There is much that makes me angry in Parashat Toldot.
I am angry that this story is framed as ‘the story of Isaac, son of Abraham’ (Bereshit 25:19), when there is no one to tell Rebecca’s full story. I am angry that although God speaks directly to Rebecca and she receives a prophetic foretelling (25:23), she is never named as a prophet. I am angry that, yet again, we are introduced to a woman who is defined through her capacity to have children (25:21). I am angry at the deceit – Jacob to Esau, Isaac to Abimelech, Rebecca and Jacob to Isaac. I am angry that women are objectified and Rebecca’s body is understood to be available to the men around her (26:10). I am angry to read the tribalism of Isaac and Rebecca who are unhappy with Esau’s choice of Hittite wives (26:34-35). I am angry that Esau is, in essence, cast off, just as Hagar once was.
Like Isaac I am ‘seized with very violent trembling’ (27:33) and like Esau, I burst into ‘wild and bitter sobbing’ (27:34). When I am angry I turn to two of my angry prophetic ancestors: Rabbi Sheila and Jonah – for they were ‘really displeased’ (Jonah 4:1). In the words of Rabbi Sheila Shulman (z”l):
“In short, what I am so angry about is the betrayal, again and again. Of what I love” (2007: 32).
I am angry about the violence and division within the Tanach and its continued workings in our world today. Sheila has taught me that I am angry because I am in love with so much of what it is to be Jewish – an insatiable appetite and demand for curiosity, questioning and the quest for justice always and everywhere. I am angry when what I love and cherish is betrayed.
Sheila talks of her rage when there is a ‘catastrophic failure of imagination’ when people cannot connect our Jewish oppression to the oppression of others (2007: 32). How can Rebecca and Isaac rail against the non-Israelite wives of their sons and not realise that our liberation is tied to the liberation of others? Sheila draws our attention to the ‘grotesque presumption, on the part of so many little men,* that they are somehow ‘in charge of’ of ‘in control of’ what they call ‘the tradition’, of which they really know so little, which they interpret at its narrowest’ and which is entirely divorced from the scream for justice embedded in our traditions and teachings (2007: 32). When I read this searing critique I think of Isaac and Abraham who are so willing to give over the bodies of their wives for temporary physical safety. I think of the divisive tropes raging through our community which label us all as ‘good’ or ‘bad/non’ Jews depending on what we believe or think. I think of those cast out from our communities today.
I want us all to be angry about the times when the Tanach ‘falls short of its own ideals of justice’, when we do not apply the principle that we are all created in the divine image’ (Mandolfo 2007: 9 and Bereshit 1:27). Like Sheila my anger is targeted at any construction of domination which places an elite over the marginalised: ‘all of the above is not, cannot be, cannot be allowed to be, all of Judaism, or the Jewish world’ (2007: 37). The narrow, constrictive understanding of Judaism is stifling and runs against the ‘stream of righteousness; that flows through our teachings’ (2007: 32). Sheila in fact demands that once we understand some of us are marginalised, ‘then I trust you will be as urgent as the rest of us to reclaim your world from the hands of those who so dishonour it’ (2007: 32).
Jonah too was angry that the world did not work according to his ethical understanding – the bad people should suffer, the good people should be rewarded. He wanted those who were ‘evil’ to have their punishment, and when they were forgiven, he sulked. He too lived in a world of binaries and constrictions. Yet, through the work of Juliet Claassens in her book, ‘Queering the prophet’ we can see that the text itself subtly attempts to drive Jonah from his, and our, narrow straits (mitzraim). Time and time again Jonah is thrust into heterotopias – spaces which are upside down, strange, complex, ambiguous and anything but binary – in the hope that he will be transformed. He gets swallowed by a big male fish, yet deep in its intestines he finds God and sanctuary. In a place of death, he find life and creates a psalm – a strange place to find refuge. He is vomited out – re-born, in some ways. He goes to Nineveh, a powerful empire, and with one sentence transforms their fate – a topsy turvy world where one Israelite can change an empire’s history.
How powerful if, instead of futility, reaching for spaces or stories which give clear answers and restricts our Judaism, we recognise and embrace the upside down world and in time we find ourselves in it and seek to be transformed. A prayer:**
As we surface from the belly of the fish, the sanctuary in the darkest deepest place, at the bottom of the ocean, away from land and humanity – may we emerge ‘upside down’.
May we question all that we thought we knew.
May we be confused with what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are.
As we have inhabited strange, curious, dangerous spaces, as Jews, as women, as queer people, however and whoever we are – may we now choose to recognise other bodies that cannot find their place in time.
May we find others who are lamenting and travelling and questioning.
May we find hope that change is possible even in the most unlikely and terrifying of times.
May we come to know that empires will rise and fall, which is a relief and a curse. May we choose life so that empires cease to rise as we continue to inhabit these marginal spaces and emerge, vomited onto the land, anew.
And rather than saying amen (we concur, we agree), may we say, Aleynu, it is upon us.
*Perhaps this phrase challenges us – I read ‘little men’ as a phrase to describe anyone who steps into leadership positions prefaced on power over others, as opposed to power with.
** Prayer originally written for Finchley Reform Synagogue, Yom Kippur Mincha 5785 and delivered with Rhiannon Humphries.
Bibliography
Claasens, J., Davidson, S. V., van der Walt, C. and Thyssen, A. Eds. 2023. Queering the Prophet: On Jonah, and Other Activists. London: SCM Press.
Mandolfo, C. R. 2007. Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Shulman, S. 2007. Watching for the Morning: Selected Sermons. London: Beit Klal Yisrael by Peter Daniels Publisher Services.
Rabbi Robyn Ashworth-Steen
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.