Where Lies Can Lead

by Beth Kisslieff
Special To The Jewish Week

Candlelighting, Readings:
Shabbat candles: 4:17 p.m.
Torah reading: Genesis 25:19-28:9
Haftarah: Malachi 1:1-2:7
Sabbath ends: 5:18 p.m.

“And Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau your firstborn’” [Genesis 27: 19].

Why does Jacob lie about his identity? The oddity is that deception was not necessary to gain the patriarchal blessing. At the end of Toldot, as Jacob departs, Isaac gives Jacob the “blessing of Abraham to you and your offspring...” [Gen. 28: 4].

Jacob’s deception, then, is not about getting the blessing since Jacob gains that without masquerade. His mother, Rebecca, however, has another purpose. She wants Jacob to access another dimension

of his personality, to leave being an “ish tam,” a guileless and uncomplicated person, while becoming more like his brother, a “yodea tzayid,” someone who “knows hunting” [Gen. 25:27].

We’re told that Isaac loved Esau “because the venison (the tzayid) was in his mouth” [Gen. 25:28]. Esau says, “Arise my father and eat from the tzayid of your son so that you may bless my soul.” Isaac asks him, “Who was the one who hunted and brought it to me?” [Gen. 25: 31-34].

Isaac, who at the Akeida (the near-sacrifice) was in the position of the hunted, is now smitten with the product of the hunt. The blind Isaac is enthralled by the son who can hunt and operate with cunning. Both Ibn Ezra and Hizkuni say that there is no hunting without mirmah (deception).

Rashi says of Jacob, “one who is not expert at deceiving people is called ‘tam,’ simple. Radak says that a tam lacks cunning. However, when Esau returns with his game and asks for a blessing, Isaac tells him that Jacob must have come b’mirmah, with cunning, in the modality of the hunt [Gen. 27: 35]. In the moment of his lie, Jacob has not only become Esau, but has completely overturned his nature from someone incapable of cunning to someone whose cunning is his modus operandi.

What does Jacob gain in speaking the fateful words, “I am Esau?” Let us look for a moment at a modern lie, one told by Joseph Ellis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his book “Founding Brothers.”

Although the professor made his wartime “experiences” in Vietnam the cornerstone of college classes that he’d been teaching, The Boston Globe revealed that Ellis actually spent that time teaching at West Point. Why would an acclaimed historian need to lie and embellish his biography?

In a recent book about fraud and fiction in American history, “Past Imperfect,” Prof. Peter Charles Hoffer suggests that for Ellis, “following his imagination’s lead gave his voice greater confidence and led his eye to places it could not go before — to the dark side of the founders, where lies and self-deception multiplied.”

Hoffer believes that Ellis’ own lies may actually have improved and enlivened his writing, once facts didn’t have to stand in the way. Jacob needs a similar device, lying about his identity to gain confidence and go to new places. In order to mature and become more fully human, Jacob has to take on the identity first of Esau, and finally of Yisrael (when Jacob’s name was actually changed), meaning “the straight one of El (God),” according to some etymologies.

The quality of being able to turn things around was embedded in the very conception of Jacob and Esau. The twins are conceived only after Isaac implores God on behalf of Rebecca. This beseeching, “vayetar,” is compared to a pitchfork in the Talmud, because “as a pitchfork turns the produce, so the prayer of the righteous turns the attributes of (God) from the attribute of anger to the attribute of mercy” [Yevamot 64a]. The twins were conceived from a desire to overturn what existed, and Jacob himself needs to turn from guileless to crafty in order to eventually become straight — Yisrael.

Avivah Zornberg, in “The Murmuring Deep,” describes that turning of pitchfork and prayer as “a descent into darkness, an upheaval that inverts the previous order, the process through which Jacob acquires identity and the blessing is also a descent that overturns the prior organization of the family.”

Jacob’s path is fraught with difficulties. Yet, he becomes whole, shalem, after he is wounded by a man that some interpret to be Esau’s guardian angel [Gen 33:18]. His wound brings him to ultimate wholeness, as his deception allows him to imagine what it is like to behave as Esau.

Jacob ends his life with his name changed to Yisrael, precisely as he began it — as a tam, straight. In fact, both “tam” and “yashar” can be translated into Aramaic using the same word. But in order to become straight once again, Jacob needed the creative potential of the lie, enabling him to explore the path of cunning.

Beth Kissileff is the author of a forthcoming novel, “Questioning Return.” She has taught Hebrew Bible, Judaic studies and English literature at Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, Smith College and Mount Holyoke College.

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