Vayishlach: How to Avoid the Confrontation with Esav

We are indeed going to face the problem of our relations with the adversary — the adversary who dwells within us, for there are moments when we hate ourselves, moments when we abuse our own person. There is an Esav who dwells within us; I said last time that we too are inhabited by Esav. We are inhabited, intrinsically, by this world of technology, and we try in a sense to tame it, to keep it — but not to stifle it, not to eliminate it. Our relationship with the outside world is of the same nature. We are not going to wage war on all the unbelievers, all the infidels, to the point of destroying them — far from it. On the contrary, what we will try to do is strip them of their preconceived ideas, their prejudices, their dubious and subjective beliefs, and we will try to recover the dimension of brotherhood, which is the shared inheritance of all humanity. So the struggle we wage is within ourselves, and within our people — which, as I told you, displays all the cultural and philosophical tendencies proper to the other peoples; we are nothing but the microcosm of the macrocosm. And so we try, in a sense, to bring things into harmony — to bring ourselves into harmony with ourselves, with our family, with our people, and beyond that, with the nation, with all the other nations.

But how are we to go about it? How should we proceed? Our Sages say that there are three things that were given to the people of Israel and for which they pay a very high price; they never cease to suffer for them. What are these three great gifts that the Almighty gave to Israel? The Torah, Eretz Yisrael — the Land of Israel — and Olam Haba, the World to Come. These three things are acquired through hard suffering. Whoever does not invest himself, and does not truly agree to devote himself to them even at the cost of suffering, will never be able to acquire them. The things one acquires easily, one loses just as easily; but when one has toiled for them, one does not part with them easily — one defends them, one wants to keep them, one fights to keep them. So we have these three dimensions: the Land of Israel in space; the Torah in time, since the task is precisely to sanctify time through the Torah; and Olam Haba, the World to Come of which we dream, which assures us of the permanence of everything — of our life, of the family, of the entire universe.

How are we to go about it? That is what we will see through this movement of return carried out by Yaakov. Yaakov, as we have said, is the prototype of exile. His life was nothing but wandering. He is with Lavan, he returns to the Land of Israel, he goes down again to Egypt. Most of the years of his life he spent far from his parents, far from the Land of Israel — but not far from the Torah of Israel. Let me read you a little from the first verses of this week’s parashah, since after years of exile — twenty years of exile — Yaakov decides to return home. In the end he has everything he needs, everything he needs. At Lavan’s he lacks nothing; he has built his household, he has eleven children, and he has amassed a fortune.

But from the moment he comes into his own, he arouses animosity within his own family. His brothers-in-law no longer look at him the same way: “He has exploited our father’s property, he has exploited our land, he has built up an enormous capital, and he asserts himself in complete independence.” And his father-in-law no longer looks at him the same way either. Antisemitism is already there. Jealousy can indeed arise from the fact that, after the utter poverty to which we had been reduced by persecutions, pogroms and family plots, we nonetheless succeeded — and that, the nations cannot accept. Sooner or later one must pack one’s bags; one must return to one’s anchorage, to one’s sources, to one’s roots, because it is from there that we can shine the most. So he must set out once again — but beware: Esav stayed with the parents for twenty years, twenty-two to be precise, and his threat hangs over us to this day, because he too will not let go. We are thus caught between two forms of antisemitism, two struggles — yet both within a single family. The two are united by the project of destroying the descendants of Avraham, but each in his own way: one through the phenomenon of assimilation, the other through the phenomenon of permanent persecution. What is to be done? Perhaps one must go and rebuild the land, and assert ownership of the land in the name of the parents’ inheritance. So he sends angels — he sends emissaries — but we are told: careful, he sends angels. And Rashi will tell us: real angels. How can one send real angels? […] He had angels at his disposal who served him. But then what are false angels? Well — you will see. First, let me define once again that we do, of course, possess free will.

A man possesses free will. An angel does not. Yes, an angel has no free will. Free will lies in the choice between good and evil, and an angel has no such choice. Now, there are three situations. When you are in the midst of action, it means you have already decided what you must do, and the problem of free will no longer arises. So in the realm of action, free will has already been set aside. Free will belongs to the level of the concept: What must I do? Which path should I take? How should I act? I had various possibilities, but from the moment I decided, it is over. What I do now — you may say it is the product of free will, but it no longer has anything to do with it. So what Yaakov decided, in sending angels, was to set his free will aside. Why would he set his free will aside? For the same reason I mentioned a moment ago, namely: Halo ach Esav le-Yaakov — “Is not Esav Yaakov’s brother?” Whether we like it or not, he is our brother. So — he is our brother. Enough; we will set aside the question of reason, of who is wrong and who is right, because we are not going to kill one another.

