Tikva Hecht: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha, diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.  Welcome to Into the Verse. I'm Tikva Hecht and I'm here with my colleague, Beth.

Beth: Hi Tikva. It's great to be here.

Tikva: Yeah, Beth. I'm excited to talk to you about this week's parsha, but let's start with a little recap of what happens in the parsha.

This is Parshat Bo, and it's a really exciting parsha. It's the culmination of the Ten Plagues and the Exodus. So we have the last of the three plagues; we have Locusts and Darkness and the Death of the Firstborn. And right before the Death of the Firstborn, we have the very famous predecessor to the Korban Pesach.

So, we have this ritual where God asks the Israelites to take a lamb and slaughter it, put the blood on the doorpost, and that becomes a sign that He's going to pass over those houses when He comes to execute the firstborn of the Egyptians. And of course, this gets commemorated every year in the holiday of Passover.

And then, after the tenth plague, the Death of the Firstborn, we of course have the actual Exodus, that dramatic, exciting moment. And that's followed by some more commandments that, again, commemorate this important event.

And I think, from a Hollywood perspective, this is one of the most popular parshas; from the Israelites perspective, from us as the reader, identifying with the Israelites. It's triumphant, it's celebratory. We're finally let out of Egypt. But what I want to talk to you about today is what this experience was like for the other side, for the Egyptians.

Beth: Hmm. I'm interested to know what has you take that angle.

Why Did God Need 10 Plagues?

Tikva: Yeah. I think that, for me, it goes back to a really classic question on the Exodus, which is why does God even bring the Ten Plagues on the Egyptians? He very easily could have come in and just taken the Israelites out. You don't actually need Pharoah's permission to bring the Israelites out. So the whole Ten Plagues are kind of a farce, and that I always found very curious.

Beth: In other words, God could have just, as Rabbi Fohrman said, could have just, like, carried B’nei Yisrael out on magic carpets. If the only goal was to free them, you could free them without all this stuff.

Tikva: I've always had trouble with the classic answer to that which is, well, this is a learning opportunity in a sense. The Ten Plagues are here to kind of teach the Egyptians a lesson, and it seems, if you look at the text, that it's not just about a moral lesson. It's not just, you know, “You were wrong to enslave this people,” but God actually seems to really want them to see His hand in this. He wants them to recognize Him.

And if you look through the conversations that Moshe has with Pharaoh, Moshe says a few times in his speeches back to Pharaoh, saying, “Now you're going to know,” right? For example, after the frogs, one of the things Moshe says is: לְמַעַן תֵּדַע כִּי־אֵין כַּיקוָה אֱלֹקינוּ – So you'll know that there's no other Being like God (Exodus 8:6). 

So it seems like the Egyptians are not just supposed to be punished for what they did wrong. God could have punished them in a lot of different scenarios, and it's not just that they're supposed to learn this lesson about what they did wrong, right? I mean, the first step is punishment, the second step is recognition of why you're being punished. They did this horrific act, and now they're recognizing the injustice of that.

It seems like they're supposed to learn something else as well, which is some knowledge about God that they're supposed to walk out of this situation and say, “I know there is a God.” And it is not just a god like they already had in their mythology.

Beth: It is the all-powerful God of the universe, the Creator of the world.

Tikva: Yeah.

Beth: So you offered two answers to that, which is, well, Number One, it's not enough to just free them. I also have an interest in punishing the perpetrators. People who do wrong deserve some kind of, you know, accounting for that.

And then, even above and beyond that, if the Egyptians were punished, and if they even came to a place where they were like, “You know what, we're sorry. We realized what we did in enslaving people was really bad, and we shouldn't have done it, and we're never going to do it again, and we're going to try to live our lives in accordance with justice.” Even that wouldn't have been enough because there was another goal, and the goal was, no, these people aren't recognizing the Master of the universe and that's important to God.

So God is finding a means to achieve all three of those goals at once, in ten fell swoops. And yet you're saying even that more nuanced answer doesn't satisfy you for some reason

Tikva: Yeah. 

Beth: Tikva, I have to tell you, like, I'm on the edge of my seat because it's an answer that I've heard, it's an answer that I've given, it's an answer that I think I'm satisfied with. So now I'm like, what is she going to say to sort of open up the hole to make me unsatisfied? Yeah, that's my mood right now.

The Hole in the Classic Answer

Tikva: Yeah, so to me, the hole in this answer which I think is rich and nuanced and in line with the text - I don't think we can say something radically different - but it leaves me wondering what God do the Egyptians end up knowing. 

Beth: What the Egyptians ended up knowing?

Tikva: Yeah, if God is so focused on their recognition of Him as this All-Powerful Being, not just another god among all the other gods, you know, what is their impression of God? Because the Israelites are seeing the hand of justice, right? They're seeing this fierce, vengeful, strong, powerful God of justice, the God we might refer to as Elokim. But they're also seeing Yud-Kay-Vav-Kay, the merciful, loving side of God. God is coming and saving them from slavery. But the Egyptians…

Beth: The Egyptians are not seeing the merciful side of God at all.

