6 November 2010 | 29 Heshvan 5771

Parshat Toldot is MY parsha. It wasn’t my Bar Mitzvah parsha or anything like that. In fact, my connection to this parsha is not what we would refer to as celebratory. If you had studied this parsha with me, you had no doubt heard my woeful tale of the night I was blindsided at a Shabbat table with the responsibility of offering a D’var Torah (Words of Torah).  I was in my first year of rabbinical school, overwhelmed with class work and hadn’t even looked at the parsha that week. With very little in my head, I was asked in front of a table full of strangers to offer some insight into our Torah reading for the week. Needless to say, I was terrified. There was one ray of hope. Earlier in the week, I attended a lunch time class led by Rabbi Bradly Shavit-Artson, the Dean of the Ziegler Rabbinical School.  In that class, he recounted the sorrowful and heart wrenching cries of Esau as he begged his father Isaac for a blessing, the blessing stolen only a few verses earlier by his younger brother Jacob. For my impromptu comments, trying to echo the words of my teacher Rabbi Artson, I simply offered a reflection on how difficult it was to hear the cries of Esau, reminding us to pay attention to the pain of others. Not my best D’var Torah but enough, I felt, to encourage my Shabbat host to move on to the next guest for more inspiring words. Unfortunately, my words inspired a few words of her own when she calmly mused at how young people are so sensitive, yet foolish, when it comes to characters like Esau. Sensitive in that we listen to Esau’s cries - foolish in that Esau was a rapist and murder who didn’t deserve our sympathy.

She then moved on to the next guest for a D’var Torah who faired much better than I did. The whole walk home, I thought about this indictment – Rapist and Murderer? Where on earth did my host get the idea that Esau was such an evil fellow? Our Rabbinic tradition, that’s where!

You do not need to search exhaustively within the Midrashic literature before you are confronted with spurn and scorn about Esau. Much of this contempt stems from the traditional understanding that the descendents of Esau became the leadership and citizens of Rome – our rabbis’ most hated enemy. This fact led to the Midrashic texts taking any and every opportunity to characterize Esau in a negative light. However, one Midrash takes an interesting turn. While expounding on the words of Genesis 25:25, which describes Esau’s appearance at birth as red, our Midrash explains:

Red – Rabbi Abba ben Kahana said: He was a shedder of blood. (Genesis Rabbah 63:8)

Like so many other Midrashim, our text immediately castigates Esau. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the Midrash offers a story about Diocletian, the emperor of Rome who ascended to this high office from humble beginnings. The Midrash recalls that during his early years as a swine farmer, the school children were accustomed to beating up Diocletian as he passed by. Now that the shoe was seemingly on the other foot, Emperor Diocletian presumably wanted payback. He sent out an order that all the Rabbis of Tiberias appear before him the morning following the Sabbath in the city of Paneas. Although the Midrash doesn’t explicitly say it, from the panic that spreads through the community, we understand that the distance between the two cities must be too far to travel in that short of a time. Through a series of miracles, the Rabbis are able to keep their date with the Emperor. Standing in attendance, Emperor Diocletian declares, “ Because you know that your God performs miracles on your behalf you insult the emperor.” The rabbis respond, “Diocletian the swineherd we did indeed insult, but to Diocletian the emperor we are loyal subjects.” The Emperor replies, “Even so, you must not insult the humblest Roman or the meanest soldier.”

On that note, our story concludes and the Midrash begins to explore a different subject. After reading this story I was puzzled. What is the connection between this story and the comment from Rabbi Abba ben Kahana? I would like to offer my own connection between the statement that Esau was a “shedder of blood” and our tale of Emperor Diocletian. We are often quick to judge, wanting to describe and characterize others immediately, and we don’t give people an opportunity to become something other than our own expectations. Take Esau for instance. Upon his birth, Esau is labeled a murder and therefore deserved everything bad that is coming to him. Esau never had a chance to be anything different because regardless of what we did, our Rabbis saw it as evil and wicked.
I believe that the story of Diocletian is here to remind us that our treatment of others has the greatest effect on how they will treat us. Even though Diocletian, being the emperor of Rome, may have been the descendent of Esau, his distain and aggression towards the Jewish people was less related to his hereditary connection with Esau and more to do with the Jews’ mistreatment of him. God-willing, as our world grows ever smaller and we have more interaction with people from different spiritual and cultural traditions, we can remember that even though our people may have struggled with theirs in the past (or even in the present), our interaction is most influenced by how we interact with each other today.

Shabbat Shalom