We will try to set aside this free will and to recover the common ground of brotherhood, so that we can coordinate our movements and harmonize our relations. That is what happens in the realm where free will is set aside, when I truly make myself small before the other in order to seek common ground with him. But there is something beyond free will: it is when I stand at the source of brotherhood as it was before the problems arose — and at the source of that brotherhood, before the problems arose, it was wonderful. So in the search, in the quest for this harmony with the peoples, as with ourselves, as with our family, as within our people, we will have to find the shared points of agreement,

leaving aside our affiliation or our orientation, at whatever level, insofar as it succeeds. That is what mal’achim mamash means — those are the real angels, those are the real angels. — Yes? I can’t hear. — “You say that at the source it was wonderful, but we know that at the source, in the womb, they were already fighting — Esav with Yaakov. How was that wonderful?” — I think you have forgotten the preliminaries of last week’s lecture, namely that in all our self-education we are just as attracted to the beit midrash (house of study) as to the world of technology. We would like to marry the yeshivah and the university; we would like to marry the Torah and philosophy; we would like to join the two poles of this world, just as we want, in a sense, to satisfy both our yetzer hatov (good inclination) and our yetzer hara (evil inclination).

We want a little […] when we are doing business — business is business, there is no morality in business, one fights as best one can. So we bring this yetzer hatov into business. But in the womb, at the origin, we have both the yetzer hatov and the yetzer hara, and we cannot separate ourselves from them. The question is how we will manage them, how we will govern them. Quite simply, the one that in principle drives us forward — and what drives us forward is generally not the yetzer hatov, it is the yetzer hara: the inclination of drives, of instincts, of passions and desires —

that one should be placed at the service of the good inclination, because the good inclination only begins to stir at the age of thirteen for boys, and twelve for girls. So that is it. He sent angels; we now know what it means to send real angels. El Esav achiv — “to Esav his brother”: he is at once Esav and at once his brother. What is to be done in the world of reality? One must face the evidence of this duality […]. And what does he tell them? Koh tomrun la-adoni le-Esav.

“Thus shall you say to my lord Esav” — he calls him his lord. Our Sages do not agree with him. Let me read you the Midrash on this: “Ma’yan nirpas u-makor mashchat” — amar Rabbi Yehudah bar Rabbi Simon: Just as it is impossible for a spring to be muddied or a fountain to be corrupted, so it is impossible for a righteous man to bow before the wicked; and just as a spring that is muddied and a fountain that is corrupted, so is a righteous man who bows before the wicked. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: He was going on his way, and you send to him and say to him, “Thus says your servant Yaakov”! Translation: the Midrash relies on a verse from Mishlei, Proverbs, which speaks of a muddied spring, a corrupted fountain: what sort of righteous man is it who bows before the wicked? It is unthinkable to bow before the wicked and call him our master.

Elsewhere — and the Midrash brings it too; to save time I will not read it to you in Hebrew — “One who seizes a dog by the ears is like a passer-by who flies into a rage over a quarrel not his own.” So for this reason I say that it is good policy to make the other feel bigger, to relieve him of the complex he has before you, to treat him with esteem: la-adoni le-Esav. That can indeed be the doron, the gift that you offer him. […] You will lose; so you must prepare yourself for war, for struggle — but you are not going to throw yourself headlong into a struggle with someone numerically stronger than you. He is coming with four hundred men, arba me’ot ish — four hundred men.

You will lose. There is no point in swaggering before him. And so you must use tachbulot, you must use cunning: be-tachbulot ta’aseh lecha milchamah — “by stratagems you shall wage your war.” And one way of outwitting the other is to give him, in the meantime, much more self-assurance, because a moment will come when he will yield to his weaknesses and bring about his own downfall. And indeed, that is what happens. Esav ended up leaving the land of his own accord. He ended up leaving the land of his own accord — and yet he had wanted this land; the right of the firstborn that he claimed was also for the possession of this land. But he gathered everything he had and went to settle elsewhere. Let me open a parenthesis to tell you that this is what sometimes happens in residential neighborhoods: we have settled in a place, and as we are gradually overrun by people who do not follow our philosophy, our outlook, our points of view — what do we do?

