The Movement for Reform Judaism

JACOB AND ESAU

The story, a section of which smooth Dan read, contains two truly remarkable and memorable sections, the first about a quarter of the way in and the second about three-quarters of the way through. The first, Jacob wrestling with the stranger at night by the ford, was the motif that began and ran right the way through my teacher, Rabbi Dow Marmur’s first book ‘Beyond Survival’. The second, the kiss (or was it a bite?) when Jacob and Esau finally meet, yielded the title of a second book, ‘He Kissed Him And They Wept’ which I edited and which looked at the present state of rapprochement between Judaism and Catholicism. I’ve probably spent more time thinking about those two chapters than any other two chapters in the Torah.

But today, I want to look at the ending, an ending that is much less well remembered – to the point of being completely ignored. An ending which is really rather troubling and quite depressing.

Esau and Jacob are brothers who struggle even in the womb. Esau emerges the first and then out comes Jacob hanging on to his heel and bristling with rivalry and determination to catch up and overtake.

It occurs to me that the sibling relationship is, arguably, the most difficult of all relationships. If you’re the first child in a loving family – and I can’t think why my granddaughter Francesca should spring to mind at this point – there isn’t an awful lot of obvious benefit to the appearance of number two. From your point of view, you were the sole recipient of all of the love, all of the worship and all of the presents. The mysterious concept that other people’s love expands to take in a second child is pretty hard to grasp when you’re two or three and there is no doubt that parental time and attention do now have to be divided. What do you get in return for this enforced sharing of attention and adoration? Not a lot. It’s quite some time before your younger sibling becomes someone with whom you can have a worthwhile and meaningful relationship.

It’s different for number two whose positive awareness of number one begins very early. But in a competitive world, there is absolutely nothing that the younger child can ever do to change one huge fact – she or he will always be the younger. Whatever else she is first at, she can never be the first child in the family.

The potential for ambivalence, for tension, for rivalry is always there and this particular narrative in Genesis spares us nothing, hides nothing in a reality that most of us parents would choose to ignore most of the time because it’s a reality that we created, about which we can do nothing.

Fortunately, most siblings, most brothers work it out. I’m happy to say that Francesca and Oliver are great together. Ben and Dan are good friends. But it isn’t what happens with Esau and Jacob. Their dysfunctional relationship, fuelled by Jacob’s jealousy and sense of rivalry, by his determination to be the favoured one, causes havoc, sets mother against father and forces Jacob to run away. And then, in our sidra, there is an apparent resolution. Jacob wrestles with the mysterious being, finds the courage to cross the ford and re-encounter Esau. They kiss and, for the purposes of this sermon, let’s not take the course taken by the authors of the dots over the words ‘to kiss’, inferring that it was actually a bite. Let’s stay with the embrace and the kiss and the reconciliation.

What are we told happens afterwards? How does the story end, what’s the close of the narrative that gets ignored? It ends with a parting and the two brothers going their separate ways, never to meet again. They can’t make it together. They can’t sustain an ongoing relationship. Nothing positive develops after the reunion. The reconciliation, at best, achieves a lancing of the emotions, real or imagined, but the relationship isn’t sustained and developed and allowed to bear the special fruit that only a sibling relationship can yield. It’s actually very sad and very sobering.

However, I don’t know how much the story is really a meditation on brotherly relationships, sibling relationships. Because the Bible operates so often on the level of archetypes – where people stand for groups and nations, where people prefigure subsequent history. Jacob is the ancestor of the Jewish people. Esau is the gentile. Jacob is ‘us’. Esau is ‘them’.

I’ve been very aware of Jacob and Esau in these terms, in terms of standing for us and them over the last couple of weeks.

The Sunday before last, for the first time, I was invited to be one of the ‘Faith Leaders’ taking part in the Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph. It was quite an experience gathering inside the Foreign Office with the Prime Minister, senior Cabinet Ministers, Commonwealth High Commissioners, the top brass of the Armed Forces and thirteen other ‘Faith Leaders’ – a Hindu, a Sikh, a Buddhist, a Muslim, two Jews and leaders of the various Christian denominations. Two Jews.

