Shiur 4, Shabbat Parshat Mishpatim

PAGES 25-32 SUMMARY

HOW GOD CHANGES THE WORLD

Ran was in the middle of explaining why the verse stresses that Yitshak prayed le-nokhah ishto, opposite his wife, and had said that God changes nature by changing the underlying causes rather than the item itself (since, in Ran’s view, God is too far removed to deal with the actual physical world directly).  That explains the Talmudic saying that God does not punish a nation without first punishing its god, meaning the subsidiary power that ordinarily runs the fate of that particular nation (Jews, by the way, are seen as under direct Providence, as per the Talmudic dictum, Ein mazal le-Yisrael, there is no power that runs the Jewish people).

In order to bring about those changes, prophets needed to focus physically on the thing they wanted changed, as with Elisha and Eliyahu bringing a boy back to life by lying on them, Yaakov’s blessing Efraim and Menashe by putting his hands physically on them, and (our issue) Yitshak turning directly towards his wife in his prayer.  The connection between physical actions and their metaphysical effect will come back later in the derasha as well, and is worth keeping in mind.

THE MEANING AND MECHANISM OF THE CONFLICT IN THE WOMB

Aside from the miracle of the pregnancy itself, Ran notes that the children’s fighting—out of the ordinary for fetuses-- seems to be a further miracle.  He suggests, though, that this fighting had a natural cause, the opposition of their characters.  Esau was admoni, a man of the fields, and Jacob was a tent-sitter, studious, etc; with such different natures, there was no way that they could not conflict when thrust together.  That means, though, that Ran assumes that people’s natures come out even when there is no conscious or cognitive awareness whatsoever.  He does not explain why God would set the brothers up this way, but we will think about both ideas—character’s always showing itself and God setting up a fundamental conflict at the heart of the history of the Jewish nation and the world-- below.

Ran, following the Midrash Rabbah, thinks that Rivkah realized the uniqueness of her situation by asking other women if this happens with twins; when they answered negatively, she asked Hashem about it.  Ran defines “asking Hashem,” as meaning either that she consulted with a prophet or that she herself simply meditated and got the answer (meaning she was a prophet, too).  He disputes, by the way, Ramban’s view that the term “lidrosh et Hashem, to ask of God” implies prayer, giving other examples of where it means to elicit information.  Without deciding between them, we can note that they are focusing on the two ways there are to seek God (the literal meaning of the term), either by making requests or by eliciting information from Him.

However she finds out, Rivkah is told of the inherent and lasting conflict of her sons.  At this point, Ran raises the problem of his explanation, that if their fighting was natural, why would Rivkah see it as a sign of anything?  He argues, though, that it was the difference in their characters itself that was the miracle.  Since they were conceived at the same time by the same parents, twins should be at least similar enough to avoid the kind of inherent conflict we see, regardless of whether we think astrologically (as Ran did) or genetically. 

Ran also accepts the possibility that God wanted to insure that Esav would move away from Yaakov, so that the Jews wouldn’t learn from their rebelliousness.  Whatever the answer, he adds that we cannot fully understand Hashem’s thoughts, a comment worth returning to as well.

 

 

HOLDING ONTO THE HEEL AND THE VARYING STRENGTHS OF PROPHECIES

Moving from inside the womb to their birth, Ran also sees Jacob’s holding Esav’s heel, an event that the prophet Hoshea points to as a sign of God’s love for the Jewish people, as predictive as well.  He suggests that God had that happen so as to embed more firmly into nature the reality that Jacob’s power will rise whenever Esav’s is weakened.  He explicitly accepts Ramban’s theory that joining actions to prophecies strengthens them (with examples we need not go into here).

The need to strengthen certain prophecies itself raises as many questions as it answers.  First, it implies that unstrengthened prophecies aren’t as likely to come true, which Ran accepts.   According to Ran, prophecies are generally changeable, depending on events between the time of its being issued and when the predicted event was supposed to occur (people might repent or sin, for example, turning their predicted fortune on its head).  However, since people need a way to test prophets, to know whose word is truly that of God, God made good prophecies irrevocable.  (Prophecies for the bad had to be revocable, because a merciful God could not require a negative future).

All that was only true, however, for prophets who needed to convince an audience of their status.  The future told to the Patriarchs, who had no such need, was therefore changeable, whether good or bad, except for those parts that were strengthened with an action.  So, for example, Ran notes that Yitshak’s blessing that Jacob would rule Esav has not been true for most of our national history, because our sins prevented us from that mastery.  Yakov’s holding Esav’s heel was there to strengthen at least that element of their relationship, that when Esav loses power, Yakov will step in and gain it. 

TAKING THE FIRSTBORN STATUS

Despite assuming their inherently conflicted natures, Ran then questions why Jacob would exacerbate that tension, such as by taking the bekhorah, the status of firstborn.  He is bothered both by how someone as elevated as Jacob could want what did not belong to him, and, granting that he did want it, how Jacob could trick Esav into selling it for a low price, rather than paying fully and properly for it.

