Parashat Vayeitzei: The Torah Meets Greek Mythology
(delivered by Student Rabbi Maayan Lev on December 2, 2022)
Chanukah will soon be upon us. It is the story of our victory against the Greeks. The story recounts that we successfully resisted the urges of assimilation, and retained our Jewish identity. To the Maccabees, Greek culture was quite offensive. But as a lover of great fiction, I can’t help but enjoy stories from Greek mythology and fiction. They’re just a lot of fun.
One of my favorite things about Greek legends is that the stories often contain great dramatic irony. The audience is often aware of things that the characters aren’t. One classic example is the story of Oedipus, who marries his mother without realizing it. Another great example is the Odyssey, in which Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar, and must maintain the illusion that he has died, making it all the more dramatic when he reveals himself.
If a Maccabee told me that it was wrong to enjoy these stories, I would tell them to relax. Though the Greeks conventionally believed in many gods, and we only believe in one, our legends have plenty of elements in common. When it comes to legends of deception and irony, our Tanach can compete with the best of them!
This week’s parashah is Vayetzei. Its protagonist, Jacob, has his entire life story revolve around irony and deception. In fact, the story of Jacob can be taken as both a great comedy and a great tragedy. Traditional Judaism shies away from the word “karma,” and teaches that heavenly rewards or punishments for our deeds occur after death, not during life. But Jacob’s story shows us that sometimes we do indeed reap what we sow during our lifetime.
Jacob’s story begins just as many Greek legends do: with a prophecy. But in this story, the prophet is none other than G!d. Rebecca, Jacob’s mother, asks G!d why her pregnancy is so painful. G!d responds that the twins in her womb are fighting, and though both will father their own nation, in the end, the younger child will be victorious.[1]
The elder child is Esau, and the younger one of course, is Jacob. One day Esau comes home exhausted and starving, and begs Jacob for the soup he is cooking, saying that he will die if he isn’t fed. Rather than saving Esau’s life out of the goodness of his heart, Jacob takes advantage of him, demanding his brother’s birthright in exchange for the soup.[2] Later, Jacob tricks his father Isaac, who is blind, into giving him the blessing meant for Esau.[3]
Jacob accomplishes this deception of his father by covering himself in goat’s hair to disguise himself as his brother. It was his mother Rebecca who urged him to do this. The Torah said she favored him, and wanted him to have the blessing. In retrospect, this was likely a self-fulfilling prophecy. G!d had told Rebecca long ago that Jacob would prevail over Esau, so Rebecca didn’t leave anything to chance. She made sure to fulfill
G!d’s words, even though Jacob himself was unaware of the prophecy.
Many years later, when Jacob was a father to Joseph and his brothers, the brothers would successfully fake Joseph’s death to their father by covering Joseph’s coat in goat’s blood.[4] How ironic that Jacob himself would eventually fall for a deception involving a goat! But the irony doesn’t stop there.
This week we find Jacob as he runs away to Haran to escape Esau’s wrath. There he meets the love of his life, Rachel. Of course, his uncle Laban pulls the famous switcheroo on Jacob. Thinking that he is consummating a marriage with Rachel, he realizes the next morning that he had actually slept with her sister, Leah. The Torah says that the act took place while it was dark, so Jacob could not see who his partner was.[5] To the reader, this sexual accident is an act of great comedy! But it’s also quite ironic. In a way, this is the Jewish version of Oedipus!
Laban is often framed as a villain in this tale, but actually, his role is to give Jacob a taste of his own medicine! But the way Jacob sees things, “Fool me once, I’ll fool you right back.”
Jacob later tries to convince Laban to let him go home. Ducking the question and hoping to convince Jacob to stay, Laban asks him how much he wants to be paid for his many years of servitude. Jacob says that he doesn’t need any money, and that all he wants are the speckled goats and dark-colored sheep from Laban’s flocks. Such animals were quite rare at the time in the Middle East, and Laban thought he was getting a bargain. Only soon enough, there were tons of these animals, and Laban understandably felt cheated!
Unbeknownst to Laban, G!d had sent Jacob a dream of the goats and sheep having intercourse![6] A strange dream about intercourse? Yes, it’s in the Torah! And like Joseph, he shares his strange dream with his family members. Like father, like son.
In actuality, this dream was a set of instructions on how to isolate the correct animals to ensure that the ones having intercourse would end up producing speckled and dark-colored offspring. Once again, Jacob has tricked a relative using livestock, and once again, rather than risk the wrath of his victim, he runs away. He escapes from Laban, and takes his wives, his daughter, and his 11 sons.[7] And pretty soon, a tragedy worthy of Homer takes place.
As they flee from Laban, Rachel steals her father’s idols.[8] The Torah makes it very clear that Jacob doesn’t know about this.[9] Laban eventually catches up to them. They argue, and among other things, Laban asks Jacob why he had stolen his idols. Jacob replies defensively that he did not steal the idols, and that whoever had stolen them would not remain alive. Jacob unknowingly curses Rachel.[10]
But Rachel doesn’t die right away. That is how this week’s parashah ends. The readers are left in suspense, not knowing if God would fulfill Jacob’s curse. In next week’s parashah, Rachel does indeed die, giving birth to Jacob’s final child, Benjamin. She was buried along the road to Bethlehem, and is the only one of our matriarchs and patriarchs not to be buried alongside the others in the cave of Machpelah.[11]
There is still the aforementioned epilogue involving Joseph and his brothers, but at this point, the tragedy of Jacob is essentially complete. He deceived his brother, his father, and his uncle, who also deceived him in turn. In the end, Jacob ironically kills Rachel.
Until now, deceptions involving Jacob have worked out pretty well for him. Even when he was tricked into marrying Leah, he actually ended up with additional wives and children because of it. In the end, Jacob’s deeds catch up to him, and he gets hit where it hurts the most. With the death of his favored wife.
The great rabbi Hillel is famous for saying, “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others. That is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary.”[12] In playing too many tricks over the course of his lifetime, Jacob had certainly not always treated others the way he wanted to be treated. His deeds caught up to him. He didn’t realize that she had stolen the idols, but in stealing the idols from Laban and then successfully hiding them from him, Rachel had taken a page out of her husband’s book.[13] She had pulled a con on Laban. In the end, perhaps it was Rachel who taught Jacob the lasting harm of deception.
Hillel also understood what it meant to reap what you sow. Pirkei Avot states that he found a skeleton in the water, and said to it: “Because you drowned others, they drowned you. And in the end, they too will be drowned.”[14] This is what Judaism calls “midah k’neged midah,” or “measure for measure.”
What goes around often comes around. So let us all remember to spread joy, not anger.
Shabbat shalom.
[1] Genesis 25:22-23.
[2] Genesis 25:29-34.
[3] Genesis 27:6-29.
[4] Genesis 37:31-34.
[5] Genesis 29:21-25.
[6] Genesis 30:25-31:12.
[7] Genesis 31:17-18.
[8] Genesis 31:19..
[9] Genesis 31:32.
[10] Genesis 31:22-32.
[11] Genesis 35:16-20.
[12] BT, Shabbat 31a.
[13] Genesis 31:32-35.
[14] Pirkei Avot 2:6.