I walked into Radlett and Bushey Reform Synagogue that afternoon to induct Rabbi Paul Freedman as their new rabbi. Seemingly everyone had spotted me at the Cenotaph – the power of television, the thirst to be represented – and the first question that I was asked was why I wasn’t standing next to the Chief Rabbi, why wasn’t Jacob standing next to Esau! In fact, Rabbi Sacks was perfectly comfortable with my being there and the ordering of the procession was entirely the work of Home Office civil servants. The two siblings have made a lot of progress over the last few years. Something which is worth taking pride in.

Particularly as, if you apply my analysis, there isn’t much in it for the elder child. What possible gain is there in sharing the limelight? Given the analogy of Esau and Jacob, what doubts and suspicions might reasonably be held regarding the motives of the younger child, the would-be usurper? And as for the younger child, nothing can change the fact of who is the older sibling, who’s been around the longest, who was there first.

Yet it isn’t very long ago that continuing attempts to keep out, to render invisible, to vilify were the norm and the loser, of course, was British Jewry which can ill afford division through sibling rivalry. Things have begun to change but the question that people seemed to be asking last Sunday afternoon was: What we witnessed at the Cenotaph this morning – was it a kiss or a bite?

My answer is that I think it was a kiss. But before you get too excited, remember that the kiss between Esau and Jacob – even if it was a kiss – did not herald co-existence let alone co-operation. They simply went their separate ways. Can British Jewry act in a less depressing, more mature and productive way?

I think there are limits to what can be achieved but I’m not completely cynical or without hope. It was interesting talking to the various representatives of the many Christian denominations. They’ve come much further than us but then they started on the process much earlier.

Three days earlier, on the 11th of the 11th, I’d been at Lambeth Palace for my first meeting as the second Jewish President of the Council of Christians and Jews – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop, the Head of the Church of Scotland, the Moderator of the Free Churches, Jonathan Sacks and me. Jonathan and I sat down together but I couldn’t cope with the sun streaming through the palace windows right in my eyes and moved round the table muttering that I could manage the father but not the son. One day my merry quips will get me into big trouble!

The main discussion item was how CCJ, founded soon after the war, soon after the holocaust, should respond to the new and urgent reality presented by Islam whilst still recognising that the old agenda and the old tasks are far from having been completed. It’s a widespread convention today to refer to Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the three Abrahamic faiths, seeing the three as siblings, each the child of Abraham. That recognition of our sibling relationship, our sharing of history, our intertwining, perhaps even of our inter-dependence, is one of the most powerful insights of recent years. But if we now recognise our family relationship, we also have to acknowledge that family relationships don’t come much more dysfunctional than this one. Neither Judaism nor Christianity has crossed the ford with relationship to Islam and Islam likewise hasn’t even begun the struggle with the strange being that preceded reconciliation. And, let me repeat again, in the biblical narrative, the siblings didn’t learn to live together, they went their separate ways.

We – the three Abrahamic faiths – don’t have that option. In a crowded world, in a global village, the days when faiths could go their separate ways and ignore the existence of the other are past. The history of the last 2,000 years illustrates what terrible things happen when faiths see themselves as superior and unrelated. The present illustrates what happens when such arrogance continues – look at the prominence of religions in conflict in virtually every trouble spot around the globe. If we continue like this we will either discredit religion completely or destroy the world or both. The imperative to recognise our sibling relationship and enter into a long-term relationship of cooperation and mutual respect is urgent and absolute.

I watch Francesca with Oliver and I marvel at the ability of children to cope with the built in disadvantages of siblinghood. I look at smooth Dan and big brother Ben and I ask myself whether the Torah was being too cynical in making the kiss ambiguous and having them go their separate ways. But, as I suggested earlier, the Torah works with archetypes where love and wise parenting are much harder to see.

Can the siblings of British Jewry work together for the good of the community as a whole? Can the three Abrahamic faiths begin to recognise that separately they will destroy the world but together they can save it? In both cases, they have no alternative. But that hasn’t stopped us up to now.

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