Imu Shalev: Welcome to A Book Like No Other.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta and only made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum.

Alright, so in our last episode, we saw how the Deception story echoes through the first three of the Ten Commandments, and Rabbi Fohrman left us with a promise, a promise that the connections do not stop there.

Parallels with the Deception story continue to show up all the way through the rest of the commandments as well. That's right, right up to number ten. And so, our journey continues but with a little twist.

Rabbi David Fohrman: What we're about to see is that as we go through these intertextual parallels that seem to link the Ten Commandments to the Jacob and Eisav story, they don't just link to the story of Jacob's deception of Isaac and his brother in Genesis 27. They're actually going to continue and link up to events that follow that, too. 

The events of Jacob running away, the events of his sojourn in Lavan's house, what happens when he's in Lavan's house, when he leaves Lavan's house, his eventual reunion with his brother — the entirety of the saga of Jacob is going to be reflected in the Ten Commandments, starting from the moment of Deception and moving on. And I think one of the themes that we'll see is how all of these later events in Jacob's life are haunted by the consequence of this Deception.

Okay Imu, so let's continue tracing these Ten Commandments. We've gotten through our first three commands, and that lands us with Shabbat, commandment number four.

And as we'll see, I think there's some echoes of Shabbat right after the Deception wraps up. Right after the Deception wraps up, there's this fearful moment where Rebecca overhears her son Esau’s pain and rage and sense that he wants to kill his brother, and feels like she has to jump in to somehow save Jacob.

And that brings us to the echoes of the Sabbath in Genesis 27. Let's read through the Sabbath in the Ten Commandments. And Imu, if you could, could you actually read us the Sabbath commandment? And as you do, pay attention to how many times the word “Sabbath” actually appears.

Imu: Okay, so we're in Exodus 20, verse 8: זָכוֹר אֶת־יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת לְקַדְּשׁוֹ — Remember the Sabbath day to make it holy. So, “Sabbath” number one.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep.

Imu: שֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים תַּעֲבֹד — Thou shalt work for six days, וְעָשִׂיתָ כׇּל־מְלַאכְתֶּךָ — and do all of your labors, וְיוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי שַׁבָּת  לַיקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ — and the seventh day will be a Sabbath, count number two, to God, לֹא־תַעֲשֶׂה כׇל־מְלָאכָה אַתָּה  וּבִנְךָ͏־וּבִתֶּךָ — it is forbidden, thou shalt not do any of your labors. I don't know why I'm translating that word as “labors,” but we'll do it for now.

Rabbi Fohrman: Not sure why you're translating “you” as “thou” either, but keep on going.

Imu: (laughs) That's fair enough. I thought I'd be fancy today.

You shouldn't do any of your work; you, your son, your daughters, your עַבְדְּךָ וַאֲמָתְךָ וּבְהֶמְתֶּךָ וְגֵרְךָ אֲשֶׁר בִּשְׁעָרֶיךָ — your maidservants, your animals, your strangers or foreigners that are in your city, in your gates. כִּי שֵׁשֶׁת־יָמִים עָשָׂה יְקוָה אֶת־הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת־הָאָרֶץ אֶת־הַיָּם וְאֶת־כׇּל־אֲשֶׁר־בָּם — Because for six days God made the heavens and the earth, the seas and everything in them, וַיָּנַח בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי — and He rested on the seventh day. עַל־כֵּן — Therefore, בֵּרַךְ יְקוָה אֶת־יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת וַיְקַדְּשֵׁהוּ — blessed did God the Sabbath day (so this is number three in our account) and He made it holy.

So three times. The “Sabbath” word appears three times in this command.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, and what I'd like to do is actually transfer over now to Genesis 27, to that moment right after the Deception where Rebecca tries to take action to save her endangered child Yaakov. Let's read those verses, and I want you to pay attention to any word that seems like “Sabbath.” Let's start from verse 42.

Imu: וַיֻּגַּד לְרִבְקָה אֶת־דִּבְרֵי עֵשָׂו בְּנָהּ הַגָּדֹל — It was told to Rivka, the words of Eisav her older son. Presumably Eisav's words around his plan to kill Yaakov. וַתִּשְׁלַח וַתִּקְרָא לְיַעֲקֹב בְּנָהּ הַקָּטָן — She sent and called for Yaakov her younger son, וַתֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו — and she said to him, הִנֵּה עֵשָׂו אָחִיךָ מִתְנַחֵם לְךָ לְהׇרְגֶךָ — Behold, your brother Eisav, having a… מִתְנַחֵם is a change of heart. He's going to “comfort himself” vis-a-vis you in trying to kill you. He wants to kill you, basically.

וְעַתָּה בְנִי — And now, my son, שְׁמַע בְּקֹלִי — hear my voice. וְקוּם בְּרַח־לְךָ אֶל־לָבָן אָחִי חָרָנָה — You should get up and run for yourself. Escape, flee, to Lavan my brother who lives in Charan. וְיָשַׁבְתָּ עִמּוֹ — And you shall sit with him, or dwell with him. But if I don't pay attention to the vowelizations here, that word “Shabbat” is right there. You should “Shabbat” with him.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, the שׁ-ב-ת of “Shabbat” is right there. And it's not just the word, right? If I say, why is Shabbat called Shabbat, right? You could offer many different interpretations of the word “Shabbat” based upon the word shav, right? What are the different things that sheiv can mean?

Imu: To sit, to dwell.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right? To sit, to dwell, to rest. Let's keep those in mind as we listen to Rebecca talking. So the first thing she says is, “Sit or dwell with Lavan יָמִים אֲחָדִים,” and she uses shav. וְיָשַׁבְתָּ עִמּוֹ — you should dwell with him for a few days. You should go there and try to find some refuge. Keep on going.

Imu: Literally a refuge, right? He's a refugee. יָמִים אֲחָדִים — Dwell with him for just a few days, עַד אֲשֶׁר־תָּשׁוּב חֲמַת אָחִיךָ — until…that's interesting. So that word תָּשׁוּב here, it is back. This is the “Shabbos” word. But here, it would mean to return, or the literal translation would be “until your brother's anger relents,” I suppose.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. So that's our second use of the term, but now it means something else other than dwell. Go ahead.

Imu: And then it keeps going: עַד־שׁוּב אַף־אָחִיךָ מִמְּךָ וְשָׁכַח אֵת אֲשֶׁר־עָשִׂיתָ לּוֹ — So, again, the translation here would be “until the anger of your brother returns from being upon you.” It's almost as if there's this tangible thing called anger and it's supposed to be in Eisav. If it's in Eisav, then it's fine, but if it leaves him, if your brother's anger is dwelling on you, that would be really bad. So it needs to go back to where it comes from, it needs to return. וְשָׁכַח אֵת אֲשֶׁר־עָשִׂיתָ לּוֹ — And forget what you've done to him.

Rabbi Fohrman: So that was number three there. עַד־שׁוּב אַף־אָחִיךָ מִמְּךָ — Until your brother's anger relents. So fascinatingly, Rebecca's saying, “Hey, you're in trouble. Your brother wants to kill you. Go to Lavan and it'll just be a few days. I'll go send for you when it's safe to come back.” But intriguingly, she uses the word Shabbat, or a version of the word Shabbat, three times. 

Now you might say to me, Fohrman, that's very interesting. You know, I get it technically. There's three “Shabbats” in the Ten Commandments, and there's three “shavs” in what Rebecca is saying. And technically I understand it kind of lines up because we've seen all these commandments echoing, in order, aspects of the Deception story, and we're up to the point in the Deception story where Rebecca talks, and lo and behold we find her with three versions of Shabbat.

But what in the world does Rebecca's words have to do with Shabbat? I mean, she's not saying, “Go keep Shabbos.” She's not saying “Don't go carry.” She's not saying “Don't cook.” So Imu, let me pose that to you, right? If I would play skeptic, I would say, I don't know, this doesn't sound like Shabbat.Why should these things be connected?

Imu: Oh, I have to be the one to answer? Because that's what I'm thinking.

