Toldos 5774:   What’s Missing?

By Rabbi Joshua (deficiently known as The Hoffer) Hoffman

            A salient feature of Eisav’s personality that emerges from our parsha is the great respect that he showed to his father, Yitzchok. In fact, the midrash (Yalkut Shimoni, Toldos 27) tells us that no one ever showed respect to his father the way that Eisav showed to his. What, then, was missing in Eisav, that led him to his ignominious end, being excluded from the chain of Jewish tradition? 

            Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, zt”l, in a yahrtzheit lecture delivered in Boston in 1953, explained that although Eisav did, indeed, fulfill the mitzvah of kibbud av, of honoring one’s father, to the utmost degree, he did not fulfill the mitzvah of morah av, of having fear and respect for his father out of recognition of the authority that respect entails. Honoring one’s parents involves providing for their needs, for example, giving them their meals, while dread of them entails things as not sitting in their place, not contradicting them, and the like. While kibbud is often done out of instinct, says Rav Soloveitchik, or out of the realization that ultimately, one may need his own children to care for him, morah is not based on instinct, but on a genuine understanding and relationship with the parent. This was the element, then, that Eisav was lacking, and that led to his rejection from the Jewish people. 

            Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlop, in his Mei Marom to Parshas Toldos, gives a different explanation. He says that Eisav honored his father, but not his mother, and that a connection with both fathers and mothers are necessary for the transmission of the Jewish tradition.  Although Yitzchok felt a degree of sanctity in the way that Eisav cared for him, Eisav lacked the element of honoring his mother, and because of this, he failed to attain the level of holiness required to become part of the formative chain of Jewish lineage. Rabbi Charlop gives a detailed explanation of the precise nature of Eisav’s deficiency, which is rooted in kabbalah, and beyond the scope of our presentation. His basic message, however, is that a complete Jewish home must be grounded in a relationship with both a father and a mother. 

            Actually, Rav Soloveitchik, zt”l, in a different context, makes a point similar in nature to that of Rav Charlop. He notes that even though Avraham lived for another thirty-eight years after Sarah’s death, we find little of what he did during those years recorded in the Torah, beyond finding a burial place for Sarah and a wife for Yitzchok. The patriarchs and matriarchs, explained Rav Soloveitchik, worked together as units, and once Sarah died, it was left to Yitzchok, together with his wife Rivkah, to carry the Jewish tradition forward. The father, said Rav Soloveitchik, provides the more formal, intellectual side of the Jewish personality for the next generation, while the mother provides the more emotional element, the feelings involved in perpetuating the Jewish heritage. Although Rav Soloveitchik does not make this connection, we can say, following Rav Charlop, that Eisav was missing this emotional element, and, therefore, did not qualify to be a conveyor of the tradition. Moreover, in contrast to Yaakov, who sat in the tent of Torah and thus, as a consequence, exhibited a sense of morah for his father, Eisav had, as Rashi notes, no proper sense of Torah, and therefore misrepresented the mitzvah of tithing, which, as the Rambam notes in his Laws of Kings, was a mitzvah that Yitzchok paid particular attention to fulfilling. Thus, although Eisav did excel in one aspect of his relationship with his father, his overall relationship with his parents was incomplete, and, therefore, he did not qualify to serve as a link in Jewish tradition.