Tikva: No, not at all. 

Beth: And that troubles you because what does it mean to know God if you're only knowing part of God?

Tikva: Yeah, and is that true knowledge of God? I mean, I think there's, like, the existential question which you kind of seem to be musing on, which is, what does it mean to know God? And as a person, what type of relationship with God do I have? If this is the God that I'm familiar with, but it also seems very, very strange that God is putting so much emphasis on this.

And then it's almost like saying, “I want them to know Me, but I want them to know only half of Me. I want them to know this facade of God.” I mean, this is a Divine Being. You can imagine this going very differently if God's goal was for them to know Him in the fullest sense. 

Beth: That's a really thought-provoking question. Okay, I see the hole. I'm invested now in this question. So take me through your journey, because now that you made the hole, we got to fill it.

What Does Pharaoh Want This Time?

Tikva: All right, so that's what we'll try to do. And I want to say, the Exodus is an epic story, of course, and we're not going to be able to cover all of it. There's more to this, but I want to show you a small piece of it, something that I noticed in this week's parsha that did help me see this in a different light. 

Okay, so let's jump in, and I want to take you to Exodus, chapter 12, verse 30. This is right after the Death of the Firstborn. The Egyptians, they've woken up in the middle of the night to find that the firstborn in every household has died. I'm going to be looking at Pharaoh as a representative of the Egyptians. I think that he does play that role

וַיִּקְרָא לְמֹשֶׁה וּלְאַהֲרֹן לַיְלָה — Paraoh calls to Moshe and Aharon in the night. וַיֹּאמֶר — He says to them, קוּמוּ צְּאוּ מִתּוֹךְ עַמִּי — Get up and go from among my people. גַּם־אַתֶּם גַּם־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וּלְכוּ עִבְדוּ אֶת־יְקוָה כְּדַבֶּרְכֶם — You and B’nei Yisrael, all of you, get out of here. Go and serve God, as you said. גַּם־צֹאנְכֶם גַּם־בְּקַרְכֶם קְחוּ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבַּרְתֶּם — Take your flocks and your herds, and as you said, וָלֵכוּ וּבֵרַכְתֶּם גַּם־אֹתִי — and bless me also.

The words that jumped out at me are those words at the end, וּבֵרַכְתֶּם גַּם־אֹתִי.

Beth: Hmmm.

Tikva: Beth, do you want to say what your reactions to those words are?

Beth: Yeah, I had two reactions. The first reaction is, huh, that's strange, right? The second reaction is, that reminds me of something I've heard before. 

Tikva: Yeah, this language jumped out at me. I think there's something, like you said. It's weird. There's something strange about Pharaoh suddenly asking for a blessing at this moment. I think there's something poignant about it too. You can almost see him in this very humble position, saying, “Wait, no, me too,” right? Like, “Bless me also.” It has a lot of pathos to it.

I think the implication here is that the people are going to go into the desert, God is going to bless them, and it's God's blessing that Pharaoh is asking for. Sometimes this is translated as, “Bring a blessing upon me also.”

So I don't think he's asking Moshe for a blessing, but he's asking Moshe to make sure that he is also blessed, the “also” referring to the Israelites.

What's also strange about this language is, it doesn't appear in the other conversations between Pharaoh and Moshe. After a couple of the plagues, you do have these exchanges between Moshe, Aharon, and Pharaoh, where Pharaoh says, “I'm going to give in. I'm going to go.” But he does ask Moshe to pray for him, and the language used there is always הַעְתִּירוּ (ha’atiru), which means “to pray for me,” but it also has this connotation of supplication, pleading. It's a very desperate kind of word (Exodus 8:4, et al). This is the only time when he asked for a blessing.

If הַעְתִּירוּ is this language of pleading and a desperate prayer, that's not what I associate with a blessing. I think of…

Beth: Yeah, no, neither do I. The paradigm that comes to mind for me when I think of a blessing, Again, not in the context of, like, my daily Jewish life. I say a blessing on water before I drink it, but in the context of the stories in the Torah up until now, what comes to mind is a father promising to a son that good things are going to come to him. And there's also a sense of, like, the passing on of the mantle also.

Who Else Wants a Blessing?

Tikva: Yeah, I have the same association, and I think that these words specifically conjure that up in us because they remind us of a story like that.

Beth: Yes, I think I was subconsciously being reminded of an earlier story in the Torah, specifically of Parshas Toldos, of the story of Yaakov and Esav, where Esav says something very much like this to his father. You know, Yaakov has come in and has taken the blessing that was intended for Esav, and Esav says, “Father, don't you have any blessings left for me? Bless me too.” In the language of my almost-two-year-old, she would say, “I blessing! I blessing!”