Rabbi Fohrman: You have to be the one to answer.

Imu: It’s kind of stretchy to find Shabbos here. Yes, it does appear three times, but sure, I guess if you're pushing me to think about it, I could see two levels here. Like, one is, Rebecca is trying to put the whole matter to bed, as it were, and to give everybody a rest; like, to just kind of put a lid on it. And another is maybe just vis-a-vis Yaakov. Like, he needs to also get out of Dodge. He needs to rest, he's being chased.

Rabbi Fohrman: Absolutely. So if there'd be a single word…in a way, it's the word that every parent wants for their children. Like, what do I want for my child?

Imu: Peace?

Rabbi Fohrman: Peace. What is Shabbos but a day of peace, right? A day when you could just leave all of the worries and the work and the hustle and the bustle behind and just kind of be in a position of tranquility.

It's very paradisiacal, that kind of Shabbat day. And Rebecca is like, “You know, Yaakov, you just need a little bit of peace in your life. Like why should you be worried about getting killed? Just go to Lavan's house. You're going to have the tranquility you need there.”

And in a larger sense, I think you're right. She's not just looking for Yaakov in and of himself to be tranquil. What she really wants, her long term goal, is some tranquility between the brothers. She'd love peace between the brothers, and she thinks she's going to get it. When Eisav finally forgets about this whole thing, then maybe there could be peace. So, meanwhile, have this sort of temporary tranquility in Lavan's house on the way to a more permanent kind of tranquility when Eisav forgets about it. 

But how well does their plan work out when Yaakov temporarily is in Lavan's house? Does he get the tranquility that Rebecca wants from him? I mean, on one hand, he does, right, because he does find refuge from Eisav. Eisav doesn't come and kill him, but is he so tranquil? What does it feel like if you're Yaakov in Lavan's house? You feeling so tranquil? You sipping martinis on the beach? 

Imu: First of all, Rabbi Fohrman, you have not been to the beach in a while because you sip margaritas on the beach, you don't sip martinis. 

Rabbi Fohrman: (laughs) I'm sorry.

Imu: But no, it certainly wasn't, you know, a club, a beach club in Charan.

Rabbi Fohrman: Club Lavan in Charan, right? By the shores of the Tigris.

Imu: Exactly. No, none of that. I mean he does escape with his life, but he ends up taking the life of a laborer. He's working really, really hard for seven long years for Rachel, and then actually those seven years don't stop. They repeat, it's never-ending. The reward is dangled and then kind of moved over and he has to work another seven years until he can finally get married.

Rabbi Fohrman: So ironically, Rebecca sends Yaakov to Lavan's house to get tranquility, but what he actually gets there is work; seven long years of work followed by supposedly this tranquil moment when he can finally have the girl of his dreams, Rachel, only to be swindled and have Leah instead and then be plunged into another seven years of work without respite. Seven years followed by seven years. And what does that seven, of course, remind you of when it comes to Shabbat?

Imu: Yeah, it's a seven-day period. Six days you're supposed to work, on the seventh you're supposed to rest. Yaakov works two periods of seven years without rest.

Rabbi Fohrman: Sure sounds like the Torah's come along and says, “No ‘seven and seven’ without any rest. We're not doing that anymore. We're having six and then a whole day of rest, and six and a whole day of rest.” 

Imu: But doesn't that feel kind of stretchy? Like, Shabbos is six days of work and then the seventh you rest. I get that you have two sevens, but they're years, not days.

Rabbi Fohrman: An excellent question, Imu. 

So, let's go back to Rebecca. When Rebecca says, “I want you to go and find refuge in Lavan's house,” if we go back to Genesis 27, verse 44, she says this: וְיָשַׁבְתָּ עִמּוֹ — I want you to be there, and how long do I want you to be there for? יָמִים אֲחָדִים — Just a few days. You're only going for a few days.

Now, I don't know if Rebecca believes this or not. Like, does she really think Eisav's going to forget about this whole thing in a few days? But that's what she tells him. Maybe she thinks, “It's going to be an interminable time, but I can't bear to tell my kid that. He's never going to leave.” Maybe it's a white lie. “You just go for a few days, it'll be fine. Your brother will eventually forget. I'll tell you when it's safe to come back. Just go.” 

Now Imu, interestingly, those words יָמִים אֲחָדִים are going to show up again, because what happens is that when he gets to Lavan's house, it turns out that Rebecca's not the only one to use the word shav with reference to Yaakov. Lavan will, too. Lavan says, “Hey, just because you're my brother, should you work for me for nothing? Tell me how much I should pay you.” And Yaakov is like, “Okay, I'd like to marry your daughter Rachel. I'll work for seven years.” And Lavan is like, “Eh, better give her to you than to someone else.” And then Lavan says the chilling words שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי, which of course is ironic, right (Genesis 29:19)?

Imu: Because he’s going to do anything but shav. He's not going to be sitting very much.

Rabbi Fohrman: There's no tranquility. There's no sitting at all. There's just work, work, work. So Lavan uses Rebecca's words in an ironic kind of way. “Oh yeah, you'll be shav with me. But it ain't tranquility. You're going to work, and you're going to work, and you're going to work.”

And then, when Yaakov works, it says something fascinating. Rebecca's words, “You'll be there for just a few days, יָמִים אֲחָדִים,” show up again when the text tells us he worked for seven long years but it seemed like יָמִים אֲחָדִים; it seemed like those few days that his mom was talking about.

בְּאַהֲבָתוֹ אֹתָהּ — His love for Rachel (Genesis 29:20). He loved her so much that he anticipated this moment of release, this moment when he can finally have her, the tranquil moment after seven years of labor, that it just seemed like a few days. Except that tranquil moment didn't come because when he was supposed to marry her, instead Leah is substituted at the last moment. Yaakov is plunged into crisis, and before you know it, he's working for seven more years.

Imu: Okay, I'd been skeptical, but that was the final piece that I needed. Let's just go over the evidence that there's a connection here at all.

We're seeing three variations or puns off the word “Shabbat” show up in Rivka's speech, the same number of times that the word itself appears in the commandment. Then we're seeing Lavan use the word shav as well. We're also seeing the number seven play a significant role in both the commandment and in Jacob's experience with Lavan. And then, last but not least, we have this phrase, יָמִים אֲחָדִים.

And for me, this was really the kicker, because it seems to be supporting Rabbi Fohrman's theory on two levels, tying everything together. One, within the Levan story itself, this phrase is equating Jacob's seven years of work with seven days. But then, level two, it's also echoing Rebecca's speech where we found the original hints to Exodus, as if to say this really isn't a coincidence. It's all connected. These years that are like a few days, like יָמִים אֲחָדִים, they're part of this larger constellation of connections with Shabbos. And once I felt more convinced by this theory, I had to admit, I also found it very touching.

Normally when I read the fourth command, it just sounds like a command: זָכוֹר אֶת־יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת לְקַדְּשׁוֹ — Do this thing, sanctify this day (Exodus 20:8). But now, I was reading those words with the emotional intensity of Rebecca, and they became a plea of a caring parent desperately wanting to see their child at rest.

And even more than that, in light of everything that we'd been seeing, these words became a way of redeeming the ironic and tragic way Rebecca's plan backfired terribly. As if God is saying, “Rebecca hoped for peace for her children, as all parents do, but Me, your Parent in Heaven? I'm going to teach you how to really achieve it.” And as a parent, that was especially resonant for me. 

Imu: It's like God's looking at this experience in Genesis 27, and it almost feels like God's picking up on and responding to both the concept of seeking tranquility but also work without end. That is really interesting to me, because, you know, for me who wants to provide rest or tranquility for my own family, I need economic means to do that, right? I need to actually, like, work in order to have the home, in order to have the space for everybody in the family to experience some kind of settling. We actually need a home to dwell in and there's a mortgage to pay.

And so you can set yourself off on a trajectory, also, to enslave yourself, to work unendingly, to be more and more and more secure and more and more safe. It's almost as if God sees that, sees Rebecca's intention, sees Yaakov's intention, and says, “Okay, let Me teach you guys how to achieve real rest. You can work and you should work for six days for that outcome, but you will need to take a break.”

