than kiss him as the pasuk says, but this runs counter to the plain meaning of the text.

If we weren’t told early on that Eisav is evil and Yaakov is good, I think we would see both characters as having at best a grey morality. Eisav is violent, but Yaakov is an extortionist, a liar, and a thief. Yaakov is hardly a righteous tzaddik, and Eisav is not an evil rasha.



[I wonder if the characterization of Yaakov as good and Eisav as evil might reflect a moral system that abhorred violence as evil but saw clever trickery – such as getting Eisav to part with the birthright, or fooling Yitzchak into giving Yaakov the brochos – as amoral or perhaps even as an admirable skill.]

Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms

Nothing groundbreaking here, just something that’s been rattling around inside my head for a while.

When I was a kid, my mother would say Shema with my brother and me before we went to sleep each night. When my wife puts my daughter to bed, she does the same. Lately, my daughter has been asking me to say Shema with her when I put her to bed (which is most nights).

Shema has a central place in Jewish prayer. It is one of the first tefillos we learn as children, and it is supposed to be the last thing we say before we die. Along with Shemoneh Esrei, it’s what daily davening is built around. It is generally taken to be a statement of Hashem’s monotheistic supremacy. Yet anyone who takes a moment to read it literally can see that it makes little sense as such.

I think most people in the frum world, perhaps even in the religious Jewish world, never read Shema literally. As a kid I was taught that Shema translated as, “Hear Israel, Hashem is Hashem, there is one Hashem.” But this is not what it says. It says, “Hear Israel, Yahweh is your god, Yahweh is one.”

It’s read the first way and not the second way because Yahweh and elohim are thought of as synonyms for “Hashem” when in fact Yahweh is a name and elohim is the equivalent of the English little “g” god. Shema is not monotheistic statement about the singular magnificence of God, but a monolatrous definition of a god named Yahweh. It is telling the nation of Israel that Yahweh is their god, and that Yahweh is only one god despite the widespread practice of worshipping his different aspects under different names.

This is something that would never have occurred to me when reading Shema with a frum worldview. It was only after learning about ancient religions that I realized how strangely Shema is worded – which then led me to the realization that it’s not strangely worded at all if you accept that it means exactly what it says.

You may not have noticed, but the post’s title forms the acronym ESP. Too bad I couldn’t think of a clever way to relate that to the post’s subject.

Just Shoot Him!

I came across this cartoon yesterday. It illustrates a question I’ve had for a long time now about the David and Goliath story.

When I was a little kid, I learned the story of how David, a boy with no military experience, went up against Goliath, a giant warrior. David hit Goliath with a stone from his “slingshot,” which miraculously hit the giant Philistine in a vulnerable place right between his eyes and killed him.

The picture I formed was of a Dennis-the-menace like kid with a toy slingshot going up against an ogre. For the kid to win was certainly a miracle!

The actual story as related in nach is somewhat different.

David was a young man, not a little boy, and he used a sling, not a slingshot. I suppose my first-grade rebbe can be excused for not knowing much about obsolete weaponry, but the difference between a slingshot and a sling is enormous. Even a real slingshot (as opposed to a toy made with a forked twig and a rubber band) propels a projectile with about the same force as a BB gun. A sling, on the other hand, is a deadly weapon. From Wikipedia:

A sling is a projectile weapon typically used to throw a blunt projectile such as a stone. It is also known as the shepherd's sling.

A sling has a small cradle or pouch in the middle of two lengths of cord. The sling stone is placed in the pouch. Both cords are held in the hand, then the sling is swung and one of the two cords is released. This frees the projectile to fly on a tangent to the circle made by the pouch's rotation. The sling derives its effectiveness by essentially extending the length of a human arm, thus allowing stones to be thrown several times farther than they could be by hand.

The sling is very inexpensive, and easy to build. It has historically been used for hunting game and in combat.

Until the invention of firearms slingers were used in combat in the same way as archers. Unlike a bow, though, slings were easy to make and fired stones or cheap lead bullets instead of expensive arrows. This was not a toy. As a shepherd, David would have had experience using a sling to defend his sheep from predators. In the hands of an expert, a sling was as deadly as a pistol.

The encounter, then, was not a little kid with a toy challenging the Philistine champion. It’s more like the scene from Indiana Jones where Indy, confronted by a large man who is clearly an expert swordsman, pulls out a revolver and shoots him. All of a warrior’s skill counts for nothing if the other guy has a gun – or a sling.

So why is the incident treated as a miracle?

One reason might be that, until very recently, it was assumed that the outcome of combat depended, not on the skill of the soldiers and generals, but on the will of God. As recently as the American Civil War, General Robert E. Lee, after ordering an assault on the center of the Union line at Gettysburg (despite the protests of his subordinates), said that the result was “In God’s hands.” Lee, a master tactician, felt that tactics mattered for nothing when compared to God’s will. This sentiment was even stronger in the ancient world. Thus the outcome of a battle was seen as nothing less than the manifestation of God’s will – a miracle. The unusual circumstances of a shepherd defeating a seasoned warrior (and the shepherd boy going on to become king) are what made this particular encounter memorable.