Tikva: So let's go look. That's actually where I wanted to go because these words remind me very much of that as well. And let's go into Genesis 27, in verse 34.

Beth: בָּרְכֵנִי גַם־אָנִי אָבִי — He says to his father, “Father, bless me too! Bless me!”

Tikva: Yeah, this language is not very common. Now, of course, it's not exactly the same language in the two places. It was בָּרְכֵנִי גַם־אָנִי, it was וּבֵרַכְתֶּם גַּם־אֹתִי, but one human being asking another human being for a blessing is actually very rare in Chumash. This particular way of phrasing it, the גַם, the “bless me, in addition to this other person,” I think these are the only two places that this shows.

Beth: Hmm.

Tikva: Yeah, so I think that alone is intriguing, but there's more. 

Warring Nations, Fathers’ Blessings, and Deception

Beth: My mind is racing a bit in a good way, and I don't want to get ahead of you, but I'm just thinking about how thematically these stories line up with one another, and there's a lot of resonances there as well.

Tikva: Mm-hmm.

Beth: I mean, who's playing which role in each story? You know, in the Genesis story, you have two brothers who represent warring nations, ultimately, and they are turning to their father and struggling to see who is going to be the chosen one.

Tikva: The one who gets the blessing.

Beth: The one who has the blessings of the father going forward, and that's a really interesting way to map the Exodus story onto that as well; a story of two brothers, two warring nations, both turning to a father.

I mean, as you said, Pharaoh was speaking to Moshe and Aharon, but really he's kind of speaking to God. It's God's blessing. It's the father's blessing that he wants.

Tikva: And just to tease out the connections even more, it's not just two random brothers. In each case, one of the brothers is essentially the same, right? We have Yaakov who turns into Yisrael, who is the father of B’nei Yisrael. So in this story, we have Esav and Pharaoh. They line up, right? These words are coming out of their mouths.

So if we kind of line them up in both stories, we have the Esav-Pharaoh character in conflict with the Yaakov-B’nei Yisrael character, and in both stories Esav and Pharaoh are bested by Yaakov and B’nei Yisrael, right? Yaakov gets the blessing, Bnei Yisrael is going to get free.

Interestingly, in both stories, there's a little bit of deception going on. Yaakov is more clearly tricking Esav, dressing up as him, getting the blessing through a little bit of deception. In the Exodus, there's also a little bit of deception going on. Moshe comes to Pharaoh and says, “We're going to go on a three days journey to sacrifice to our God.” And Pharaoh has the implication that they're going to come back.

But in both stories, right, there's a little bit of this deception. And ultimately when Pharaoh and Esav make this plea for a blessing, they're in this very humbled position. This is coming from a place where they most likely do not believe they're going to get that blessing. So there really is a lot of resonance between the two stories.

Beth: Right, there's a hubris in both cases. It's like, from the perspective of the Pharaoh/Esav character, there's a very unpleasant, unexpected ending where I think each one assumed that he would go on to continue to be the powerful one in the next generation, and never thought that, you know, Yaakov-B’nei Yisrael could possibly defeat him, yet that's what ends up happening.

So there's not just whatever despair you might ordinarily feel, you know, not having won the sibling rivalry, but something a lot sharper and more painful than that.

Tikva: Yeah, I think you're right that the pain in these stories is not just losing the battle, but losing the battle almost having the floor pulled out from under you. Esav and Pharaoh, they didn't expect to find themselves in this weakened position.

A Great Cry

Tikva: And actually, on that note, I want to show you another textual connection, because we saw, you know, already, I think one strong one; the similar language; בָּרְכֵנִי גַם־אָנִי ,וּבֵרַכְתֶּם גַּם־אֹתִי. We're seeing that the stories have similarities, but there's actually another really powerful phrase that's used in both stories to describe exactly the pain of Esav, of Pharaoh, and of the Egyptians that is similar and that is very, very rare. 

Beth: Is there a צְעָקָה גְּדֹלָה (tza’akah gedolah) in both stories?

Tikva: Yeah, there is. So let's just go to both stories and show where that is. So in the Exodus, right before the verses we just read a few minutes ago where Pharaoh calls Moshe and Aharon to him, we have the actual Death of the Firstborn. We have the plague, and the way it's described is that Pharaoh and all the Egyptians get up in the middle of the night.

וַתְּהִי צְעָקָה גְדֹלָה בְּמִצְרָיִם — There's this great cry in Mitzrayim, כִּי־אֵין בַּיִת אֲשֶׁר אֵין־שָׁם מֵת —  Because there's no house where there's no death (Exodus 12:30).

And if we go back to Genesis 27, Yitzchak says to Esav, “Someone else came and took the blessing. I gave him the blessing. He's blessed now,” with the implication that there was one blessing and someone else just took it from you. And then we're told that when Esav hears the words of his father: וַיִּצְעַק צְעָקָה גְּדֹלָה וּמָרָה עַד־מְאֹד — He cries out this great cry, a very bitter cry (Genesis 27:34)

Beth: So, right, so in terms of order in both cases, the Esav/Pharaoh experiences the Great Cry, and then that seems to lead immediately to this desperate “Can't I have the blessing also?”