And what's having me say this is the meaning of the word יָמִים אֲחָדִים. On one level, there's this יָמִים אֲחָדִים, which is cute in the methodology, it's cute in the algebra. What I mean by that is that it explains why the seven years that Yaakov spends in Charan should match up to the six-and-one-day of Shabbos.

But I wonder if there's a deeper resonance, which is that we tell ourselves a lie that I'm going to work and it'll just be for a few days, right? It'll just be a few יָמִים אֲחָדִים, right? But you end up setting yourselves into two seven-year sets, into 14 years of slavery. Actually three, right? Yaakov actually goes for a third set of seven years so that he can accumulate wealth and security.

And so God is like, “Look, יָמִים אֲחָדִים, I like that concept. Let's stick to one day and it's going to be the seventh day, right? It'll be the וְיוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי, and that day will be a day of rest.” Even that word שְּׁבִיעִי has the word shav. That will be your dwelling, your safety and security. And then the other six, you can go be crazy people and seek security.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's fascinating. What I hear you saying, in a way, is that, you know, the text tells us that those seven years, if he could have married Rachel at the end, then it really would have felt like יָמִים אֲחָדִים because he loved her so much. And to me, translating what you said, is like, when you are working, when there is the possibility of true tranquility at the end, because what is more tranquil than marrying the girl of your dreams and being able to just be with her? It is a certain kind of tranquility. It does make work worth it. And when work feels like it's worth it, like I'm doing what I need to do, and there's this moment at the end that I'm really working for, it does feel bearable, even if it's long. It does feel like יָמִים אֲחָדִים.

But when that's snatched away, then not only do you lose the tranquility at the end, but you lose the יָמִים אֲחָדִים. The work doesn't feel like a few days anymore. It feels like it's grinding. It feels like it's forever. So to maintain the illusion of יָמִים אֲחָדִים, you need the reality of that tranquility. And maybe that's one of the lessons of Shabbos.

Imu: Oh, that's brilliant. So it's sort of like saying, if you work so that you can be retired at age 65, that would be horrible, right? It's sort of like you've turned your entire life into a means to achieve an end at the end of your life, and that would be terrible. So God says, “Let's take some of that thing that's at the end and sprinkle it along the way so you have a taste of that end through your means.”

Rabbi Fohrman: You have these little tastes of tranquility. Well, it is true that the idea of working so I can retire at 65 is better than working and never being able to retire. That would be unbearable. I can make work sort of barely bearable by saying “and it's all so I can retire at 65.” But then that puts so much of an onus on retiring at 65. Then you're right. God is like, “Let's sprinkle a little bit of that in every seven days. Every seven days, let's give you that little recharge; not just some time to recharge, but that sense that things have been worth it for this.”

Like, Shabbos afternoon, you're able to play backgammon with your family, and you're able to just have this little moment of being. That's a moment when you could say, “For this, it was worth it,” right, and then it allows you to confront the next few days and it doesn't feel interminable anymore. It is a few days, right, and it doesn't feel like more than a few days. It feels like יָמִים אֲחָדִים because that tranquility is close at hand, and that's one of the beautiful aspects of this cycle of Shabbat. It really gives us the joy and the energy in our works, that work can be joyful instead of work feeling awful and interminable.

Imu: Well, I'm very lucky to enjoy my work most days. This conversation got me thinking about how much that joy is nurtured by Shabbos, and taking time to stop and be in the moment with my family. It made me realize that Shabbos really isn't just one day a week, but it kind of radiates out to all seven.

So if our discussion ended here, I would have felt pretty satisfied. But Rabbi Fohrman actually wasn't done yet. There was another way in which he thought the Deception saga might be offering us insight into Shabbos, and what it really means to bring peace to all your children.

Remember when Rebecca sends Jacob away? Her ultimate desire isn't just for him to find tranquility at Lavan’s, but that eventually there will be peace between him and Eisav, between brothers. But it's a peace made almost impossible by the zero-sum blessing given to one son and not the other.

Well, Rabbi Fohrman noticed that when Jacob gets to Lavan and is swindled into incessant work, into the ultimate anti-Shabbos situation, it all seems to be happening in the shadow of that blessing.

Rabbi Fohrman: In that terrible swindle, you hear an inverse of the blessings. First of all, he's been tricked by his father-in-law, of all things, much like he tricked his father. He's been tricked about a younger and an older sibling. Lavan says: לֹא־יֵעָשֶׂה כֵן בִּמְקוֹמֵנוּ לָתֵת הַצְּעִירָה לִפְנֵי הַבְּכִירָה — We don't give the younger before the older. Maybe where you come from we give the younger before the older, but not where I come from.

And all of a sudden, this time the Deception is on him, and the hard-fought blessing that he wins, that your brothers are going to come serving you…isn't it fascinating that Lavan introduces himself to Yaakov as a brother? הֲכִי־אָחִי אַתָּה — I am, after all, your brother, וַעֲבַדְתַּנִי חִנָּם — you should work for me, you should serve me for nothing? Tell me what your price is. Yaakov ends up serving his brother, and the tables are turned.

Rabbi Fohrman: You know, part of the problem we've been talking about with this blessing is that it's zero-sum, to the extent that one brother's up, another brother is down, and Yaakov here is bearing the bitter fruits of this, right? You know, in the blessing, he was supposed to be the guy on top when his brother served him, and here it's the opposite. It's literally the opposite. Instead of him being on top with his brother serving him, he's serving a, quote, “brother.”

And it sounds like maybe Shabbos is a response to that also. Maybe it's a repudiation of the zero-sum game. I mean, Shabbos isn't like, “You know how you're going to get rest? You're going to get rest because you're going to be so powerful that literally everybody is going to serve you all the time. And so, you Israelites, don't worry about a thing. When you are in charge, your whole lives are going to be full of rest.” That's not the way God grants us Shabbos. 

What God says to us is, “Hey, I want you to know something. You know what Shabbos is? It's a time for where, just a moment, the hierarchies of the world, the great “I’m up here and you're down here” go away, just for a moment. Then they can go back.”

You know what tranquility is? Tranquility is a release from that hierarchy. During the week, you can have a master and a servant, but on Shabbos, there's no such thing as a master and servant. The master takes off and the servant takes off, and you know what? Maybe they share a meal together, and suddenly the hierarchy goes away.

And that changes life for them during the week, too. Because if I have a Shabbos when I spend the meal, hanging out with my servant, and we all rest together, I can't see them as just an object anymore. They're a human being just like me, and they're in a relationship with me, which involves work, but it's a whole different kind of relationship when there's a Shabbos at the end of it, where the zero-sum game goes away; when I'm not up there and you're down here, but at some level, we're both human beings together, we're both peers.

And at some level, maybe, God is repudiating the zero-sum nature of the blessing and says, “You know what a real blessing is? The real blessing is having a Sabbath in your life. And the real blessing is being able to share that thing with your servants. Then you're blessed.”

Imu: That's really lovely. We're used to experiencing Shabbos as something where you give yourself a break, but there's also this dimension of the dissolution of hierarchies, which is a really, really interesting bein adam l'chaveiro, “between man and brother,” sort of concept of Shabbos.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, and if you even look at the Ten Commandments, look at how emphasized that is. Like, how many words does it take the Torah to say that you shouldn't work on Shabbos? Go back in the text, right? וְיוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי שַׁבָּת  לַיקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ לֹא־תַעֲשֶׂה כׇל־מְלָאכָה אַתָּה. That's one, two, three, four, five words. Now, how many words does it take to say that those who are lower than you in the great totem pole shouldn't work?

Imu: Right. And for anybody who says Kiddush each week on Shabbos, this is the classic obstacle course.אַתָּה  וּבִנְךָ͏־וּבִתֶּךָ עַבְדְּךָ וַאֲמָתְךָ וּבְהֶמְתֶּךָ וְגֵרְךָ אֲשֶׁר בִּשְׁעָרֶיךָ, right?

