Parashat Toldot: Only One Blessing?

The story of Yitzhak’s giving of blessings to his two sons is a story of blessing gone awry. When God blesses Avraham, the blessing is one which spreads outward positively to those around him --- I will bless you and you will be a blessing. I will make your name great and those who bless you will be blessed. Venevrechu bikha kol mishpahot ha’adamah. And all the families of the earth will become blessed through you. This is a blessing for Avraham and his descendants, yes, but by its nature it overflows to those around him. He is becoming a funnel for blessing to spread through the world.

Yitzhak’s blessings to his sons, by contrast, are of the zero-sum variety. If one person gets something, then necessarily the other does not have it. One brother will rule the other. From Yaakov’s blessing: “Let peoples serve you and nations bow down to you. Be master over your brothers.” From Esav’s: “You shall serve your brother. But when he starts to fall, you shall break his yoke from your neck.” When one is up, the other is down. There is only room for one winner. That’s why the two sons are fighting, grabbily, over the blessing.

What kind of a blessing is this that only one person can have? The words of Esav ring in our ears – Habrachah ahat likha avi? Have you but one blessing, my father?

Sometimes that is how it seems in life, that there is only one first prize and if someone else gets it, then by necessity I do not. Such a view pits us against each other in a tight narrow competitive race. Is that the nature of our divine blessing?

The competition between the brothers is interrupted in our parsha by another story, this one about wells. Here, too there is competition for scarce resources – the servants of Yitzhak fight with the servants of Grar over who owns each newly found well. Each side says, like the two sons of Yitzhak: It belongs to me, not you. Lanu hamayim. Ours is the water. The fights are so intense that the wells become named for such strife, with names like “Contention” and “Harrassment.”

Now, in the story of the brothers in our parsha, the competition ends in hatred – Esav understandably wants to kill Yaakov for stealing his blessing.

But the story of the wells ends differently. After a number of fights over wells, finally Yitzhak moves to a new place, digs a new well, and there is no fight over it. He calls this well Rehovot, from the root rahav, wide or expansive, saying, “Now at last the Lord has granted us ample space to increase in the land.”

Space. A sense of the breadth of the world and all its infinite resources and possibilities. That is the answer to the competitive spirit. The knowledge that God’s blessings are never ahat, singular, but always rahav, wide and expansive, with room for many to grow and prosper.

Yitzhak had two sons, each with his own talents. Is there only one blessing to be fought over between these two or are there many types of blessings in the world, as infinite and wide as is God Himself and His bounty? How do we access this feeling of divine bounty and avoid the grabbiness and narrowness of feeling that we are all fighting to win the same single prize? Can we remember that the true divine blessing, like the one granted from God to Avraham is, like light, to be spread and increased at no cost, and that it is often only our own human distortion of this blessing that makes it feel like there is a single blessing to be divided among two sons? The well of "expansiveness" gives us a glimpse of an alternative, almost utopian way of viewing things, a glimpse of what is possible beyond the narrowness of yours and mine.