Tikva: Yeah, and there are a lot of tza’akot in the Bible, there are a lot of cries. The Israelites cry out to God. This is the same language used then when we're told God hears the cries. So cries are not unusual. But these are actually the only two places, and I believe this is true throughout Tanach, where someone's cry is described as gedolah, as this “great cry.”

So these are the two great cries of the Torah. And if nothing else, it does seem like the Torah is trying to say to us, “Hear these cries in a similar vein,” right? “Hear these cries as, somehow, there's something similar in them.”

Things Are Not Adding Up

Beth: Yeah, it's interesting. Like, there's something about that that doesn't quite add up for me though. It just seems that the thing that makes Esav cry a great cry isn't exactly the same as the thing that makes Pharaoh and all the Egyptians cry a great cry, right? Like, with Esav, he's crying a great cry because he's learned that the blessing from Father went to Yaakov. I mean, that's not straightforwardly what's happening in Pharaoh's case. What's happening in Pharaoh's case is that he sees that his firstborn son is dead, and that's why he and all his countrymen are crying.

Tikva: Yeah, it doesn't really line up. That was my reaction also when I saw these. I thought there's something here. There's something powerful here; there's something intriguing here, but it's not lining up, and you're zooming in on this detail and you're noticing they're not really reacting to the same thing.

But I think if we zoom out a little bit and think about that, they're not reacting to the same thing because Pharaoh doesn't really seem to be playing an Esav role in the story at large, right?

Like, Esav is a son responding to losing the blessing of his father. The entire premise of the conflict between Esav and Yaakov is this family drama between two sons who really seem to want something from their father; whether it's love and care or whether it's just, you know, the inheritance and the blessing. And however you want to read that, more generously or less generously, they are two sons fighting over who will be father's favorite. 

If we go into the Exodus, that's not the way we think of the story. Pharaoh starts off the story saying, “I don't know God. I don't recognize God.” This is not a story of two brothers fighting for God's love. If anything, Pharaoh seems to see himself as a rival with God.

Beth: With God, right. Not a rival with B’nei Yisrael.

Tikva: Yeah. 

Beth: Yeah. In fact, the more I think about it, it's not just that they are each crying in reaction to something which is different. They're almost exact inverses, because Pharaoh is crying vis a vis his role as a father. He's crying over his son. Esav is crying vis a vis his role as a son. He's crying about something that transpired with his father, which is both puzzling but also, in my experience, doesn't feel like a coincidence.

Firstborn Drama

Tikva: There's something about these two stories that, in some way, the Torah clearly seems to be connecting them, calling to the reader to look at Pharaoh through the lens of Esav, Esav through the lens of Pharaoh. And yet, there's something that doesn't line up about them. So how do we make all of this line up?

And I do have an idea to, I think, show a more elegant way that these stories line up with each other. And it has to do with looking at another way that they resonate with each other. 

Exodus is this exchange between Moshe, Aharon, and Pharaoh, when Pharaoh is asking for the blessing. All of this happens, as we've been discussing, in the shadow of the tenth plague, the Death of the Firstborn, Makat Bechorot. 

The story with Esav is the story of how he was tricked out of the blessing, but it also seems to be a story where he too is struggling with a loss, not the physical death of a firstborn. He is the bechor in his family. He doesn't die in this story. But he does seem to be mourning his bechorah, his status as the firstborn. And so, in a sense, this is also a story of the loss of firstbornness.

And just to show you this, I want to go back into 27. If you look at verse 36, this is after Isaac and Esav have sort of put the pieces together, and Yitzchak says, “Oh, I know what happened. Your brother came and he took the blessing.”

And suddenly, Esav has this very angry outburst against his brother. He says: הֲכִי קָרָא שְׁמוֹ יַעֲקֹב — Oh, now I get it. This is why he's called Yaakov. וַיַּעְקְבֵנִי זֶה פַעֲמַיִם — He “Yaakov's” me, which is, he supplanted me, or he was like a heel towards me these two times. אֶת־בְּכֹרָתִי לָקָח — He took my bechorah, וְהִנֵּה עַתָּה לָקַח בִּרְכָתִי — and now he took my blessing (Genesis 27:36).

So we see that Esav in this moment is not just angry about the blessing. He's actually really furious about the bechorah, about this other trick that Yaakov seems to have played on him. He also lost his status as firstborn, just like the Egyptians. It's not nearly as traumatic, but nonetheless, it is an interesting similarity where the Egyptians actually lose their firstborn. And here is Esav struggling with the loss of his status as firstborn, as the bechor.

Things Still Are Not Adding Up

Beth: Yeah, in the Egypt story, there was this person who was the son of Pharaoh and was a firstborn. And in this story, he ceases to be. And you kind of have the same thing going on with Esav, which is that in this story…well, no, no, I guess it doesn't make sense to say that because it doesn't line up.