Rabbi Fohrman: It’s like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight words, right? All focused on everybody else. It's like, it's not just about you. It's about her. It's about him. It's about them. It's about your donkeys. It's about everybody under you, right? That's like a huge part of Shabbos. It's not just your own rest. It's your ability to grant rest to those below you, which really sets you all free.

Imu: Right. Like, what Shabbos does is, it sort of makes all slavery not true slavery, because slavery means that somebody chooses to have you work without end. But what Shabbos does is, it interrupts that, right? Like, nobody has power over you on that day. No one can tell you to work. And so there's this grand breaking of an identity, which is “I am someone's slave. I am completely subject to someone else.”

It's almost like God's looking at Genesis 27 and saying, “I'm going to create a structure where that can't happen. No matter what, there will always be the grand pause every seven days, which will make everyone's true identity, whether you're son or daughter, maidservant or slave or foreigner, those labels go away on that day. Everybody's kind of the same on that day.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. Yeah. Fascinating.

Okay Imu, let's move on to commandment number five, which famously is כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ (Exodus 20:12). That's the next thing we got in the Ten Commandments. Where in the world do we have כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ in the story of Genesis 27? It's not obviously there. There's no moment when, you know, it's like, “Oh, can I dress you, Father?”

Actually, now that I think about it, isn't it interesting that halachically the way כַּבֵּד does express itself, one of the classic ways it expresses itself is giving your parents food to eat and drink? And isn't it interesting that that's what Yitzchak wanted?

It is true. If you look in the Rambam, the Rambam will basically say malbisho u'ma'achilo (“feed him and clothe him”). It's fundamentally about getting your father dressed, putting his clothes on for him, and giving him food and drink, and your mother. And that's how you express כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ.

Imu: It's the exact inverse, guys, of the period of life that I'm in, I have to tell you. I think I spend all my hours out of Aleph Beta dressing and feeding my children. Boy, do I look forward to this. Somebody put me in pajamas.

Rabbi Fohrman: Maybe the point of כַּבֵּד actually is that kind of gratitude, right? Which is that, you can't imagine that now, but the same way that at the beginning of your children's lives you are dressing them and feeding them and that's what it means to be a parent, at the end of life for parents, children come around. And then it's like, “Dad, can I help you put your coat on? And, you know, maybe I can make you some scrambled eggs for breakfast?” And suddenly the roles are reversed.

Imu: Or hunt some game.

Rabbi Fohrman: Or hunt some game. And that's the way we express gratitude to our parents, our willingness to do for them what they once did for us.

Imu: That's nice.

Rabbi Fohrman: If you think about it in terms of Genesis 27, does dressing someone, does feeding someone remind you of anything in Genesis 27?

Imu: Oh, feeding someone definitely does, right? We may be joking around a little bit, but, you know, both Yaakov and Rivka, right, the two parents, אָבִיךָ and אִמֶּךָ, give commands to their kids and the kids obey them. And particularly, commands around, if we're using the Rambam's approach here, commands around feeding Father.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. The only thing is that everything gets all messed up through that. I mean, this is a grand Deception story where everything careens out of control. Sure, it's true that father gives a command to hunt some game, and Eisav does abide by it, but it careens out of control as father basically rejects what Eisav gave him, and is like, you know, “I don't know. I don't have a bracha for you.” And then it, you know, Yaakov was not commanded by his father to give food, but his mother sort of said, “Go bring food to Dad,” and he did. But if I asked you, Imu, was that a great act of Kibbud Av v’Eim? What Yaakov did when he showed up with that food and said, “I am Eisav your firstborn?”

Imu: That is interesting. Are you saying it's like crossed signals? Like, at once by honoring mother, he dishonors father?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, there's all sorts of failed versions of Kibbud Av v’Eim in this story. Like, the classic ways that you would be mechabeid your father and mother, you would honor them, is by feeding them and dressing them, and instead I am dressing up to deceive you. Honoring my mother ostensibly because she told me to do it, but at the expense of honoring my father because I end up deceiving him, and I end up feeding my father because my mother told me to do it, sort of honoring her, and in the end deceiving them both.

And somehow there are these sort of echoes of Kibbud Av v’Eim, and Eisav sort of does it too when he provides food. And he's good Kibbud Av v’Eim guy to Father, but he's doing it in a way which causes competition and anguish to his mother who wants the other child to get blessed.

And so you have no clean version of Kibbud Av v’Eim, although you have all of these sort of marred or tangled versions which, at some level, even though they have echoes of “honor your father and mother,” fail at some level as well.

Imu: It's interesting because it seems like you're reading כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ as both, right? It's not like, “You should honor your father sometimes, honor your mother sometimes.” It's “Honor your father and your mother,” right, not one or the other. It almost feels like the zero-sum game that we've been seeing with sons is now taking place with father and mother, because they were put in a zero-sum situation with father and mother, right? Honoring mom and listening to her words, as you said with Yaakov, is going to dishonor father and his words.

Rabbi Fohrman: Fascinating. In other words, do you really express honor of your father and mother when your parents are struggling with one another and you take sides? Comes along the Torah and it's like, I don't know. Not so sure if that's Kibbud Av v’Eim.

Because at the end of the story, we get a redeemed moment where something happens for each child when they're actually honoring both their father and mother at the same time, when both parents can nod along their heads and finally say in unison, “That was good, thank you.” And it happens right where we would expect it to happen.

In the first three commands, we saw echoes of the whole Deception story. In the fourth command, “to keep the Sabbath,” we saw the next event after the Deception story being mirrored, the story of Rebecca telling her child to flee. And then we get the very next moment in which we find a moment of true Kibbud Av v’Eim, honor of parents both.

And it's the moment Rebecca has to come to Isaac and come up with a reason why Yaakov has to flee. Now, Rebecca doesn't want to tell him the truth, which is he's got to go to Lavan because Eisav's going to kill him. That's just going to pour more gasoline on the conflict between her and her husband over who should have been blessed. It's a very sensitive thing. And Rebecca chooses not to bring that up, but instead to choose something that unites them both rather than divides them as a reason why Jacob has to flee.

Imu, let's pick up from there and see what is it that she tells Yitzchak as the reason why she thinks Yaakov has got to leave home. If you can, read verse 46 and let's take it from there.

Imu: וַתֹּאמֶר רִבְקָה אֶל־יִצְחָק — Rivka says to her husband Isaac, קַצְתִּי בְחַיַּי — I've become disgusted with my life, weary with my life, is what my translation says, מִפְּנֵי בְּנוֹת חֵת — from the daughters of חֵת. She's referring to the wives of Eisav.

Rabbi Fohrman: By the way, we heard at the very beginning of the Deception story, the segue into the story was Eisav got married but the wives were a thorn in the side of both Rivka and Yitzchak (Genesis 26:35). Which, by the way, was the last shared experience of Rivkah and Yitzchak. The last thing that they both experienced together and could pose a united front from was like, “Oh man, Eisav's wives, yeah.”

Imu: I'm picturing Yitzchak and Rivka in their recliners, right, and talking to each other. They can't agree on which child they love more, but they can both agree that they hate their daughters-in-law.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. That's what it is. That's the last moment of agreement that they have, and then everything goes haywire. And I love this one more, you love that one more. It's all this drama. And then, finally, they get back to a shared truth. Rivka steers them back to a shared truth, something they can both agree on.

And lo and behold, it's got to do with those daughters-in-law again, right? Or prospective daughters-in-law, in this case. And it's like, “Hey, remember that last thing we agreed about? How much we hated Eisav’s wives? I can't stand those בְּנוֹת חֵת. Let's come up with a plan to do better with Yaakov.”

And here's where Rivka comes up with her plan. Go ahead.

Imu: Yeah. She says: אִם־לֹקֵחַ יַעֲקֹב אִשָּׁה מִבְּנוֹת־חֵת כָּאֵלֶּה, you know, my life was basically going to be terrible. אִם־לֹקֵחַ יַעֲקֹב אִשָּׁה מִבְּנוֹת־חֵת כָּאֵלֶּה מִבְּנוֹת הָאָרֶץ לָמָּה לִּי חַיִּים — If Yaakov were to go and marry one of these daughters of חֵת. Like, these daughters-in-law which we already have, you know, what is my life even for, right? Why should I even live?

