Birthrights and Unjust Inheritances

Text as prepared for delivery at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, Westmount, Québec.

We are people who call some of the same books and stories the foundation of our faith in the same God. And what I am qualified, so much as anyone may be, to do is, is to open those texts and ask, why should we care what these ancient communities passed down to us?

Biblical interpretation is a world-changing act. Biblical interpretations change the courses of lives and nations, anciently and today. Even those who wish that religion would go away, and delusionally believe that that is a path to world peace, their very claim Biblical narratives are worthless or irrelevant is a Biblical interpretation. And tonight we hear from the Torah a story whose questions resonate into our lives to this day, and how we view it affects our interpersonal and geopolitical relationships.

Hendrick ter Brugghen

Jacob and Esau are twins who fight over their inheritance, sometimes translated as birthright—a word of whose charged meanings I am well aware. I always think think the first question of a Biblical story analysis is what happened. Simply, what is the plot of this story. It is a sibling rivalry. It is assumed in the story that the older brother, Esau, deserves more by default. The younger, Jacob, understandably does not like this default arrangement. As a fifth child myself, the prestige of oldest siblings is a principle I am biased to consider ridiculous. As the parent of twins myself, I am predisposed to think of even thinking of either twin as older is even more ridiculous.

This may also be a story about soup. Say whatever else you will about Jacob, but he is the greatest soup chef in the history of the world. As a Bostonian, I am offended it was not clam chowder. The fact it was lentil soup only demonstrates his culinary gifts all the more. So one day Jacob makes some amazing soup, and Esau comes in from the wilderness famished, and sells his position to Jacob for the soup.

Is this a story about Jacob’s cleverness? Is Jacob’s cleverness brilliance that should be rewarded or trickery that should be condemned? Is this a story about Esau being impulsive, being irresponsible, a warning against throwing away your lifetime of potential for a moment of physical satisfaction? If you study the commentaries of centuries of Jewish and Christian communities alike, you will find insistences on all of the above.

Tonight, however, I invite us to think of this story not from the points of views of any character in particular, but to question the assumptions behind the narrative in the first place: the assumption that unequal inheritance was inevitable. And maybe even good or right.

With all our sacred texts, we have to ask is this story, descriptive—a morally neutral retelling of the way things are, prescriptive—a story advocating we be like one of the characters in particular, or proscriptive—a warning against the behaviours of the characters. I suggest we consider the possibility that this is a proscriptive story to us all, but not about the actions of Jacob or Esau, but about a warning against the situation in which they found themselves. It is a shallow and even egotistic religious view which sees sin as only the personal failings of sinners, with no regard for how hard it is for anyone to behave morally in a morally bankrupt context.

Inheritances are sacred because they are gifts from those who came before us, ideally those who have loved us and we who we hold in our hearts in love. Believing that we have inheritances, birthrights, from our parents, from our ethnicity, from God even, is deeply holy if we recognise the gifts we have as sacred obligations and if we recognise that we did not earn them.

Earthly inheritances—that is inheritances from other humans—are necessarily, inevitably finite. We can only inherit so much. Unequal inheritances, however, are not inevitable. Those are choices. Perhaps, one may say, the very system of presumed unequal inheritances was so ingrained in the culture of the story it never occurred to anyone that things could be different. That seems reasonable. And a warning. Most of the ways any of us, as individuals, as nations, are unjust we probably do with our passive acceptance of the way things are, rather than as active choice to be unjust. But the injustice is injustice all the same.

Heavenly inheritances, that is any gift or privilege or responsibility we receive from God, though, are not inevitably finite. When we imagine that the blessings of God to any person or people inevitably or automatically preclude God’s blessings to another, we have fashioned God into our finite image. Assuming the blessings of God are finite, that my receiving a blessing must come at a cost to you, or that your receiving a blessing is an affront to me, is so common in human behaviour. But it is human to think of blessings a zero-sum game.

Isaac acted like it was his duty, in the norms of his time and place, to bless his sons unequally. Rebekah felt like she had to coach Jacob into how to manipulate the system. Jacob felt like exploiting his brother in a time of hunger was his only option. Esau felt like giving in to Jacob was the only way he could survive. What if they were all right? What if they system itself was wrong?

Genesis teaches us that everyone is made in the image and likeness of God. To me that is a clarion call to remember that each person represents a different finite glimpse into the infinite God who is creator of us all.

If we see in Esau the danger of not cherishing the birthrights we have been given, and in Jacob the danger of scheming to get the ones we have not been given, if we see both lessons in all their paradox and tension, we can see a lesson that resonates across time and culture. Even in the face of limited resources, injustice is a decision. Sometimes made passively, but no less made. And that when we think of the inheritances God wishes to give to all God’s children, we must not replace the infinite God with the idol of the God of Scarcity, a false god who curses others to bless me or blesses me at the expense of others.

I am not naive. I do not claim merely saying that God is infinite will answer the pragmatic questions of how we build more peaceful families or a more peaceful world. It is a wilful insistence, however, that building peace is both necessary—which I find easy to believe—and possible—which stretches my faith to its limit sometimes. Believing God has a blessing and a birthright for all of us is not alone a guarantee of peaceful cooperation, but it is a foundation that makes it possible.

Saying shalom is at the best of times a description, a prayer of gratitude. At the worst of times it is a wilful, determined prayer. In my own community when I say Que la paix du Seigneur soit avec vous, to people whose intimate lives I know well, I know how much I am asking of them, and of God, when I dare speak peace into their lives. It is a prayer I do not always seeing being answered. It is a prayer I cannot survive ceasing to pray. Shabbat shalom.