The New Year

Last Friday night, December 30^th, our young cantor’s sweet voice sang an old prayer to a secular tune. When, after perhaps ten seconds, I identified the song, a wave of sadness washed over me.  The tune, B’shana habaa (In the new year), is an Israeli song for the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, and it was the first Israeli song that I attempted to learn during the intensive Hebrew course that my wife and I took at Beit Hanoar, on Herzog Street, in September and October of 1972, after our arrival in Jerusalem.

Our Hebrew course began before Rosh Hashana, so it was appropriate for Dalia, our gifted teacher, to teach us the lyrics to B’shana habaa, especially because it contains useful vocabulary as well as an irregular noun.  While the lyrics are appropriate for the religious new year in Israel, which takes place in September or October, they are utterly inappropriate for the secular new year in New York, as can be seen in the first line,  “In the new year, we’ll sit on our porch and count migrating birds.” Still, the tune that our cantor was singing reminded me of new beginnings.

But the beginnings I remembered were in the past.  When I first encountered that song, I was 40 years old, half my age now, my career largely ahead of me.  Our parents and grandparents were still alive, and our children were still very young.  I was starting work on an exciting research project in what for us was an exotic locale.  The future was endlessly long.  But when I heard that song last Shabbat, I felt the sadness of nostalgia for a time that can never come again, for the time when we were still young. 

In that week’s bible portion, Vayigash, the aged Jacob hears the astounding news that not only is his son Joseph still alive but that Joseph is now the viceroy of Egypt, the land to which his sons now take him.  Robert Alter (The Five Books of Moses, a translation with commentary: p. 265) comments: Jacob’s story, like David’s, is virtually unique in ancient literature in its searching representation of the radical transformations a person undergoes in the slow course of time.  The powerful young man who made his way across the Jordan to Mesopotamia with only his walking staff, who wrestled with stones and men and divine beings, is now an old man tottering on the brink of the grave, bearing the deep wounds of his long life.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as a powerful young man at the time I first heard B’shana habaa, although I was clearly more powerful than I am today, nor am I as feeble as Jacob was at the time his sons carried him down to Egypt.  Still, hearing B’shana habaa, shortly after reading Alter’s comment, brought home to me how advanced in age I’ve become, how careful I now find myself when walking over rough terrain, how slow I am in ascending the subway staircases, how little time there is left. 

But the other morning, as I was walking in Prospect Park and mulling over these sad thoughts of decline, I looked up at the sky, cloudless and radiantly blue, and I thought that the present is a good place to be.  And I remembered the advice a surgeon gave to the daughters of a man whose cancer he had excised: "Everyone dies," he said, "but not everyone lives.  I want you to live."  That's what I'm doing my best to accomplish during the time that is left. 

2010-2012 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Toledot

Each week, a member of our minyan offers a brief commentary on the Torah portion of the week.  My turn arrived two Saturdays ago. The portion was Toledot, an exceedingly rich text whose central drama is Jacob’s supplanting his older twin Esau as the bearer of Abraham's and Isaac’s legacy.  As I read through the portion, I was struck by how suffused it is with pairs, doubles, opposites, mirror images, and echoes, appropriate for a story not only about twins but also about duplicity.  

For example, Rebecca tells her son Jacob to bring her two kids, which she will cook into a stew for his father Isaac, now blind, in order to receive the blessing which Isaac has meant for Esau.  Why two kids?  Surely one would be enough for an old man or even for a family of four.  In a hot climate without refrigeration, an uneaten goat stew would soon spoil.  But the pair represents the doubleness that we see throughout the story. 

We need not look far to find other examples.  Rebecca gives Jacob stew and bread, another pair, to give to his father – an echo of the bread and stew that Jacob gave Esau in exchange for Esau’s birthright.  To fool Isaac into thinking that Jacob is Esau, Rebecca covers Jacob’s hands and the back of his neck in the hairy skin of the goats she’s killed – Jacob is smooth-skinned whereas Esau is hairy – and dresses him in Esau’s clothing.  So we have the pair formed by Esau's clothes and the goat skin, which in turn covers two parts of Jacob's body, his hands and the back of his neck.

Jacob brings the food to his father.  Isaac asks him which son he is.  Jacob says he’s Esau.  Isaac asks him to approach so that he can feel him and he asks “are you really my son Esau?”  Jacob does not answer but draws close.  Isaac feels him and says, “The voice is the voice of Jacob but the hands are the hands of Esau.”  And he asks again, “are you really my son Esau?” And once more Jacob says he’s Esau.  So here we have three pairs: the pairing of “the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau,” Isaac’s two identical requests for confirmation – “are you really my son Esau” - and Jacob’s two lies about his identity. 

Isaac asks Jacob to kiss him and as Jacob complies, Isaac smells Esau’s clothes, commenting that Esau’s scent is “that of a field blessed by the Eternal.” So Isaac employs two senses to confirm his understanding that Jacob is Esau, touch and smell, but he ignores two others.  He ignores the evidence of his hearing – “the voice of Jacob”  – as well as the evidence provided by taste.  Surely goat stew does not taste like stew made from game, which is what he asked Esau to give him and which is what he was expecting.  So we have two pairs here, those senses that support the deception and those senses that contradict it.  Isaac then blesses Jacob, and the blessing itself, a poem, is structured as a collection of couplets.

The question arises as to whether Jacob really deceived Isaac.  Perhaps Isaac deceived himself, willing himself to believe Jacob’s grotesque disguise.  But if it was Isaac who was the deceiver, it may not have been himself that he deceived but his family.  In other words, he may have been conscious of Jacob’s ruse and pretended to be fooled by it.  In either of these cases, he acted as he did because in his heart he believed that Jacob was the appropriate bearer of his and Abraham’s legacy.  That Isaac chooses not to believe the evidence of two senses, hearing and taste, that he refuses to rescind his blessing after Esau presents him with clear evidence of Jacob’s duplicity, and that indeed he later blesses Jacob a second time all support the notion that Jacob did not deceive his father.   Thus the story provides two plausible interpretations, one in which Jacob deceives Isaac and the other in which Isaac either deceives himself or deceives the rest of his family

The story does not criticize Jacob for his immoral behavior, but its pairs, doubles, opposites, and echoes provide a subterranean comment on the duplicity and ambiguity at its heart.

In this post, I’ve given only a few of the pairings that I presented in my d’var Torah.  The more I looked for them the more I found, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even more to be discovered.  But in preparing my commentary, I found more than these pairs; I also learned the pleasure of close textual analysis, of which this was my first attempt.  This old dog is learning new tricks.