Rabbi Fohrman: So Yitzchak in response to this is like, “Oh, you're absolutely right,” and suddenly both parents are on the same page. And what does he do? He calls in Yaakov, and this time there's no deception. And Yitzchak, with Rebecca implicitly behind him, gives a directive to Yaakov. And interestingly enough, וַיְבָרֶךְ אֹתוֹ. Isn't that fascinating? It's like, here's another blessing but implicitly it's coming from both parents.

Imu: Yeah, so they both give him a blessing. Yeah, I like the implicitly coming from both. וַיְצַוֵּהוּ — And he commands him, וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ — and says to him, לֹא־תִקַּח אִשָּׁה מִבְּנוֹת כְּנָעַן — You shall not take a wife from the girls in Canaan. קוּם לֵךְ פַּדֶּנָה אֲרָם — Get up and go to Padan Aram. בֵּיתָה בְתוּאֵל אֲבִי אִמֶּךָ — Go back to the house of Betuel, the father of your mother, grandpa's house. וְקַח־לְךָ מִשָּׁם אִשָּׁה — Go there and find yourself a wife there, מִבְּנוֹת לָבָן אֲחִי אִמֶּךָ — Go marry one of the daughters of Lavan, the brother of your mother.

Rabbi Fohrman: Excellent. And then, let's go and see what happens. It turns out that this little discussion between mother and father and child, Yaakov, all of a sudden gets overheard by somebody else, and that somebody is Eisav. And let's go and let's see what happens when Eisav overhears that conversation. Pick up again from וַיַּרְא עֵשָׂו.

Imu: וַיַּרְא עֵשָׂו כִּי־בֵרַךְ יִצְחָק אֶת־יַעֲקֹב — And Eisav saw that Isaac had blessed Yaakov. And presumably it's referring, you know, not to the blessings that were already taken and he had his crying over, but this latest blessing. וְשִׁלַּח אֹתוֹ פַּדֶּנָה אֲרָם — And his sending him to Padan Aram, לָקַחַת־לוֹ מִשָּׁם אִשָּׁה — to get a wife from there, בְּבָרְכוֹ אֹתוֹ — in his blessing of him. וַיְצַו עָלָיו לֵאמֹר — And he commanded him, לֹא־תִקַּח אִשָּׁה מִבְּנוֹת כְּנָעַן — you shouldn't take a wife from the daughters, or from the girls, in Canaan.

Rabbi Fohrman: So this is a very difficult sentence to read. It's a sentence with huge parentheses in it, right? So here's how you read it: וַיַּרְא עֵשָׂו — And Eisav saw. What did Eisav see? Now, everything after this is what Eisav saw. Eisav saw: כִּי־בֵרַךְ יִצְחָק אֶת־יַעֲקֹב וְשִׁלַּח אֹתוֹ פַּדֶּנָה אֲרָם לָקַחַת־לוֹ מִשָּׁם אִשָּׁה בְּבָרְכוֹ אֹתוֹ. And he saw וַיְצַו עָלָיו לֵאמֹר לֹא־תִקַּח אִשָּׁה מִבְּנוֹת כְּנָעַן. He saw that father sent Yaakov away. He saw that he blessed him. He saw that he told him not to take a wife from Canaan. And he saw something else.

Imu: The next verse.

Rabbi Forhman: The next verse. What else did he see? And here's where we get to Kibbud Av v’Eim.

Imu: Yeah. וַיִּשְׁמַע יַעֲקֹב — And Yaakov actually listened to that command, אֶל־אָבִיו וְאֶל־אִמּוֹ, oh cool, that's cool — Yaakov listened to both his father and his mother.

Rabbi Fohrman: Bingo. 

Imu: Which is interesting because he got two different commands. You don't even have to say, oh, Rivka's implicit. She gave him a command and then Yitzchak follows up and gives him a command. It's the same…different reasons, by the way. Like, her command is, “Run away from your brother who's trying to kill you. I'm going to give you a kind of Shabbos, or I would like to give you a kind of Shabbos.” But Isaac's is, “Hey, you got to go marry.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, but remember, but Isaac says “You’ve got to go marry” because Rivka is like, “You’ve got to go marry.” And when Isaac says you got to go marry, implicitly it's like, “I don't want your mother to be upset. Your mother's telling me she can't even go on living if you marry somebody from around here. Go do me a favor and listen to your mother. I'm telling you from both of us. You've really got to go.”

So this is the ultimate, this is Father and Mother on the same page. And finally, a child can listen to both of them the way it's supposed to be, and express not just Kibbud Av, not just Kibbud Eim, but כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ. He can honor parents as a united front.

And that is what Yaakov does, and that language of אָבִיךָ and אִמֶּךָ shows up in essence by וַיִּשְׁמַע יַעֲקֹב אֶל־אָבִיו וְאֶל־אִמּוֹ. This is the redeemed version of Kibbud Av v’Eim in this story. All sorts of tangled, impossible children taking sides and fights with parents, where the joy of one parent is the anguish of another, until finally both parents are on the same page, and there's this clean act of Kibbud Av v’Eim.

And by the way, he's listening to his parents in moments when the parent is doing something very difficult and very painful. Think of what it's like for Rebecca. It's like, Rebecca knows that this isn't just a little shidduch journey, right? She knows the truth, that Eisav wants to kill, and therefore she doesn't know how long it's going to be. This might be years. It might be “I never see my child, but it's the ultimate sacrifice. If necessary, I want to live close to my child, I want him to be in my life, but I want him to live most of all. And I'm willing to sacrifice the thing that means second most to me, hanging around with my child and having him love me, for the thing that means most to me — having him being safe.”

And that's the ultimate sacrifice of parents. And as children, we honor the sacrifices of our parents and we honor them with Kibbud Av v’Eim, which is exactly what's happening here.

Imu: So it seems like we'd found where Kibbud Av v’Eim shows up back in Genesis. It's Jacob honoring both of his parents, but Rabbi Fohrman thought that there was still another layer to this connection. Because, going back to that complicated verse that we were just parsing, the Torah doesn't just tell us that Yaakov listened to his father and mother. It tells us that Eisav saw that Yaakov did this. Eisav overheard, and presumably the Torah is telling us this for a reason.

Rabbi Fohrman: The Ten Commandments is not actually just emulating Yaakov's Kibbud Av v’Eim for his parents. It's actually emulating a very poignant act of Eisav's also, which likewise expresses Kibbud Av v’Eim, almost as if to say Eisav's real act of honor to his parents wasn't his willingness to get game for Isaac, which would have caused anguish to his mother as he fulfills the zero-sum quest for a blessing of one child instead of another. His real act of Kibbud Av v’Eim is right alongside Yaakov's when he sees what both parents told Yaakov. And then, quietly, the text tells us something that no one else ever really knows, right? Yaakov may not know it, Rivka may not know it, Yitzchak may not know it, but we the reader know it. So read the next verse.

Imu: וַיַּרְא עֵשָׂו כִּי רָעוֹת בְּנוֹת כְּנָעַן בְּעֵינֵי יִצְחָק אָבִיו — Eisav finally sees that the the wives he had taken, they're evil. They're bad in the eyes of Isaac, his father. וַיֵּלֶךְ עֵשָׂו אֶל־יִשְׁמָעֵאל — So Eisav goes to Yishmael, וַיִּקַּח אֶת־מָחֲלַת  בַּת־יִשְׁמָעֵאל בֶּן־אַבְרָהָם אֲחוֹת נְבָיוֹת עַל־נָשָׁיו לוֹ לְאִשָּׁה. So Eisav sort of gets the pattern. He's like, “We should go to Grandpa's house. Okay, so there's Grandpa Betuel. There's Grandpa Avraham. Yishmael is the son of Abraham, the same way Lavan is the son of Betuel, and Lavan has two daughters. Well, Yishmael has daughters and I'm going to marry those. He marries מָחֲלַת  בַּת־יִשְׁמָעֵאל בֶּן־אַבְרָהָם אֲחוֹת נְבָיוֹת עַל־נָשָׁיו לוֹ לְאִשָּׁה.

