Divrei Torah - Guests/Members

Sometimes I feel that reading the Torah should come with a trigger warning, a statement that alerts us that the content may be disturbing or upsetting. This is true for me in reading this portion. It includes examples of painful dysfunctional family dynamics and truly disturbing values and behavior leading to conflict, deception, and betrayal. 

God tells Rebecca, who is having a difficult pregnancy after her distress at her inability to have children, that the younger brother will prevail over the elder, and that Isaac will prefer Esau. That sets up sibling rivalry and competition. It is a foreshadowing of layers of deceit and a set up for the estrangement to follow.

Indeed, one day, when Esau comes home hungry and vulnerable, Jacob buys Esau's birthright for a pot of lentils. That is a heartless example of a transactional relationship that leads to a series of threats and tragedies. 

Later, Rebecca encourages Jacob to pretend to be Esau to receive Isaac's blessing. Discovering this, Esau cries, Don't you have a blessing for me? In that family, love was obviously a limited commodity. 

For me, at this time of intense ecological grief and political trepidation, Esau's cry echoes with familiar personal loss and systemic despair. 

In self defense, to talk about this portion, I decided to seek out opposite possibilities to help me imagine a different narrative where blessings were not assumed to be in short supply.

In contrast to the mindset of scarcity in Toledot, I found the new book, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braided Sweetgrass.

Kimmerer offers an expanded vision of "gift economies" from Lewis Hyde's 1983 book The Gift – in which sharing our gifts creates a culture of abundance, a sense of security based on mutual reliance.

I also am thinking about Rachel Carson's legacy as a touchstone. In her book, A Sense of Wonder, published after her death, Carson wrote about introducing children to the abundance of nature, to give them a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from sources of our strength.

Alongside the tangible, Kimmerer imagines the cycling of intangible resources, such as gratitude, reciprocity and community, as a way to challenge the scarcity and competition of our economic and societal hierarchies, to question the status quo.

She proposes connection and appreciation as antidotes for the alienation and powerlessness that stem from broken relationships with the land and each other.

She writes:

Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver…. 

She writes…

I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given.

Kimmerer also references the book, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein:

Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle: genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. 
I also share Kimmerer’s question: Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems to create scarcity instead of abundance? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. …

And I wonder, why did God set up the scarcity mindset before Rebecca's twins were even born and why does the portion give us a very different Rebecca from the young woman who had been so generous to the stranger and his thirsty camels? Did she never know a mother's joy when siblings love each other? As a mom, I've cherished the times when my daughters got along, shared interests, secrets, and clothes, and supported each other. I have many happy memories of them singing in harmony in their rooms, on hikes or in the back seat on road trips.

In a gift economy the natural world itself is understood as a gift and not as private property… The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and ongoing cycles of reciprocity. 

True security is ensured by nurturing the bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both keep hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance. What if Jacob had simply given his brother the pot of lentils instead of selling it to him?

Like Kimmerer, I cherish the notion of the gift economy instead of a market economy that reduces everything to a commodity. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude, and kindness is an infinitely renewable resource which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use. For as long as I can remember, I've had that expansive feeling in public libraries and public gardens, even volunteering at the Newton Swap Shop, as well as on ocean beaches and mountain tops.

In Kimmerer's book, I recognize the basis for my commitment to creating Dorshei Tzedek and to nurturing Chesed for building meaningful connections, for fostering generosity and gratitude outside the transactional market place, and, in spite of the worsening political turmoil and uncertainty, to share the sense of abundance and the blessings of community. 

I wish Jacob and Esau had grown up with the same sense of abundance and love for each other and feelings of security in a blessed community. Perhaps, instead of intergenerational trauma, their story could have been an example of peace and shared prosperity, foreshadowing a much kinder and safer world.