Another possibility is that the unusual aspects of the encounter are themselves the reason the incident is considered miraculous. Even today, someone who survives a situation where he might have been killed often calls his survival a “miracle” even if there was nothing supernatural about it. Even though there was nothing supernatural about David shooting Goliath in the head, the fact that David came through the encounter in one piece might itself be reason enough to call the incident a miracle.

So, would we consider it a miracle today? If a teenaged farm boy armed with the pistol he uses to shoot at coyotes faced off against a master swordsman in single combat and won by shooting the swordsman between the eyes from twenty feet away, would that be a miracle?

Haman’s Ingratitude

The following is something I wrote almost a year ago, when I was still playing with the idea of starting a blog. It’s the first piece I ever wrote with the intention of posting. Now it’s finally the right time of year to put it up.



3/10/09

The Artscroll Kol Dodi on Megilas Esther is “adapted from the shiurim of R’ Dovid Feinstein.” It has the Hebrew text of the Megillah, Artscroll’s English translation, and a semi-detailed explanation that draws on midrashim and meforshim and follows the Megillah almost word-for-word. This morning during megillah reading I was flipping through my copy reading entries at random. Some were interesting, some I had issues with, and one particular entry was an incredibly convoluted piece of illogic.

“…explained Haman’s animosity for her [Esther’s] people. Saul had waged war against Amalek and killed most of the Amalakaites, the nation of Haman. On the other hand, Saul had spared King Agag, and it was only because of that misplaced mercy that Haman had come into existence – where was his gratitude? Haman represented an extreme example of a familiar, if unpleasant, aspect of human nature that people resent those who help them.” (7:5, p.119)

Stop and think about this a moment. Saul “waged war” on Amalek and wiped out nearly the entire nation, men, women, and children. (Even the farm animals were killed, just in case any of the Amalaikim had magically transformed themselves into livestock to escape the sword.) It would seem perfectly natural that anyone who survived what can only be described as genocide would be justified in hating the nation that had destroyed his ancestors. But no, here we learn that Haman hated the Jews because Saul had been kind to his great-great-etc.-grandfather. And what was this great kindness Saul did for Agag? He let him live!

This reminds me of one of Aesop’s fables. A wolf got a bone stuck in his throat. Desperate to get it out, he asked a bird with a long beak to pull it out for him. The bird understandably did not want to put his beak down the wolf’s throat, as this would put his head between the wolf’s jaws. “You have nothing to worry about,” the wolf assured him. “I’ll even give you a reward.” Enticed by the promise of a reward, the bird pulled the bone from the wolf’s throat. Free of the painful bone the wolf started to trot away. “Wait,” the bird called after him. “What about my reward?” The wolf stopped, turned back to him and replied, “I let you stick your head in my mouth and didn’t snap it off. Isn’t that reward enough?”

Much like the wolf in the fable, the author of this megillah seems to feel that if one could have killed another and doesn’t, it is a gift bestowed upon the spared party.

[Incidentally, the moral usually paired with this particular fable, called “The Wolf and the Crane,” is: “In serving the wicked, expect no reward, and be thankful if you escape injury.”]

Wild Mass Guessing

The title is taken from here, and describes what happens when fans of a fictional work try to “fill in the logic holes and rationalize the weird.”

This was the phrase that sprang to mind when I read a short d’var torah on sukkos. The article started by asking, “Why do we sit in sukkos,” and, “Why is Sukkos in the fall?” To which the obvious answer is, ‘because it’s a harvest festival, and people camped out in huts in their fields while they were bringing in the harvest.’ Of course, this isn’t at all spiritual, merely practical. The holiday, canonized in the chumash, has to have connections both to the miraculous past of the Bnei Yisroel and to glorifying God’s name. So various views were quoted, including a discussion of whether the sukkos are a representation of the ananei hakavod or are a remembrance of actual huts which Klal Yisroel lived in while in the midbar; and whether sukkos is in the fall because that is when the Jews camped or because by living outside when it is getting cold we are showing that we are doing so because God commanded it and not because it is fun to camp out.

If one accepts that Sukkos evolved from a harvest festival, the discussions among the meforshim seem kind of silly. They are an attempt to make sukkos fit into a spiritual framework that probably wasn’t in place when the holiday first started, and into which it was never really molded. [Unlike, say, All Hollows Eve, which was a deliberate attempt by the Church to turn a pagan harvest festival involving spirits into a Christian holiday involving the dead.] These rabbonim, fans of the spiritual framework of Rabbinic Judaism, are engaging in wild mass guessing to fill in the holes.

For a long time now, my initial reaction to any unfamiliar religious concept or practice I come across (and any I’m used to that I really start thinking about) is, “How did that get started?” Unfortunately, the traditional answers are often like the above d’var torah’s discussion of Sukkos. Wild Mass Guessing by various people attempting to construct something that makes sense out of various disparate parts, full of retcons and discontinuities, often bending over backwards to explain something that makes perfect sense when approached without preconceptions into which it needs to be made to fit. When it comes to how well these apologetics work, Your Mileage May Vary.

As the Wild Mass Guessing page says,
Warning: Prolonged exposure to these pages will result in them making sense.