It's really interesting. Eisav’s act of Kibbud Av v’Eim here is, in a way, more interesting, more…I don't know what adjective to use, but it's different than Yaakov because Yaakov gets an explicit command. But I think it's deeply sensitive to hear without being spoken to, right? So he sees and he listens and no one told him anything.

And maybe Mom and Dad were trying to spare him the hurt feelings and saying, like, “We really don't like your wife.” But he gets it. He sort of understands what's going on, and he has to do his own sacrifice.  And he doesn't understand, like, only that he doesn't like them. He understands also, “Oh, you seem to value the values of our family.” And that's where we should be choosing from. Okay. I got it. Nobody commands him to do that. He just follows the pattern. Like I said, “Oh, Grandpa's family? A son of grandpa who has daughters? Like, figures that all out for himself.

And on some level, it makes me think about the fact that Torah doesn't say, “Thou shalt obey your parents.” It says כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ, right? Honor them. And that might be the Torah's way of saying, don't just listen to your parents. You actually need to respect their worldview, respect their values, and find the way to read between the lines, maybe.

Rabbi Fohrman: And isn't it poignant that specifically…I mean, exactly as you say, Eisav wasn't commanded this. He overheard this. And think about what it's like to be Eisav in this moment. Yaakov just stole your blessing, and Father seems to have betrayed you, and there's all sorts of reasons to be angry at Father and really mad at him. And yet, at this moment, it's like, oh my gosh, I see what's important to Dad.

Imu: That's a really good point.

Rabbi Fohrman: I mean, what's that about? Right?

Imu: Beth Lesch, one of our scholars, did a video on this, but it's so just shockingly true. If you’re Eisav, right, you have every reason to leave the family and tear it all down. You have been rejected, right? Like, soundly rejected. Isaac confirmed the blessing on Yaakov, who cheated and stole and who, you know, יַּעְקְבֵנִי זֶה פַעֲמַיִם — He interfered with me these two times (Genesis 27:36).

Rabbi Fohrman: At least in Eisav's view, even if there were all the excuses, even with all of that, but from Eisav's perspective, he betrayed me and father betrayed me.

Imu: Yeah, and then after all that, you've got Mom and Dad, basically…and I mean, I can understand Mom, right? She's never really liked me that much, but Dad got, like, really not only doubling-down but tripling-down and saying, you know, “Go find a wife, one of these good wives.”

Like, he's just taking me down over and over, and Eisav's response to that isn't, like, “Forget you people.” His response is to reorient.

Rabbi Fohrman: And maybe that's what the Torah is saying: You know what, listen to your parents when they tell you things. There's usually a good reason. They're being self-sacrificial. That's Yaakov. And you know what? Honor your parents if you see something, if you understand their values, even though they weren't talking to you. Eisav overheard them talking to his rival, and Eisav could have just said, “They're not even talking to me, they're talking to him. It's further proof that they just like him more than me. They're telling him what to do, not me.” But still, he sees that and it's like, “No, this is my father's value system.”

In line with that email, I want to take you back to a comment that Rashi makes, which is really kind of interesting. Take a look at the verses that introduce this moment, when Yitzchak sends Yaakov away and he sends him to Lavan's house. We get a very interesting characterization of who Lavan is. If you could, read verse 5 in Genesis 28.

Imu: וַיִּשְׁלַח יִצְחָק אֶת־יַעֲקֹב — Isaac sent Jacob, וַיֵּלֶךְ פַּדֶּנָה אֲרָם — and he goes to Padan Aram, אֶל־לָבָן בֶּן־בְּתוּאֵל — to Lavan the son of Betuel, הָאֲרַמִּי — the Aramean, אֲחִי רִבְקָה…why am I reading this?

Rabbi Fohrman: Keep on going.

Imu: Okay.

Rabbi Fohrman: Who is Lavan? 

Imu: Sorry. אֶל־לָבָן בֶּן־בְּתוּאֵל — to Lavan on the son of Betuel, הָאֲרַמִּי — who's an Aramean, אֲחִי רִבְקָה — the brother of Rebecca, אֵם יַעֲקֹב וְעֵשָׂו — the mother…

Rabbi Fohrman: You see how crazy the verse is?

Imu: Yeah, that's a tough verse. Yeah, it's just a lot of stuff in there being really, really clear about all the relationships here. So I'll just read it again.

Here's the simple part: Isaac sends Jacob to go to Padan Aram, but where in Padan Aram? To Lavan. Who's Lavan? The son of Betuel. Okay, but what else about him? He's Aramean. Not only is he the son of Betuel and he's Aramean, he's also the brother of Rebecca. By the way, if you forgot who Rebecca is, she's the mom of Jacob and Eisav.

Rabbi Fohrman: What do you mean, “if you forgot who Rivkah is, she's the mom of brother Eisav?!” But what's the next verse?

Imu: Uh, aov ov. So Eisav sees all of this and understands all the family connections, understands

Rabbi Fohrman: Now, but who is it that the parents were talking to? They were talking to Yaakov. Now, did the parents ever tell Eisav that they had an issue with his wives? No. All we know is that they were upset about the wives among themselves, but we have no record of a conversation with Eisav.

Finally, here's this conversation with Yaakov implicitly about the wives of Eisav. Now, granted, it's a touchy subject, but isn't it interesting that right before this verse, when it says that Yitzchak sent Yaakov away to find these wives that maybe Rebecca could somehow live with because Rebecca was so distraught, isn't it fascinating that the text tells us, “and who did he go to?” He went to Lavan's house. Who Lavan? Oh, the brother of Rivka. Who Rivka? The mother of both Yaakov and Eisav.

And read Rashi on the mother of both Yaakov and Eisav. Rashi: אֵם יַעֲקֹב וְעֵשָׂו אֵינִי יוֹדֵעַ מַה מְּלַמְּדֵנוּ — I have no idea why these words are here. Because why are they here?

I mean, like, if you don't know, Rebecca is the mother of Yaakov and Yosef at this point, you haven't been paying attention, why tell us this? It's almost as if there's this subtle rebuke of the parents at this moment, right? Which is like, hey, you guys are finally united in something, of what you think of your daughters-in-law, and what kinds of daughters-in-law you want Yaakov to have. But even though you're united, you're only having that conversation with one kid. Rebecca, after all, is the mother of both Yaakov and Eisav.

And lo and behold, who overhears that conversation with that one favored child? Eisav does. And this is the moment, as you say, where Eisav could tear it all down, and instead, Eisav is like, “No, you know what? I see. I get it. Nobody ever had that conversation with me, but I can understand the values of the family now.”

And this, I think, is an example of Eisav's Kibbud Av v’Eim. Eisav and Yaakov have both listened to their parents, each in different ways, in incredibly difficult circumstances for each, and this becomes a paradigm of Kibbud Av v’Eim and the Ten Commandments. 

Imu: Throughout this season, parallel after parallel, we've seen how the text in Exodus seems to be picking up on something that went wrong in Genesis and correcting it. The zero-sum blessing turns into a blessing for the benefit of all children; Isaac's inability to see through Jacob's disguise that morphs into the people learning to perceive God at Sinai without projection of their own biases. Even Rebecca's well-intended command to Jacob to find refuge with Lavan needs some redeeming in the form of Shabbos, an actual period of rest.

But now, we've seen something kind of different, and surprisingly sweet. Sure, at first Kibbud Av v’Eim gets expressed in the Deception story in all kinds of troubling ways. But then, the characters themselves, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Eisav, they begin to correct the mistakes.

So here, at the end of the first tablet, the fifth commandment isn't exactly redeeming what went wrong. Quite the opposite. It's drawing our attention to this one moment where, despite all the strife and hurt between child and parent, brother and brother, something has gone right. 

