Esav Complex

From: Gabe

Dear Rabbi,

I don’t understand why Jacob was allowed to deceive Isaac to get the blessing that belonged to Esav, and why he was allowed to take that blessing. Furthermore, what was he doing dressing up as Esav, which certainly seems to indicate that he knew he was doing something wrong? If receiving the blessing was justified, why didn’t he just explain that to Isaac and get the blessing with his consent?

Dear Gabe,

Jacob’s seeming “Esav complex” is one of the more complex topics in the Torah, so I empathize fully with your question. But allow me to present only some of many possible explanations:

First of all, while Esav had the potential to be a very righteous person, he wantonly chose a path of wickedness, and cunningly deceived Isaac into thinking he was the person that his father wanted him to be, and that he could have become if he wanted. But instead, according to traditional sources (see Rashi on the following verses), he was an idolater, a murderer and a glutton (Gen. 25:27-30), and also an adulterer (26:34) who “trapped his father with his mouth” (25:27) by presenting himself as if he meticulously observed Isaac’s ways.

Esav’s deception is what made Isaac mistakenly consider him worthy of his blessing. But Rebecca, exemplifying what the Sages (Berachot 10b) describe as a woman’s keen judgment of character, saw the truth about her wicked son Esav. She therefore understood how dangerous it would be to have such blessing in the “hands of Esav”, and sought to secure the blessing for Jacob, who deserved it and would use it properly.

According to one explanation (Midrash HaGadol), this blessing was earmarked for the first-born, so that when Esav gluttonously despised the birthright and sold it to Jacob (Gen. 25:34), the right to the blessing was thereby transferred to Jacob. Jacob didn’t tell Isaac of the sale because he did not want to make Esav look bad, nor did he want to hurt his father over Esav’s despising of the birthright. But Esav knew that he forfeited the blessing and that it really belonged to Jacob, and yet he continued to deceive his father and went along with Isaac’s mistaken intention to bless him. So it was not Jacob that was deceiving his father to get Esav’s blessing, but rather Esav deceiving him to get Jacob’s.

So why didn’t Rebecca or Jacob intervene by revealing this directly to Isaac; why did they contrive a deception of their own? Because at that point, time was of the essence, and if they had revealed the truth of Esav’s long-standing deception of Isaac, he, convinced of Esav’s “innocence”, would have consulted with Esav about their accusations. At that point, Esav would very likely have murdered Jacob, which he ultimately intended to do, and which was the reason Jacob fled to Rebecca’s family (27:41-43). So Jacob was justified in protecting for himself through cunning that which Esav intended to steal from him through cunning.

According to another explanation (brought in Artscroll, Gen. 27:1-4, p. 134), the blessing was not necessarily earmarked for the first-born, but rather it was intended by Isaac to be for Esav. But this was because, even in Isaac’s mistaken understanding that both brothers were righteous, Esav was more interested in this-worldly matters while Jacob was focused more on spirituality. Accordingly, Isaac intended to give Esav the blessing for material bounty in order that he would help support Jacob’s Torah study, which would in turn benefit Esav as well. He thought that the brothers would maintain this mutually-beneficial relationship, as did later the tribes of Issachar and Zevulun. Rebecca knew that that was the farthest thing from Esav’s mind, but rather he would take the blessing for himself and not share any of it with Jacob, effectively strangulating the life-line of Torah. She therefore had Jacob “dress-up” as Esav, meaning she equipped him to be involved in this-worldly pursuits, in order to receive material blessing for the purpose of supporting and studying Torah.