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[I know this is late. I meant to get it posted in time for the relevant Torah reading this year (Parashat Toldot). But it is one of my best pieces, so I am posting it now — better late than never]

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Why would Esau abandon his birthright? He arrives home after a day’s hunt, smells his brother’s cooking, and trades the birthright away for dinner. Why indeed would he do that?

Details matter here. The first thing Esau announces upon entering the tent is, “I am weary.” Jacob makes him a proposition, “Sell (michrah) your birthright.” Esau despairs: “I am about to die. What good is my birthright to me?” And with that, the deed is done.

Esau deserves more sympathy than he gets, because we are conditioned to treat him as the “heavy.” But God is compassionate, the Rabbis say, so we should be too. Look again at Esau, then.

Are we to believe that Esau’s weariness is pure physical exhaustion? Could this mighty man of strength be so weak that he cannot pour himself some stew? That he cannot think straight enough to keep his birthright intact? Hardly. Take him at his word! “I am weary… about to die.” It doesn’t take much to diagnose Esau as suffering from a malady that attacks millions of us still: Depression.

The Rabbis emphasize the word used by Jacob, an unusual version of the imperative, michrah, “Sell!” It can also be read, machrah, not the imperative, but the past tense, meaning, “She (or it) sold” — as if rather than asking for the birthright, Jacob was observing that something or other had already sold it. Nachmanides indicates what that “something” was: it is Esau’s weariness, ayefut in Hebrew, a feminine abstract noun, and the real subject of the sentence.

On this reading, Esau arrives home at dark, his depression creeping in with the setting sun. “I am weary,” he announces, “ready to die. What good is anything to me?”

“Your weariness has sold the birthright,” Jacob observes.

And the Torah sums it up: “Esau treated even his birthright with contempt,” not because he is too tired to think clearly, but because his very soul is so weary of the world, that he is ready to die.

Thousands of readers will now recognize Esau in themselves or in those they love. Sufferers of depression present themselves as strong and filled with promise, while inside, they are weary beyond belief. Their own birthright — fresh air, sunshine, life itself — seems meaningless. People ask them to snap out of it — as if they could. But they cannot. They can barely get out of bed in
the morning. Like Esau, they are oh so weary — ready to die.

How, we may wonder, does Esau fare in the end? Years later, returning from servitude to Laban, Jacob encounters his brother who has done quite well for himself. He is wealthy, thriving, a man with family, land, and servants. But Jacob overlooks the obvious to peer into Esau’s soul. Having recognized, once, how “Esau’s weariness has sold his birthright” Jacob now judges anew. “Looking into your face,” he says, “is like looking into the face of God” (Gen. 33:10).

Jacob recognizes Esau’s depression as a thing of the past: his brother’s face, once weary, now shines with divine radiance. With his new-found peace of mind, Esau can even forgive Jacob for taking advantage of him when they were children. He kisses Jacob, assures him he is content with life, and calmly takes his leave.

Esau is a case study in hope. If Esau can be transformed into a mirror of the divine, then so can we. But first we must decide that daily weariness is neither normal nor necessary. Happiness depends on the inner life of the soul, and the soul can find the most surprising cures, even when we least expect them.

In our day, God stores up miracles in medical discoveries. If you are weary unto death, find a doctor. Decide that you have had enough of sadness. It is never too late to learn to shine like God.

Do you remember when Yom Ha’atsma’ut evoked sheer amazement – an Independence Day for a sovereign Jewish State! Who would have believed it? Well, the it is almost upon us again, but the quality of the day has changed. It has grown so familiar with age that most Jews here will not even notice it come and go, and those who do will wonder what to do with it.

I suggest we treat it as the opportunity to make spiritual sense of having a Jewish homeland while living outside of it. Gone are the days when founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion could argue that the only proper Jewish response was aliyah. Gone too are the days when Jews had scruples about having a Jewish state altogether. And gone as well are the days when Jews in the Diaspora could relate to Israel meaningfully with no other rationale than proprietary amazement.

That is a formidable truth, especially about the next generation of Jews, those under 40 (let us say), who can just as easily leave Judaism as stay in it, and who want to know that the Jewish project matters enough to command their allegiance. I call that search for commitment “spiritual.” Hence my claim that it is time to make “spiritual  sense” of being a Jewish People divided by geography. What does it mean to live either in or outside the Land (ba’aretz  or chutz la’aretz), but, in either case, to share the mission that gives being Jewish its raison d’etre?

That there is such a mission, I take for granted (although I know it deserves argument on another occasion). My concern here is the phenomenon of the Israel-Diaspora divide which goes back as far as the collective Jewish memory reaches. We need a useful way to think about it.