Okay, stop. Stop the music, enough music time. You know, our wonderful audio engineer, Hillary, she mused and reflected on what you just heard. And let me tell you, at this point in the conversation, I had a lot of musing going on. I was especially captivated by the way that everything we'd seen changes how you read the command back in Exodus, especially that “and” in “Honor your father and mother.” Like, it's not “respect each parent individually, father and/or mother,” but respect both of them together, as a union, or maybe respect that you come from multiple sources. And while I was kind of meditating on those words in the verse, my eyes moved to the rest of the verse as well, the end of the command. And that kind of sent us down a rabbit hole.

Having done all this, before we move on, I just do think it's interesting that the command has a second half. There's a לְמַעַן, which you don't really get in the other Ten Commandments. There's a “so that….” So you should honor your father and mother: לְמַעַן יַאֲרִכוּן יָמֶיךָ עַל הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר־יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ — So that your days will be lengthened. on the land that God is giving you.

So somehow, honoring your father and your mother is going to allow you to stay in the land longer or live a longer life, however you want to read that. But reading it with the story of Genesis 27 and now 28, it is interesting that when a son chooses to listen to one parent and not the other, it leads to exile, leads to him fleeing, right? He has to leave the land that he wants to end up in. So, I wonder if there's some sort of, um,

Rabbi Fohrman: Interesting. He ends up fleeing, but isn't it also interesting that at this moment that he's fleeing away from the land that the whole point of the family is to inherit, Isaac tells him not only to flee and go find a wife, but there's a verse there that they skipped. He says something which now makes sense to me, which is like, even though you're fleeing, I do have another blessing for you — that you'll come back. Read the words וְיִתֶּן־לְךָ in what Isaac tells him as he's fleeing.

Imu: shall be given to you, the blessing of Avraham, לְךָ וּלְזַרְעֲךָ אִתָּךְ — to you and to your children, לְרִשְׁתְּךָ אֶת־אֶרֶץ מְגֻרֶיךָ — to actually inherit this land of your sojourn, אֲשֶׁר־נָתַן אֱלֹקים לְאַבְרָהָם — that God had given to Avraham. So it's sort of like in the merit of you listening not to one of us but now to both, you'll be able to come back and actually inherit this.

Rabbi Fohrman: In other words, I realize that you might say that the shortcut to all these blessings I just gave you is to stay here. I just told you, you're going to get the fats of the land and dew of the earth, and everything's going to be great. You should be like, “No, I'm not going anywhere to find wives. I'm staying here in this land. I'm supposed to get the fats of the land.” And Isaac is like, “No, you actually have to leave now. You have to leave. Not sure when you're coming back. You've got to honor your mother and go find these wives somewhere else.”

According to Rebecca, surreptitiously whispered, “Shhh, you've got to leave. Your brother's going to kill you, but you're leaving now for a while. This is exile. But in the merit of you listening to us even when you don't want to, in the merit of you going away, I bless you that you'll come back. And when you come back, it's not just that you're going to be on this land. You and your children after you will come and will live for many, many long years on this land. And that is the reward for listening us to leave and to go into exile.”

And that seemingly becomes a paradigm, those words of Yitzchak. וְיִתֶּן־לְךָ — God should give you this blessing to take the land, אֲשֶׁר־נָתַן אֱלֹקים לְאַבְרָהָם — that God gave to Abraham, becomes כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ, honor your father and mother, לְמַעַן יַאֲרִכוּן יָמֶיךָ — so you should have a long life upon the land, אֲשֶׁר־יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ — that the Lord God has given you.

And it's a mimicry of those words of Yitzchak, that God should give you the land that you're being exiled from. And it may seem like years, but relative to the many centuries and millennia that you'll be in the land, it's just a short time. L'man about you, and have a long, long life on this land.

Imu: So if Yaakov hadn't obeyed his parents here, then he would have inherited the mantle of Isaac and had control over the household, but then he would have had a dagger in his belly. It would have been a short term as the heir, but my gut tells me it's got to mean more. There's got to be some reason that Imu in 2024 has to listen to both father and mother, and it would result in lengthened days in the land.

And my mind goes back to, I'm seeing in all the commandments multiplicity and singularity, right? Whenever there's a unit and you just pick one side of the unit, it has a distorted effect. It actually breaks an equilibrium that you're in. So I'm seeing, now, father and mother, which is a new unit. If you listen to just father or just mother, don't think that your relationship with land won't break also, right? Your family, not just with brother and not just with parents, but also with land. And if you want to maintain your long relationship with land, you can't break the integrity of the family unit, not even with parents. Something like that. That's what it's

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh, fascinating. You know, you're really right about that multiplicity notion. The same way that parents Gantt co picking and choosing and saying, “This child, but not that one. Here's the zero-sum blessing. You're up and you're down.” It's almost like the Torah's mirroring that with Kibbud Av v’Eim from the children to the parents and saying, “You know what? I know you both want to honor your parents. I know you both are there to try to give game to Isaac, right? But the real trick is, the same way that parents can't break you children up, you as children can't break your parents up, and you've got to find a way to honor them both. And that's the true honor for them.”

Okay, my parents have some disputes, but what in their life are they together on that I can let my honor to them shine? And both Yaakov and Eisav rise to that occasion. And the Torah says, that becomes the model of Kibbud Av v’Eim. And a beautiful note, the thing that you're noticing, which is that, and maybe land is part of the family too. And once you can keep your parents whole, right, then there's something else which is whole along with your parents, which is your family homestead.

Imu: It is interesting because, right, the proof of that would be the word toldos, right? The toldos of Isaac and Rebecca, their generations, their children end up being Yitzchak and Eisav, but there's the first toldos, the parents of us all, which is Shamayim and Aretz, right? You've got heavens and earth.

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh, interesting. We are family of heavens and earth. That's a little bit of a stretch,

Imu: Just saying — again, this is an aside — but it is interesting to me that if you choose one parent over the other, then your “grandparent,” land, is not going to be happy with that. You create war within the family. And so land

Rabbi Fohrman: Can I just unpack what you're saying, because if anybody is listening to you, that’s just is going to go right over everyone's head because it builds upon stuff that we've done together. 

Imu: So what you're unpacking is, why should honoring father and mother have anything to do with land? Like why would,

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. Why is land really part of the family, as it were? That seems like a poetic thing to say, but is it really true? And what Imu's pointing out is, it really is true. At some level, even though we all have parents, mother and father, we also have grandparents. And our deepest, farthest-going-back grandparent is actually land, who collaborated with God to make man. נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ (Genesis 1:26). Ramban famously says, who is God talking to when He says, “Let Us make man?” He was talking to the land. “Land, you contribute the body. I'll contribute the soul.” And Genesis 2 confirms that: וַיִּיצֶר יְקוָה אֱלֹקים אֶת־הָאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה — God creates out of land man's body, וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים — and blows into his nostrils this breath (Genesis 2:7).

So we've got a terrestrial father, we have an earthly fatherland. We even have natural fathers and mothers. What kind of land did God make us out of? You can't take dust and form it into a person. You have to take damp earth. Where did that damp earth come from? It came from rain. Where did rain come from? It came from the heavens. And isn't it fascinating that that first rain that came from the heavens, out of which the damp earth was made into man, is given to us in family-like language through the Torah? אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם — These are the generations of Heaven and Earth (Genesis 2:4).

And Imu, you correctly point out that תוֹלְדוֹת is this word which over and over is used to describe the progeny of people, except for the very first תוֹלְדוֹת we have in the Torah which is the progeny of Heaven and Earth, as if Heavens and Earth are together parents. Heavens-earth, clouds-earth, father-mother, mother-father come together through the medium of rain to create damp earth, out of which man is created.

So in a very deep kind of way, heavens and earth, clouds and earth, these are all our grandparents. And somehow, when we honor our parents, we can have our grandparents shining love upon us also. And Imu, isn't it interesting that what was the blessing that Jacob got? It was a blessing of the fertility of the earth, as expressed in וְיִתֶּן־לְךָ הָאֱלֹקים מִטַּל הַשָּׁמַיִם וּמִשְׁמַנֵּי הָאָרֶץ וְרֹב דָּגָן וְתִירֹשׁ. Heaven and earth, your great-great-grandparents, should shine forth upon you happily.