Tikva: It doesn't line up again. So Beth, tell us…so wait, so we have another problem? Wait, I think you're stumbling into another place where we just keep…this is like a domino effect. These stories are not lining up. So why doesn't it line up? What's the problem?

Beth: Okay, what I wanted to say was…and here, in, in the Genesis narrative, you have this guy whose name is Esav the Firstborn, and he ceases to be in this moment. In this story, he's no longer Esav the Firstborn. He doesn't cease to be because he's been killed with a plague, but he ceases to be because he's no longer the firstborn.

But I can't say that so easily because, is that what's happening in this story? I mean, for sure he fails to receive a blessing, but is it the bechorah which is taken away from him? Just two chapters before this, there's a whole ‘nother little short story which is about the bechorah specifically, which is about the birthright. And in that story, it seemed that Esav willingly gave it away.

Tikva: He sold it for lentil soup.

Beth: He sold it for red lentil soup, exactly. He didn't lose his status as bechor here in this moment. He lost his status as bechor a long time ago. So, yeah, that's another…yeah. So what do we do with that?

Tikva: It's very strange. And just to add to that, to make, I think, the problem a little…not that it has to get deeper, but just a little bit more. If we go back to 25 and look at that story, you might say, well, maybe he sold the bechorah and he's been walking around with this great regret, and now it's finally coming out that he's so heartbroken that he made that terrible mistake.

But we're told through that story, it's very clear that Esav does not care about the bechorah in this story. When Yaakov suggests “I'll give you this soup if you sell me your bechorah,” then what Esav's response is: הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ לָמוּת וְלָמָּה־זֶּה לִי בְּכֹרָה — I'm going to die. What’s the point of this bechorah for me? What do I care about having this bechorah (Genesis 25:32)?

So he seems to very quickly give in to the sale and not even value the bechorah. And if we have any doubt that maybe that's just something he's saying in the moment, the story ends with the narrative telling us, reinforcing this for us: וַיִּבֶז עֵשָׂו אֶת־הַבְּכֹרָה — Esav despised the birthright (Genesis 25:34).

So not only do we have our problem that we're trying to line up Exodus with Bereishit. In Exodus, in Shemot, we have the loss of the firstborn, and now we're seeing here the story where there is a loss of the status of firstborn for Esav, and yet that seems to have happened earlier.

Tikva: But let's even put aside that question. Just look at Esav's story itself. We seem to have this weird change of heart in Esav where he despised the birthright, and now all of a sudden he's angry with Yaakov about the birthright. He's not conflating the blessing and the birthright. He's not saying, “Oh, now I get why Yaakov stole the birthright from me so he could get the blessing.” That's not what he's saying. He's saying, “Yaakov tricked me two times. He took my blessing and he took my bechorah.”

So, it feels like Esav is all of a sudden upset. Suddenly, he's having this experience we might have expected him to have earlier, which is realizing he made a bad sale, realizing that he lost something of value.

So to try to answer that question about Esav's change of heart, I want to look more closely, and I think this will ultimately help us answer our question on Exodus as well. I want to look more closely at these verses and see where the bechorah comes up in them and the role that it plays in this exchange between Esav and Yitzchak.

A Closer Look at the Blessings Story

So Esav, all of a sudden at the end of this story when Yaakov's trick comes out, Esav doesn't just say, “Oh, he tricked me out of the blessing.” He says, “He tricked me out of the bechorah as well.” Something is triggering him back to that memory of that sale. I think that there's a story here. I think that there's actually a buildup to that moment in these verses.

If you go back to when Esav first comes into the room, he seems very excited to get this blessing from Yitzchak. There's no indication in the story that he doesn't want this blessing. Yitzchak asks him to go out and prepare this meal, he goes out hunting, and he starts cooking. He comes into the room and he's so excited, and he has this really delicious smelling feast for Yitzchak, and he says to his father: יָקֻם אָבִי — Let my father get up, וְיֹאכַל מִצֵּיד בְּנוֹ — and eat from his son's hunt, בַּעֲבֻר תְּבָרְכַנִּי נַפְשֶׁךָ — and that your soul will bless me (Genesis 27:31).

Tikva: So he even refers to himself in the third person as Yitzchak's son. It feels almost pompous, though noticeably, at this point, he doesn't call himself the bechor. He's not the firstborn son. That's not what's important. But the next thing that happens is Yitzchak turns to him and he says two words that are probably devastating for any child to hear: מִי־אָתָּה — Who are you? Yitzchak is unable to see, he's lost his eyesight. Esav walks into the room, so excited, and his father says to him, “Who are you? I don't know who you are.” And then look at what Esav says at that moment. He says: אֲנִי בִּנְךָ בְכֹרְךָ עֵשָׂו — I'm your son, your bechor, Esav.