Well, we move elsewhere. But this can work in two directions, for good as well as for ill. The Torah has assured us that when the Canaanite sees that you hold fast to your convictions and to practicing them in your land, to your values, and that you are ready to defend them at any cost, they will leave the land of their own accord. Why? Because they will not want to remain confined in that atmosphere. We can see this phenomenon occurring to some extent. So that was a first approach. The second is this: after all, this man was going his own way. It is not for you to go out to meet him; let him come to you — you do not yet know what he wants of you.

Why? You will provoke him — that is what the Midrash reproaches. But in reality one must remain at the meeting point of these two ideas, namely kabdehu ve-chashdehu — “honor him, and suspect him” […] — honor him, but remain on your guard. The doron, the tefillah and the milchamah: the gift, the prayer and war. But on milchamah, war, the Ramban adds something. Waging war is not to be done at any cost. One must know how to avoid it. The question is not how to wage war but how to avoid war — when one is exposed to an enemy numerically stronger than oneself […], because war stirs up vengeance. One should not keep wanting at all costs to conquer the land by force. One must conquer it by one’s faith.

You must conquer it by the values you defend there. And that is indeed what justifies your ownership of the land. And then you will see your enemies gradually draw away from you, abandon you. They will recognize your values themselves, because the values you hold, they too share, but at a lower level. That is what makes theirs idols and not a faith that unifies everyone: they have remained in multiplicity; they have multiplied idols, multiplied philosophies, ways of life, ideologies, and that is why they wage wars of destruction against one another. That is why the verse says be-shiv’im nefesh yardu avotecha Mitzraymah — “with seventy souls your forefathers went down to Egypt.” The people, the house of Yaakov, numbers seventy souls.

But in principle, when one says shiv’im, seventy, one should say, grammatically speaking, nefashot — many souls. No: the text says shiv’im nefesh — seventy souls, with “soul” in the singular: one soul. Everything constitutes one soul, because everything is complementary; everything completes everything else. Moreover, he tells him: Im Lavan garti — “I have sojourned with Lavan.” And Rashi says on this: though I sojourned there, I preserved my Jewish identity; I did not give in; they tried by every means to dissuade me, but I remained on my guard, and I intend to go on. Now, to say it, to formulate it that way, is fine. But our Sages say: careful — garti has the numerical value of 613. Garti: I kept the 613 mitzvot there.

613 mitzvot — but who is capable of fulfilling the 613 mitzvot? Even the great tzaddik does not perform the 613 mitzvot; it is impossible. There are mitzvot he cannot fulfill: he is not a kohen, and questions of yibbum (levirate marriage) and chalitzah may never arise for him. The 613 mitzvot can be fulfilled only within a community, within a people as a whole. So Yaakov tells him: careful — what you accomplish on your side and what I accomplish on mine mean that our intentions, our good intentions, our good deeds, add up, as if… That is to say: I do not deny that you too may have good deeds to your credit, and I share them with you, just as I intend to credit you with everything I do, because everything I do, I do not do for myself; I do it to spread the values of faith in the unity of G-d in the world. That is the reason he tells him va-e’char ad atah — “and I have lingered until now”: that is to say, we ourselves have a mission to accomplish in our exile; exile itself is not devoid of all value.

We were forced into it — it is there that we were born; we were born in exile. And it is there that we forged our identity; we forged it in exile. It is there that we learned to become sensitive to the misfortune of others, and there, too, that we learned to share our joys with them. So what are the mitzvot? A moral bond between people. This is the parashah our Sages would study before going to plead their cause before the Roman authorities, in order to absorb all the teachings contained in this parashah — namely, that Yaakov dreads the moment when he will have to fight Esav and kill him.