And in order for your ancestors in heaven to shine forth on you happily, for the heavens themselves to shine forth on you, for earth itself to shine forth on you and give you its fertility, what better way to make your great-great-grandparents happy with you, to give you the fertility of the land, than to honor your terrestrial parents? And to do what Yaakov is doing here, which is leaving home, as difficult as it seems, and leaving earth temporarily so that he can honor his parents. And then earth, your great-grandparent, will love you in return.

Imu: Yeah. I see this as similar to the Avodah Zarah concept. Which is, by breaking apart a whole and saying, “Okay, the heavens are really great, I'm going to worship the heavens,” you create a zero-sum in all the powers. Then the heavens is really great, but you don't care about the earth, right? And God is all of those things. We did that formula beforehand. To me, if you break apart father and mother, you necessarily, by listening to mother, you reduce the power of father. You're actually violating father. So land is also one of your parents, and by objectifying love that way and not seeing yourself as part of the family whole, land also is threatened to be objectified. And land might say, I don't want

Rabbi Fohrman: If all I care about is land but I don't care about my parents, then land is like, “Okay, but I was your parent, and so why'd you just randomly decide to care about me? It's not about me. It's about you. You just want the fertility of me because you like fertility. You're not honoring me.”

Imu: Exactly. So if you can honor both your sources, right, then you also show that you can live with integrity and live really understanding the symbiotic relationship we have with land, the responsibility of לְעׇבְדָהּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָהּ (Genesis 2:15). And land will take care of you and you take care of land, rather than being an objectifier, somebody who picks and chooses who they listen to.

Rabbi Fohrman: Fascinating. You're right, the same way that really Kibbud Av v’Eim, honoring your parents, is a way of you taking care of parents when parents have in the past taken care of you, you feed and clothe them when they feed and clothe you, well what does the earth do for you? It also feeds you, right? It also provides you with clothes through the flax that it grows. And earth is the great parent that fed you also and that's taken care of you, and you in turn are bidden to take care of it with

Imu: That's actually how we're introduced in that Toldos moment. We're introduced to earth and it says there was nothing on the earth because man was not

Rabbi Fohrman: wasn't there yet to respond and to take care of Earth. And so, you're right, we're promised this relationship which is symbiotic with Earth. You take care of Earth, Earth will take care of you, right? And in concert with that, you're expected to take care of your parents, who also took care of you.

And maybe the Yaakov and Eisav response to both parents is the paradigm for that, that gets memorialized in the Ten Commandments. Very fascinating.

Imu: I think this is beautiful. To me, what you taught is a key to, I think, something that is elusive, which is why would honoring your parents have anything to do with living a long…people see it as living a long life, but I think there's misunderstanding. It's not “honor your parents,” it's “honor both your mother and your father,” and it's not “living a long life,” it's being with land, another one of your parents.

Once you understand all those pieces, it all just clicks into place beautifully. It's “honor both your parents, because you have another parent, your earth, and you're part of a larger unit.” If you break apart units like this, you're out of symbiosis, you're out of balance. Your time on this land won't be long.

Really lovely, really beautiful. And again, I'm grinning from ear to ear because it's this methodology where you can read this over and over, you can read mefarshim, you could do all kinds of vorts that explain nicely why honoring your parents would lead to a long life. But once you start to understand these pieces in surprising ways without attacking the verse directly, right? It's not like you were like “I want to explain verse 11 in the Ten Commandments,” but you saw a bunch of things that started to give you the building blocks for this, to click into this.

Rabbi Fohrman: No, it's crazy. I was just thinking about that this morning, that it's like you can't attack it directly, right? You can try all you want to come up with your theories of what verse 11 of the Ten Commandments means, but it's all speculative until the Torah comes along and says, “No, no, no, no, no, I want to show you some commentary. I want to show you my commentary. My commentary is Genesis 27. It overlays on this.”

Imu: It's so surprising. It's deeply surprising to me, what we just read in verse 11. So surprising.

Rabbi Fohrman: All right, Imu, all right. On that note, Imu, I'm going to say goodbye to this little session we're having, and we'll pick up again and pick up on the second half of the Ten Commandments. We've now gone through the first five, but as it turns out, it's not just the first five. The rest of the Ten Commandments also continue to echo the story of Jacob, leading to a surprising conclusion, I think. I can't wait to share that with you. Onwards and upwards.

Imu: Hi, Imu again, popping in one last time this episode. Just wanted to say that if this last discussion about land as our grandparents and honoring all of our sources seemed way out there to you — you know, if you're thinking I'm some kind of crackpot or if you thought it was absolutely brilliant and riveting and you want to dive deep into those ideas — either way, we left some links in the show notes to a couple of Rabbi Fohrman's courses. In these videos, he shares the underlying arguments with all the evidence that we were building off of, and that should help kind of ground our discussion a lot more in this episode. 

But for now, you know, standing on one foot, the core idea that I see the Torah hinting at in this command, but through many of the connections that we've seen, it's this: It's very tempting to view ourselves only as individuals, as fully independent from the people around us and potentially even in competition with them, even within our own families. Family can sometimes seem like a salad of people, some you like, some you don't, some who benefit you, and others who get in your way.

But the Torah seems to be urging us to leave, or to try to leave, that worldview behind, to try to see ourselves as genuinely interconnected, and to care for the larger units that we're a part of. And maybe that begins with our own families, with honoring the union of our parents. And if we can learn to approach our own family as an interconnected whole, then maybe we can do that in an even broader sense, too, with all humanity, with God, and even with the land.

And by the way, I think this worldview of moving from family to the larger families of the earth, that derives from something we discussed way back in the beginning of this season. It's the blessing that God gives to Avraham: וְנִבְרְכוּ בְךָ כֹּל מִשְׁפְּחֹת הָאֲדָמָה — Through you, Avraham, and your family, all the families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:3).

It seems kind of interesting, I think, that God describes the other nations of the earth not really as nations but as families, as if that's sort of the prime unit; as if, in order to have real global influence on a big scale, we kind of need to understand something about the interdependent intimacy of family.

So from this perspective, it's not so much that you get long life on the land as a random gift for honoring your parents. It seems much more organic than that. Like, the gift of land is the outgrowth of nurturing your relationship with all your multiple sources. If we can come to live symbiotically with those close to us, with the people and the resources that God gave us, then maybe we'll merit for those relationships to grow. 

There's one more thing that I do want to acknowledge. Kibbud Av v’Eim can be an extremely difficult mitzvah to keep. You know, not everyone's parents are perfect, and in some cases parents can even be abusive, and sometimes it makes all the sense in the world to break ties. The truth is, how these insights actually apply in real life, that's something that deserves careful thought. It's not, you know, just listening to some podcast is going to give you the answer for what to do in every difficult situation. There is a lot more to talk about, and we'd actually really like to get into some of these thorny questions and real-life implications in conversation with you especially, as well. So we're hoping to do an epilogue or webinar, and you guys can look out for that.

But if you're someone who finds Kibbud Av v’Eim difficult, I'm hoping at least that you can abstract some of the values of this conversation, some of this idea that those who have nurtured you, those who have lived in a symbiotic way with you, there is some sense in which learning to live with them and taking care of them in return is extraordinarily important and meaningful and healing.

Anyway, that's what was on my mind at the end of this episode. And I'd love to hear what's on your mind. Genuinely, Rabbi Fohrman and I love hearing feedback from you, positive or negative. Not too negative, but negative is fine. We can handle it. It's just really exciting to hear your voices coming out from out of the ether. So please send us an email if you want. That's at info@alephbeta.org.

Until next time, thanks for listening, everyone.

Credits

This episode of A Book Like No Other was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and me, Imu Shalev.

It was produced by Tikva Hecht 

Our audio engineer is Hillary Guttman. 

A Book Like No Other’s managing producer is Adina Blaustein and our senior producer is Tikva Hecht. 

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta and made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. Thank you, Shari and Nathan. And thank you all for listening.