Parashat Toldot: What Would You Do To Get a Blessing?

Sometimes I think that the Torah, in these early stories, presents us not with an ideal to follow, but more of a mirror to see more clearly our daily insanity.

I think that is the case with the fight over the blessings in this week’s parsha. The phrase that comes to mind here is the modern Israeli phrase, ad kedei kakh? “To that extent?” Really? Is being the first born so important that we would fight in the womb over it, holding on to the ankle of our brother? Is it so important that we would dress or dress our child up in his sibling’s clothing in an elaborate scheme to fool the father? Really?

To what end all this manipulating? What is it that they -- and we -- are out there fighting for all the time anyway? What is it we are climbing over each other to get? A blessing? Is that how one receives blessings? By fighting tooth and nail and furry skin over it? What are we in this rat race in the first place for? And is it getting us there? Or is it rather, as Yaakov suspects, bringing a curse down on us instead of a blessing, all this heel-chasing?

These parshiyyot do present a few glimpses of real blessing, and they do not come as a result of these schemes but from quiet moments of peace with God.

One occurs when Yitzhak, after being involved in his own contentious fights over the ownership of a well [itself a symbol of blessing], finally sees that “God has made things expansive for us,” naming this new well Rehovot, “Expansiveness.” This feeling of expansiveness -- that there is plenty of water for all to share – is the opposite mode of the heel-chasing fight over the blessing in the rest of the parsha. And it leads to a real sense of blessing and peace – following this event, God appears to Yitzhak and blesses him that He, God will be with him and always bless him, and then Avimelekh appears again to make a treaty and they all break a meal bshalom, in peace.

True blessing does not come from the fight.

For Yaakov, true blessing comes to him in the beginning of next week’s parsha. Running away from home with nothing but the clothes on his back, he lies down with a rock for a pillow and finally does get a real blessing, not from his father, but from God Himself, who stands over him with His ladder of angels and promises him to be with him and protect him on his way.

We chase blessing constantly through all kinds of manipulations. We worry that we will not get what we need unless we hold on tight to the ankle in front of us and sometimes we even betray our own true identity in search of this ostensible external blessing. This parsha makes me wonder whether such seeking is helpful or whether perhaps true blessing comes from those moments of internal peace, when we are calm enough and expansive enough to feel God's presence and simply know that we are always blessed.