So this is the first moment when Esav suddenly refers to himself as the bechor.  It's like Esav is reaching for every identity he has in relation to Yitzchak, which to me seems so natural, right, when someone doesn't recognize you and all of a sudden you want them to see you. It's like you have to give them your identity. “Don't you remember me? We, like, went to playschool together!” Whatever it is.

Beth: “I'm Beth. I'm Carol's daughter. Remember? The writer?”

Tikva: Yeah, exactly. You grab at every identifying mark.

Beth: I think it's very interesting that Esav previously told us, basically, that he didn’t care at all about the bechorah and yet chooses to identify himself with that word in this moment. So, the first real noticing is the confluence of מִי־אָתָּה with אֲנִי בִּנְךָ בְכֹרְךָ, and contrasting that with Esav's having despised the birthright previously.

Tikva: I would just contrast that more with the verse above, that when Esav walks into the room and he identifies himself as the son, he doesn't identify himself as the bechor, and Yaakov actually does. I didn't mention this, but Yaakov immediately identifies himself as, “I'm Esav, your bechor” (Genesis 27:19). Esav walks into the room and basically identifies himself as “your son.” It's only when Yitzchak doesn't recognize him that he says, “I'm your bechor.”

So Esav, I think, at this moment, he's not just saying, “I'm the hunter,” or “I'm the hairy one;” but he is “the bechor,” but he is also grabbing at his identity with his father, who suddenly has also transformed, in a sense, in front of his eyes.

His father was about to give him a blessing. His father was the one who had all the power in the family, who had this great ability to bless his son, and now his father is someone who doesn't even recognize him.

And then what happens next is they start putting the pieces together. And Yitzchak says, “Who was that who came and brought me something to eat? I went through this ritual with someone else. I gave them the blessing.” So once again, Yitzchak has gone from the person who has the power to bless to someone who himself has been tricked. And imagine for Esav how feeble and powerless Yitzchak must seem in that moment.

What Was the Great Cry All About?

And this is when Esav cries out, that צְעָקָה גְּדֹלָה, that great cry, and he's begging for this blessing. And to me, when I read these verses, it feels like Esav almost saying to his father, “You have to make everything better. You're my father. You're the one who had the power to bless. You're the one who's supposed to be able to fix things. Why can't you fix this?”

And then they continue to put the pieces together, and then Yitzchak gets this bright idea, “Oh, it was your brother.” And that's when Esav screams out against Yaakov.

Beth: Mm-hmm. Okay, so the next big noticing for you is, you're looking at verse 34 and you're looking at Esav's grief, at his cry. And his cry, it's more than just the cry of someone who is feeling lost, like an identity has been taken away from him. That is there.

But you're noticing that he is turning to his father and pleading with him, and somehow that leads you to say that. He's facing and grappling with the fact that his father is not going to be able to save him; that the father figure who you always thought was going to be there and was going to be strong is not always going to be there or strong.

Tikva: Yeah, and look at 33. I mean, if you go into 33, this is what Yitzchak essentially says to him. Yitzchak himself has this strong reaction. He has this great trembling, and he says,
“Who was it who came in, and they brought me this hunt?” And as their conversation continued, he says to Esav, “I don't have another blessing. I gave him the blessing. He has power over you.”

And ultimately, Yitzchak does give Esav kind of a consolation prize, But the tension in this conversation is that Yitzchak is saying to Esav, “No, I had one really good blessing to give, and I gave it away, and I can't take it back. I don't have that power to say, oh, Yaakov tricked me, so I get my blessing back.” He doesn't seem to have that power. And so I think Esav is, in this moment, wrestling with that. He keeps asking his father for a blessing, and his father keeps saying to him, “I can't do that for you.”

And now he's regretting the loss of the bechorah. And to me, I'm curious what you think of this, but to me, seeing this in light of Esav finding his father doesn't know him; finding his father doesn't have the power that Esav thought his father had to give him a blessing or to repair the damage done.

Esav Asserting His Role As Firstborn

To me, it feels like Esav's own identity is getting shattered a little. He's finding himself on shaky ground. And that's when he's reaffirming his place in the family. Not through what his father can give him, but through his objective status, “I am the bechor.” Now he's realizing, “Oh, I sold something that mattered because my father, the patriarch, is going to come to a point where he's weak. He's not able to play that role. Someone else is going to have to step into that role and I want it to be me.”

And it's like his way of finding his footing again, and finding his footing almost in a sense of supplanting his father; becoming the new patriarch, becoming the new father when he can't find that in Yitzchak himself.

And I think that's what we see happen as the story goes on. Esav vows he's going to wait. He's respectful enough to wait for Yitzchak to die, but then he vows he will kill Yaakov, and he's essentially taking matters into his own hands, and in a sense, disrespecting his father.  This is obviously not what his father would want, and also, in a sense, disrespecting the blessing. He seems to think, “You know what, my father's blessing is not going to determine the future of this family. I'm going to determine the future of this family. I will go and kill my brother and I will take my rightful place.” Kind of owning the legacy of this family.