A productive starting point is the consciousness of space and time as complementary ways of being in the world. We inhabit both, but have different perceptions of each. Points in space are arrayed in a way that allows us to commute back and forth among them. Not so time, which seems more like a video passing before our eyes — just the point that we call “now” actually exists; the others (past and future) belong to memory or anticipation.

A singular phenomenon of Judaism is its intentional seriousness about both. Like other religions and cultures, we too have a holiday cycle that celebrates sacred time; no surprise there. But, somewhat uniquely, we also insist that we have a land, a plot of sacred space without which we would not fully be Jews.

Religions tend to be phenomena of time – they measure their birth by a single historical moment when a prophet, savior, or sage, called them into being. Judaism too goes back to a primordial call in time, but it depends as well on a primordial space that was singled out simultaneously. The founding message to Abraham was precisely to go to the land that God would show him. Judaism, then, had a sacred place the moment it came into being.

So the plenitude of human aspiration is lived out in time and in space; and Judaism, from the outset, highlighted both.

Modern times have seen what amounts to a division of sacred labor: Israelis inhabit spiritual space; Diasporans mine spiritual time. Israelis, who know only space, are chagrined by Diasporans who never even contemplate moving to Israel. Diasporans, who know only time, are piqued by Israelis who go to the beach, not the synagogue, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Both charges are true, but neither is a sign of spiritual ill will. They are simply outgrowths of our two diverse orientations to the sacred: sacred space for Israelis; sacred time for Diasporans.

This time/space perspective sheds light on the attractiveness of Jewish Peoplehood. Ever since the destruction of the first Temple, we have known communities in Israel and in the Diaspora, each one strengthening the other. I do not mean just the exercise of money and power: Diasporan donations that fuel Israeli economic and military genius, which in turn bring pride to the Diaspora. I mean something deeper – a worldwide and eternal People harnessing spiritual energy from the entire space-time continuum.

To live just in space or just in time is impoverishing. I relish the reminder that I have both, and Yom Ha’atsma’ut is such a reminder: a moment in sacred time to affirm my commitment to sacred space. When accompanied by thoughtfulness about the purpose of Jewish Peoplehood, the universal mission for which the Jewish People exists, it can be Jewish spirituality at its finest.

The things that matter most we rarely know for sure. Among them are the great issues of truth and justice. They go together, as we all know, nowadays, from the long-standing television series Law and Order. In the first half of every episode, the police seek out truth; in the second half, the courts  establish justice. Readers of Torah could have gotten that message from this week’s portion which calls on the Israelites to establish shoftim v’shotrim, “judges and officials.” The officials are the police: the truth finders; the judges allocate justice.

This interdependence of truth and justice comes through also in the blessing that follows the haftarah. “All of God’s words,” we are assured, “are true and just.” But only God is absolutely trustworthy regarding either. The human condition presupposes doubt on both. The S’fat Emet affirms, “It is impossible to arrive at absolute truth”; and D’rashot El Ami acknowledges, “From a human perspective there are many kinds of justice, just as there are many kinds of truth.”

We seem, therefore, to be in absolute need of truth and justice, but absolutely unable to arrive at either of them absolutely. This is not to say that they are relative; we must differentiate the way things are known (“ontology,” in philosophical language) from the human capacity to know the way they are (“epistemology,” as the philosophers say). It is only our ability to know them (epistemology) that is flawed.

So here’s our dilemma. How do we run a society which requires public policy based on truths and rooted in justice, when we can know neither of them for certain?

To begin with, we can take seriously the lesson that “there are many kinds of truth.” Realities about such evils as war and poverty are known not just through quantitative data, but from the stories people tell, whether biographical or purely literary. The old TV program Dragnet featured LA detective Joe Friday eliciting “just the facts.” But “just the facts” are never enough. Take Stephen Crane’s Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, for example. Its empathy for wartime suffering transcends statistical comparisons of battle casualties. Read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and you understand poverty in ways that “just the facts” will never reveal.

Judaism captures this sort of complexity with the term yosher — neither truth nor justice, but a third category: a “feel for” equity, righteousness, the “rightness” of things. Budgets, for example, should be more than “just”; they should also be “right” — a response to the overall situation, including mitigating factors beyond what the letter of the law understands as “just the facts.”

It is rightness that we have in mind on Rosh Hashanah when we picture a courtroom with one seat of justice and another of mercy, and ask God to occupy the latter before passing judgment. There may be mitigating factors that a Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck or Victor Hugo might pick up, but that “just the facts” would overlook.

