Parashat Toldot: Esav's Cries

Vayitzak tze’akah gedolah umarah ad me’od. “He cried out an exceedingly great and bitter cry (Gen 27:34).” This is the Torah’s description of Esav’s reaction to the news that his brother Yaakov had stolen his blessing.

We can rationalize Yaakov’s actions. He had in fact bartered for the first-born rights earlier in the parsha so the blessing was his for the taking. He had more foresight and was more polite and respectful than his brother. He is our ancestor, after all, and Esav is not.

But still, that cry of Esav’s -- tze’akah gedolah umarah -- screams out to us. Whatever else Yaakov did, he hurt Esav. Esav suffered because of Yaakov’s actions.

And such suffering, says the midrash, does not go unheeded by God. “Rabbi Hanina said: Whoever maintains that the Holy One blessed be He is lax in dispensing justice, may his bowels become lax. He [God] is merely long-suffering (Breishit Rabbah 67:4).” When, according to Rabbi Hanina, did God punish Yaakov for causing Esav to suffer? Hundreds of years later, during the time of Esther, when Mordecai hears of Haman’s plan to kill the Jews. There we are told that Mordecai cries the same cry as Esav -- Vayizak ze’akah gedolah umarah – “He cried out a great and bitter cry (Esther 4:1).”

When you cause someone pain, it has repercussions. “Hurt people hurt people.” Yaakov’s actions began a long-term cycle of hatred and suffering.

What is so remarkable about this midrash is that it paints God as being on the side of Esav. Esav is the father of the nation Edom which is traditionally understood to represent Rome, and therefore considered Israel’s arch-enemy. Here we have a story of God heeding the cry of Israel’s enemy, and indeed, punishing Israel for that enemy’s suffering. There is a famous saying that puts it this way: “More important than having God on your side is making sure that you are on God’s side.”

God is Israel’s God, but God is also the God of the world, and most particularly, the God of those who suffer. It is their cries that draw Him into the world. “Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground (Gen 4:10),” says God after Cain kills Abel, using that same verb tza’ak. And it is the tze’akah, the cry, of the mistreated in Sodom that draws God down to earth there too. Later, in Exodus, we are told that if we mistreat the poor, the widow or the orphan, they will surely cry out to God – tza’ok yitzak eli – and then God will come down to exact retribution (Exodus 22:22, 26).

God hears the cries of the mistreated, whatever nationality. Hagar, too, suffered at the hands of our ancestor Sarah, and there too God hears and responds. In fact, her son – also the father of an enemy of Israel – bears as his name the memory of God’s ability to hear such cries, Yishmael, meaning “God hears.”

Not all the deeds of our ancestors are meant to be emulated. The message here is not to act like Yaakov or Sarah, who cause the pain, but to act like God, who hears the cries of suffering. Perhaps that was the purpose of all the suffering the Israelites later endured in Egypt, to create a nation that -- because it was born out of suffering -- would always be attentive to the suffering of others.