And of course he, it's not ultimately what he does. That's a different story. But in the world of this immediate story, I think we can see that transition in Esav from a son who expects his father to give the blessing to him, expects his father to make things better, to seeing himself almost as supplanting the father.

Beth: I think, just on an ideas level, I just want to make sure I’m seeing what you're seeing, because when I read verse 34, my first instinct isn't to see what you're seeing in him. My first instinct is not that he is grieving the loss of the strong and capable father. My first instinct is to say he's grieving the loss of the blessing. He's really, really, really bummed to have not gotten the blessing that he wanted to get and so where are you going to take that grievance to?

Tikva: I think, if you're looking at that verse in isolation, you can read it that way, and I think, on some level, that's what's happening. But look at the back and forth between them. So, going back to 33, Yitzchak says, “I blessed him, he's going to stay blessed.” He's basically saying, “I can't give you a blessing.”

Then we have 34 where he's saying: בָּרְכֵנִי גַם־אָנִי; you know, “Bless me too,” right? So you're right. The first time he says it, it could just be, “I really want a blessing.” 

Beth: Mm-hmm.

Tikva: Then Yitzchak puts the pieces together and says, “Oh, you know what happened? Your brother came in and took the blessing.” Now we get Esav crying out, “Oh, my brother, he tricked me twice. He took the bechorah, he took the blessing.”

But the conversation doesn't end there. To me, this is a pivotal moment of all of these pieces affecting Esav, but I think, to see that affect more, if you continue going in the conversation, Esav says again to his father: הֲלֹא־אָצַלְתָּ לִּי בְּרָכָה — Didn't you keep a blessing for me?

And he's like, I said to him again, “I can't do that. I gave him power over you. I gave him everything.” And he says, you know: מָה אֶעֱשֶׂה בְּנִי — What can I do for you, my son? It's so heartbreaking. Like, he's so powerless. And again, he seems to not believe it.

He says, “Don't you have one blessing?” And we have these words again: בָּרְכֵנִי גַם־אָנִי — Bless me too. So I think you're right; in isolation, you can look at it that way. But if you look at the conversation as a whole, the dynamic is this continuous back and forth of Esav saying, “Don't you have a blessing?” and Yitzchak saying, “No, I really don't,” and Esav saying, “Don't you have a blessing? Don't you have a blessing? Didn't you keep one blessing?”

“My father, my father, my father; אָבִי, אָבִי, אָבִי.” Like, that language is what's jumping out at me. 

I think if you look at the conversation as a whole, then you can start to see this dynamic and you can start to see Esav struggling not just with losing the blessing but with losing confidence in his father. But as he's losing confidence in his father, his anger is being expressed in, “Yaakov tricked me out of the bechorah. You know what? I'm just going to be the bechorah. I'm going to step into these shoes and I'm going to become the head of this family myself.”

And so I think there's actually a transition for Esav; a kind of very dark coming of age in this story.

Beth: I'm really glad you took me through the verses. The storytelling was wonderful. You're really bringing out for me the ways in which Esav, at this moment, is grieving the loss of a father; the father who he always thought was going to be the strong one, and he could always count on that. And it turns out that's not going to be forever, and I see that.

Tikva: I just want to say, though, I am reading a lot of emotion into the story. I'm reading this story in a certain light. Maybe you don't buy any of that, right? Maybe you're like, “No, no, no, this is not at all what's happening psychologically in the story.” Just textually, what I think is clear and what you can say is, there is a progression where, as Esav realizes he's lost the blessing or he's losing the blessing, he comes to care about the bechorah. So if you're not with me on why or what's going on emotionally, right, I think that's there in the text.

Returning to the Exodus Story

And to go back to Exodus, I think, interestingly, we have the opposite transition. That's where I think the connection between them can start to click, because we were struggling before with the fact that these stories just seem to be about different conflicts. But if we look at the Esav story not as a single static conflict but as a progression of Esav being the son, so excited to get his father's blessing, coming to lose that blessing, and then coming to value the bechorah, then I think it actually maps on really well to the Exodus story, but in the opposite direction.

Beth: You're saying somehow Pharaoh started out caring a lot about the bechorah, but by the end of the story doesn't.

Tikva: Well, Pharaoh starts off, like we said earlier, Pharaoh starts off sort of in that father role. If you had to, say, put a label on what it is Pharaoh cares about, you could say the bechor. And we have God saying, right, “I’m going to kill your bechor if you don't let My bechor go.”

Like, it does seem that God is saying, “I'm going to hit Pharaoh where it hurts.” This is what Pharaoh cares about, and Pharaoh sees himself as a patriarch. He sees himself as the head of a nation, as a father.

Beth: As a father, interesting. But the change is that Pharaoh is going to come to see himself primarily not as a father, but as a son.