And in the same way, he fears that Esav might in the end succeed in killing him. And that is the reason he divided his family into two camps, saying: if, in the end, the first does not hold, at least the other could scatter, flee and escape. The struggle Yaakov wages against Esav is a struggle for survival. That struggle for survival still exists […]. However sure of oneself one may be, however many precautions one takes, however much one wishes to rely on diplomacy and means of defense — none of it is of any use. There must be tefillah; there must be prayer. It is prayer that can truly carry us beyond all the safeguards we take on our own. And here I would like to underline another aspect that the text puts forward for our reflection: he prepared gifts. But what gifts? An ox, a donkey, small livestock, a manservant, a maidservant — what would Esav do with them? He couldn’t care less about all that. It doesn’t count. It is worth nothing to him. It has to be seen as a coded language. Shor, the ox, is combat: the bull that in the arena will measure itself against the upright stance man sets against it, and with its horns will try to throw him off balance and triumph over him […]. But chamor is the donkey — and that donkey is the messianic image of rochev al chamor, “riding upon a donkey”: the Mashiach, who is rochev al chamor. And there is shor, which is Yosef. We have two Messiahs.

One is he who will wage the war of Gog and Magog. He will be a fighting element in that war which convulses the entire universe, but he will lose — he will lose his life. No, it is not the Messiah son of Yosef whom we await. It is not on him that we are counting. We are counting on the Messiah son of David. The Messiah son of David is rather the man of the Psalms, the man of prayer — the man who has this strength within him yet constantly calls himself into question, constantly. Yaakov was assured of G-d’s protection all along his way. G-d appeared to him and told him: Fear nothing; return to your land.

Now, when one is truly called by G-d to carry out a mission, one can go forward. But no — he always has this questioning that haunts him. Perhaps I was not worthy; perhaps I sinned here and there. Indeed, after fourteen years he should have packed his bags and left, since what he had been sent for, he had accomplished: he had married Rachel and Leah; he had built a family. But no — he also wanted to amass a fortune, and he added six years — six, seven years — […]; he made an agreement with his father-in-law to build up his savings before returning home. These are considerations people sometimes weigh, but he reproaches himself for it […]. He reproaches himself because it came at the price of the parents he did not see, at the price of a long return, at the price of an upbringing that remained unsettled for the children — because for the children to form a united family, they will have to go through crises. And let us not forget that what happened to his daughter Dinah was, to a certain extent, part of the bill for this prolonged stay with Lavan before he returned home.

Well then, what does Yaakov do? Katonti — he addresses a prayer to G-d and says: Elokei avi Avraham ve-Elokei avi Yitzchak — “G-d of my father Avraham and G-d of my father Yitzchak, Hashem, who said to me: Return to your land and to your birthplace, and I will do good with you. I am unworthy of all the kindnesses and all the truth You have shown Your servant, for with my staff alone I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps.” […] And here I am today reduced to dividing my family, and I must face my brother. I fear him because he is at once a brother and at once Esav. It is hard to fight a man who stands against you and who, in the name of brotherhood, wants to destroy you.

Then: Hatzileni na — “Save me, I pray.” And there is a precious detail: va-yalen sham ba-laylah ha-hu — “he spent the night there” — he spends the night reflecting on how he will actually resolve this problem. We are still at this level of reflection, because we cannot separate ourselves completely from Esav. We must keep his garment — but we also have [our voice]. We are determined to guard jealously the voice of morality, the spiritual voice. How, then, can one confront the other, who hears only one voice? Well, that is why we must at times set against him the fact that we are like the dust of the earth, like the sand of the sea. We bear it upon ourselves: we are crushed, we are trampled — but let us not forget that those who trampled us are the ones who keep the bad conscience of what they made us endure.

But we — from that earth we have managed to make something new sprout, and so it will always be. We will hold back all the waves that seek to submerge us, and this in order, in the end, to shine like the stars of the sky in the depth of the night. And that is what the text underlines when he says in his prayer: Ve-atah amarta, heitev eitiv imach, ve-samti et zar’acha ke-chol ha-yam asher lo yissafer me-rov — “And You said: I will surely do good with you, and I will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.” What cannot be counted — what does “cannot be counted” mean? On the contrary, it is the sand that holds back the onrush of the waves that threaten to flood the world, to sink this world.

[…] And it is in this way that Yaakov tries to give us the recipe to adopt. For the first wave of exile, Mitzrayim, Egypt; the second wave, the destruction of the First Temple; the third, the destruction of the Second Temple — in view of the building of the Temple yet to come. And that is why there are three messengers. He commanded the first, he commanded the second, he commanded the third, and in fourth place he commanded gam et kol ha-holchim acharei ha-adarim — “also all those who went after the flocks.” And he understood the word “flock” in the proper sense: a troop that obeys its leaders to the letter and does not tolerate a single voice of dissent.