The nuanced nature of truth and justice is the overall theme, generally, of these seven weeks of transition from Tisha B’av to the high holy days. It emerges from the Haftarah readings (known collectively as “the seven portions of comfort”) which constitute a serialized dialogue with God on the possibility of renewal following exile. The stage is set on Shabbat Nachamu, “the Sabbath of comfort,” where, God urges Isaiah to “comfort, comfort my people.”  But what comfort can there be if truth is one-sided, and guilt unmodulated by matters of rightness?  Technically, Israel has sinned and deserves punishment. So one week later, Israel responds, dubiously, “But Adonai has forsaken me!” God, however, knows human nature; understands human weakness; and, through our prayers (spoken and silent), hears the stories we have to tell about why we acted as we did.  So the third week, God reiterates the promise: “Unhappy storm-tossed one, I will give you foundations of sapphires.” And now, this week, God underscores the fact that “I, it is I who comfort you,” a reminder that God’s insight (unlike ours) is perfect: God gets at the rightness of things; God tempers justice with mercy in a manner toward which we can only strive.

Strive for it we should (hence, the accent on “pursuit” in this week’s admonition,” Justice, justice, you shall pursue“) but with the full admission of its complexity.  Whether personal quarrels, organizational planning, or matters of congressional debate, the sides involved would do well to remember that they are not God; that there are many roads to truth; that fullness of understanding arrives through people’s stories, not just the facts; and that justice should be tempered by “rightness.”

Everyone (not just Americans) ought to read President Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address. Pearl Harbor was almost a year away, but foreseeing the eventual need to confront tyranny, Roosevelt virtually predicted why we would go to war: to preserve our essential four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These he called America’s true arsenal.

It’s 2011, the 70^th anniversary year of Roosevelt’s address. How are the four freedoms faring — for Americans and for Jews?

Americans would have to say that the two freedom’s “of” are doing well. Both freedom of speech and freedom of worship remain sacrosanct. The press remains free, and (so far anyway) we have steadfastly retained separation of church and state. Give them both an A on America’s Freedom Report Card.

The “freedoms from,” however, have suffered. Freedom from fear took a blow on 9/11, not just because we were attacked from without, but because the government sanctioned secret arrest and torture within. We deserved an F for that, but are working our way back to an A again.

Freedom from want is another matter. At the moment, the top 1% of the population owns as much as the lowest 90%. Minorities suffer particularly. According to the July 26 Pew Study, “The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households…. the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.”

Not that most Americans think that recession has ended! Our current quarterly growth rate is only 1.3%! Yet Congress steadfastly thinks the problem is we spend too much (!) on the elderly and the poor. Fiscally speaking, I am a moderate, but even I find it hard to believe that our leaders care very much about very many. The economic revival gets a B-; the national ethos of increasing greed and mean-spiritedness gives us an F.

I say this not to carp. America remains a magnificent country. We are privileged to live in it. As a Jew (especially), I am grateful beyond words. I just wish everyone had enough to eat.

Roosevelt’s four freedoms apply universally–they are minimum demands of a free society.  American Jews, therefore, have our own report card to consider. Our pattern is just the opposite of America’s. The “Freedom froms” get passing grades, but we fail the “freedom tos.”

Thanks largely to Federation, to which we are accustomed to giving generously, the Jewish poor have freedom from want; and because American anti-Semitism is minimal, we have freedom from fear as well. But we deserve no A for freedom of speech and freedom of worship.

As to freedom of speech, critique of Jewish sacred cows is not easily tolerated among us.  The ultra right wing has a stranglehold on Israeli politics; we are constantly defending ourselves from having our rights cut off by governmental fiat. We should be headlining our opposition to proposed bills in the Knesset that deprive women of their rights and make second-class citizens out of Jews who are not Orthodox enough for the extremists. Yet we barely utter a word. Rampant anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel sentiment makes us wary of speaking out in public, perhaps. But how ironic! We finally live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech and then restrict our own free speech when it comes to Jewish matters!

Freedom of Jewish worship doesn’t do much better, but for different reasons. Here, we suffer from idolatry of authenticity. Enamored of some imagined sacred ideal of the past, we have forgotten how to experiment with Jewish worship in ways that restore its spiritual vigor. Each movement has its own challenges here, but except for the minority of people who have mastered the prayer book and the accepted ways to get through it, Jewish worship can be baffling and forbidding at best, exclusive and irrelevant at worst. We need to give ourselves the freedom to become revolutionary in our insistence that prayer can matter once again.

American security, Roosevelt insisted, in his 1941 address, would come only if “those who build our defenses” enjoy “an unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending.” That goes for Americans and for Jews. Standing firmly, openly, and vociferously for what is right is the best way to guarantee Jewish continuity. Within America as a whole, we should be at the forefront of demanding a better score on freedom from want; within our own ranks, we should be vigilant about freedom of speech and freedom of religion.