Tikva: Yeah, I think that these stories are trying to point us to a transition; just as Esav has a transition from son to father, Pharaoh seems to have a transition from where he is in this father position to suddenly speaking words of a son. Suddenly Esav's words are coming out of his mouth and he's asking for a blessing, which is, like we said before, it does feel like the words of a child.

And even when Pharaoh, during the Ten Plagues, when Pharaoh would say, “Okay, fine, they can go pray,” for me; he says, “חָטָאתִי” (I sinned), those aren't child words. Those are adversary words. This is, you know, the enemy general putting down his sword.

At this moment, with Moshe and Aharon after the tenth plague, it's child words coming out of his mouth. He seems to now value the idea of God giving him a blessing. And yeah, and I think that he perhaps has recognized himself on some level as “son;” perhaps “son” like Esav, “son” in a state of conflict, but “son.” 

Beth: And whereas Esav is, over the course of the story, coming to see his father as less and less exceptional, it's the opposite with Pharaoh. Pharaoh is coming to see more and more that God as the Father is not a peer, but is ultimately exceptional, is the only possible source of blessing. Like, the “Bless me, father,” in both stories has a different desperation.

Esav, in this moment, realizes that he has his father's favor, but his father's too powerless, too weak to do anything about it.

Tikva: Yeah.

Beth: And with Pharaoh, it's the opposite, which is that he realizes that his Father, God Almighty, is the strongest power in the entire universe, but the obstacle isn't that his Father doesn't have the capacity, doesn't have the strength to give him the blessing. The obstacle is that he doesn't have His favor. He's not been living up to his Father's expectations. That's a tragic realization for him, and that's where his desperation is born from, but it's this, like, deep, raw, self-reflective, “I'm not deserving of the blessing from Father.”

Where the Stories Overlap: Remarkable Transitions

Tikva: I think that's really well said, and I think that what you're describing is exactly where the צְעָקָה גְּדֹלָה in both stories, you have that צְעָקָה גְּדֹלָה and that's almost where the stories overlap, right? Like, you know, one's going in one direction, one's going in the other, but they overlap at that moment. And you're right, there's a desperation in both of them, and then the opposite desperation. I thought you said that so well.

For Esav, it's a desperation of his father who wants to help him but can't, and yet it's a moment of incredible helplessness and the floor is pulled out from under him. For the Egyptians, it's a moment where, first of all, they, as parents, are recognizing their own helplessness. They can't help their children and I think that it's almost like, in that moment, they're pushed into the position of children, right? They're so helpless as parents. They're calling out to a father-like Being, “Can't You come save us?”

And the answer, they know, is, He could but He isn't going to, and it's heartbreaking. It's so harsh, but at the same time, what it does give them is that experience of knowing that they do want that.

And I think that is the transition, the remarkable transition for the Egyptians, where Esav transitions and says, “I can't rely on my father. I have to rely on myself now.” The Egyptians, in experiencing almost the rejection of God, it's like for the first time they're experiencing the desire for God as Father.

So it's not like this perfect moral redemption, but I think on maybe a more primal level, a more existential level, it's a shift, it's a paradigm shift of, how are you looking at your own conflict here? Are you denying God entirely, denying that you even want that relationship with God? “God is your enemy” versus, “No, I want God's favor.” 

What Does It Mean to Know God?

And that gets back to our question from earlier; this whole question of what does it mean for the Egyptians to know God? To me, what I saw in all of this is a very different way of looking at what it means for the Egyptians to end this story saying that they know God. It's not just the God of justice, and it's not the Disney version of the story where they know the loving God and the family is happy and complete and everyone's great and just sitting down to dinner together. 

Beth: Tiny Tim.

Tikva: Right. It is something in between. They do walk out of this story knowing the possibility of that God could be a Father, but most importantly - and to me this was the thing that I'm walking away with from all of this the most - is that normally when we think about knowing God…you know, what does it mean to know something? It's to know this and this and this fact about them, to know these attributes, right? God is omnipotent, or God is loving, or God is vengeful, whatever it is.

And what I'm seeing in the text is that, no, God is sort of setting everything up that way. He's playing their game, but what it is to actually know God is to allow or discover inside of themselves the longing for God and the longing for a relationship with God as Father.

And I think, in our lives, how we know someone is very defined by how we approach why we want to know them, and you can't just give someone that information. That does seem like something that has to come out of an experience.

So, yeah, I would say on top of everything else that we can say about the Ten Plagues, the justice, the retribution, the value of the story for the Israelites, I think that this is another element that for me feels very powerful, particularly in that sense of thinking about, even in my relationship with God, what does it mean to know God? What is the value of longing for God even in times when you maybe don't feel favored? But maybe there's a connection in the hope or in the request of “Bless me, too.”

Credits

This episode was recorded by: Tikva Hecht together with Beth Lesch.

This episode was produced by Evan Weiner.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our production manager is Adina Blaustein.

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.