It has no say in the matter. And, as I told you, when you speak of these things, you should know that there are things you have not heard. The minchah I bring you corresponds to my machaneh. In the word minchah — minchah is an offering; machaneh is the camp — there are four occurrences of the word minchah and four of the word machaneh. I am at once presenting you with an offering that projects itself onto the four stages that the history of the Jewish people, of the house of Yaakov, is destined to pass through — but know that this history, this offering I give you, is conditional on the survival of my machaneh, the survival of my camp.

I will stop here to leave you your share of the discussion. There is a great deal to say about this first part. I have only skimmed the text, but we will have occasion to return to it in other lectures. So, if you have questions. — “Good evening, Rav Benizri. I would like to ask you a question about what you said concerning Yaakov. He did not know what Esav’s intentions were; he could not know what his intentions were. Of course, he knew his parents had told him to leave — rather, his mother told him to leave so as not to lose both of them on the same day. She even said she would send for him. So it is possible that what came to him […] were people who made the 953 kilometers to Haran — according to Waze, as they say — to tell him that his mother was worried and that it was time to come home. Of course, as we see here in social services and everywhere, when there are elderly people — even if, as we said this morning about families with many children — it is always one person, or perhaps two, who take care of the parents.

And there, for more than twenty years, Yaakov was not there, and the one who took care of his father, at any rate, was Esav. That is why — personally, as I see it — if he was the only one there, and his father did not know when he would pass away, he told him to dig his grave. So it was he who took care of the burial and […] everything else, wasn’t it? The question I am asking is this: is it possible that, coming to see his father, he saw that people were missing — surely among the keepers of the flocks, his mother’s flocks, since there is a tradition that in the ketubah one had to give a sheep to one’s wife — is it possible that it was his father, knowing very well the behavior of the Canaanite peoples, who sent him to meet his brother, to bring him back safe and sound to Hevron or to Beer Sheva, and that they would then have it out in front of the parents?

Is that possible? He said to him: I will stay with you. He said: No. — Then I will leave you some people to stay with you. He said no, and we then saw what happened with Dinah. I imagine that if she had gone to Blaise-Pascal or to the Champs-Élysées to see the other girls — since she had lived in Haran, which is a little backwater, as you can see on the internet, and so Shechem was a bigger place — perhaps that thing, when she went out for a little walk, naively, would not have happened. Is this possible?” — Well, first of all, Yaakov was aware of the honor of parents that Esav had practiced during those twenty years of absence, at the very least.

And one of the reasons for his panic and his fear is that he himself had not lived up to his obligations — all the more so since he had not simply been content to stay at Lavan’s the time needed to choose, to take his wife — excuse me, it was a matter of a single wife — but had stayed of his own free will for six or seven more years. That is what fed his fears, and that is why he tells him: “Here — the honor of parents, I did not fulfill it; but we share. What I did on my side and what you did on yours mean that between the two of us we have practiced the taryag mitzvot, the 613 commandments.” And on the other hand:

the Esav we now confront is the one from whom we have sometimes separated ourselves. While we spent years in yeshivah, we ignored him; we separated ourselves a little from the world and its problems, and we meet him again with dread, because we lack the proper means to defend ourselves. Listen: when you were studying Kodashim and Taharot, you were dealing with questions of holiness and of purity — and then you find yourself in the world of Nezikin, the world of damages and compensation, and you never imagined that tomorrow you would actually be taken for a ride by people from Esav’s world. So these are the problems of daily life, and that is the reason why Yaakov must […]. The opposition between Yaakov and Esav exists only as long as he is Yaakov. When he passes into the state of Israel, he has succeeded in mastering both Esav and Yaakov at once.

And then there are these two personalities that he now fully manages. That is also why the two wives he has are the reflection of the two personalities: Rachel and Leah. This deserves a long development, but that is how it is. What I wanted above all to bring out in this parashah is this. You know, there are three parashiyot: Vayishlach, Beshalach and Shelach Lecha. Vayishlach is Yaakov’s relationship with Esav. Beshalach is the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt and its setting out toward Israel. And Shelach Lecha is the sending of the spies. But none of these reached their goal; these are missions that did not reach their goal — Vayishlach, Beshalach and Shelach Lecha, still awaiting their fulfillment.

But these are necessary passages through which we must go. We must not imagine that the story of Yaakov and Esav belongs to the past. It accompanies us today.