To answer, Ran notes the tradition that Avraham had died that day and that the lentil soup that Esav took from Jacob was actually meant to be a seudat havra’ah, a meal of comfort, for the mourning Isaac.  He sees Esav’s insensitivity to those events— going to the field that day like any other, ignoring Isaac and his pain, demanding food of Jacob with no awareness or care for the family’s loss—as proving his lack of fitness for the main role of the firstborn, serving as the continuity of the family lineage, a topic we’ll take up below.  Once he was unfit, it became ok for Jacob to take it, in Ran’s view.

Not only that, Ran reads Esav’s comment that he was going to die and therefore didn’t care about the status of firstborn as also referring to his lack of connection to his forefathers.  Without such a connection, he was sort of slated for death, since he wasn’t part of the family legacy; given that isolation, he did not care about selling his birthright for some soup—an act, along with the oath, that Ran believes Jacob insisted on so as to make the sale legal according to the law of the time—until later (when Isaac is actually giving out the blessings), once the passions of youth had died down and he recognized how much he had given up.

BLESSING OR PROPHECY?

Ran, however, questions the fuss over the berakhah, since it would seem to just have been a prediction of the future.  If so, there would be no reason for Esav to feel cheated.  Before he gets there—and we will have to wait until next week to see the answer to that question-- Ran comments on the practice of a prophet accepting a meal or gift from the person seeking the prophecy.  He suggests two possibilities, the first being that the token was a way to help the prophet focus his attention and powers on the person in question.  Here, that would mean that it was a way to help Isaac get to understand the future of his son and tell it to him. Alternatively, Ran thinks it might have been a way to help Isaac just get into the proper frame of mind for prophecy generally, since it only occurs when one is happy. 

Either way, the resulting prophecy doesn’t seem to have any input from Isaac, or any ability to be taken from one person to the other, so Ran doesn’t understand why Esav would care about the “theft.”  Leaving the answer for that until next week, we now turn to four interesting issues raised by Ran’s discussion. 

INHERENT CONFLICT IN ISAAC’S DESCENDANTS

If we remember that Ran had claimed that Esav was never kicked out of the family, as were Avraham’s children, his view that Esav was embedded with a nature that would lead to permanent conflict between him and Yakov raises a “why” question he does not address.  I think his idea offers an interesting perspective of how God wanted human history to work out; it was not going to be enough for people to naturally reach the Messianic era, they would have to act unnaturally to do so.  In particular, Esav (not blessed with the tradition and discipline of Torah) would have to eventually come to accept (not just recognize or submit to) his subsidiary status to his brother.  While that is a utopian dream, it seems to have been necessary for Ran’s view of the world.

Why not just kick Esav out of the family, like Yishmael?  Remember that Ran thinks that much of the world is about combining and unifying.  He may then have thought that the essence of the Messianic era had to involve a unification of two almost complete opposites, in a way that would emphasize their strengths and smooth over their differences.  The hurdle to that unity, while huge, was not insurmountable, and would be one of the miracles of the final redemption. 

Esav’s accepting subservience would return him to the family fold, and make him part of the redeemed world (this, perhaps, is why Hashem reacts so strongly to Amalek’s being the one to hinder the awe of Israel He had sought to set up in the Exodus; that branch of Esav’s family could no longer remain as an independent entity, even in Messianic times).

Redemption of the Jewish people, then, will include their incorporating in their broader nationhood descendants of Esav who will, either before or after we achieve some kind of independence in Israel, accept the need to support our endeavors from a subservient role.

FIRSTBORN AND CONTINUITY

Ran’s view of the firstborn raises an issue that our individualistic society sees completely differently from Jewish sources.  Ran assumes, as does Judaism generally, that children are meant to continue their parents’ legacies (at least the positive parts of those legacies).  Esav’s lack of concern for that aspect of his life, his turning his back on lineage, inherently denies him all the privileges of the firstborn, and fully justifies Jacob’s actions to take it away. 

Primogeniture in Judaism, in other words, is not a reward for being first, or simply a relic of a time that stressed the firstborn, it is an expression of children’s filial responsibilities to live lives that continue the family traditions.  The firstborn son in particular was required to be extra-conscious of that responsibility.  The privileges of firstborn-hood stem from the responsibility; rejecting the latter inherently foregoes the former.

 

COOLED PASSIONS

An almost offhand comment of Ran’s—that Esav did not realize what he had done until the moment of the blessings, when he was around sixty, because earlier he had been young—obliquely raises another theme of Jewish thought, that our physical passions rule us when we are  younger, but recede as we age.  Rather than fighting that, as American culture does, Jewish thinkers somewhat welcomed it, since they saw it as clearing the way for a better appreciation of the important aspects of life.

INDETERMINATE FUTURES

In the final point I will raise in our discussion this week, I call our attention to the issue of when the future becomes irrevocable.  Ran assumes that a bad prediction can always be changed (I think he means at least somewhat, since there are times when we speak of a sealed gezar din, decree), because God does not want to lock in to punishment until absolutely necessary. 

That means, though, that prophecies are not predictions of the future, they are declarations of what the future will look like, if people do not act to change it.  That caveat, particularly in terms of prophecies of disaster, is a forceful reminder of the assumed power of people to shape their destinies, of God’s leaving our futures largely to us, to either improve or destroy, but to be a matter of our choice and freewill.

Shabbat Shalom.