toldos: hunting with our mouths
sholem aleichem friends,
Oy, what a week. It's Wednesday as I write this, and I just got hailed on walking back from teaching calculus, so you know. Winter is on its way. Maybe people on the bus will stop complaining about the onboard mask rules once we're all bundled up in scarves. Or they'll just stop wearing masks since no one can tell....but I can't go down that road yet!
Anyway, we begin our Torah portion this week with the story of Esav and Yaakov's conception, birth, and youth. Esav is the firstborn, very hairy, and becomes a hunter, as it is written:
וַֽיִּגְדְּלוּ֙ הַנְּעָרִ֔ים וַיְהִ֣י עֵשָׂ֗ו אִ֛ישׁ יֹדֵ֥עַ צַ֖יִד
when the boys grew up, esav became a man who knows how to hunt
The Rabbis explain that this doesn't just mean literal hunting, but also that
צָד אֶת הַבְּרִיּוֹת בְּפִיו
he hunted people with his mouth.
All potential dirty jokes aside, what exactly does this mean? Rabbi Abahu provides some more detail:
צָד בַּבַּיִת, צָד בַּשָּׂדֶה. בַּבַּיִת, הֵיךְ מְתַקְנִין מִלְחָא. בַּשָּׂדֶה, הֵיךְ מְתַקְנִין תִּבְנָא
he hunted in the house, he hunted in the field. in the house: how do they tithe salt? in the field: how do they tithe straw?
In other words, when he is in a house Esav would ask about tithing salt (found in the house), and in the field he would ask about tithing straw (found in a field). Neither of these things is actually tithed, Rashi explains. Esav asked these questions, adjusted for context, in order to portray himself as more studious than he was, to trap people into thinking of him how he wanted them to.
The Rabbis find this abhorrent, and it certainly isn't great, but to be honest I've always had a lot of empathy for Esav here. Most queer people, I think, understand needing to guide people's perception of us with carefully chosen words. On her album Transangelic Exodus, trans jewish punk rocker Ezra Furman sings
I've got one fatal flaw
I'm a compulsive liar
If I don't love you
I will tell you anything
And even if I love you
I'll always be conniving
I'll always be negotiating with the truthAnd I can trace the habit
To when I was eleven
And I thought boys were pretty
And I couldn't tell no one
While closeted, many queer people are trained in the creation of a kind of personal midrash. We are forced to take the text of our lives and use it to tell different stories to different people, often through the same techniques that the Rabbis use to create midrash: adding details, changing the context, performing subtle modifications, etc. In the house we ask about salt, in the field about straw.
This, for me, was one of the great reliefs of coming out of the closet. I could finally shed the layers of midrash I had wrapped myself up in. But giving up control of how other people saw me was easier said than done. I couldn't just come out of the closet and have this habit erased from my mind, the compulsion to control how other people see me magically removed. I realized this most strongly during a period post-transition where I was stealth at work. All of a sudden, I was back in a position where everyone was held at a distance, my words carefully chosen to never give away who I really was.
In Likutei Moharan, Rebbe Nachman writes that name ehyeh (from ehyeh-asher-ehyeh, I-am-that-I-am) of haShem corresponds to teshuvah. Before teshuvah, Nachman writes, a person does not have being. When you prepare to do teshuvah, you are preparing to exist. Coming out of the closet is therefore a profound moment of teshuvah because it is a moment of deciding to truly exist, to inhabit the name of ehyeh: I am becoming. But teshuvah is not a one-time thing! Oy, So you've come out of the closet, so what. What happens the next time you can choose between weaving a convenient midrash and simply existing? For me, it has always been all too easy to fall back on those old habits from the closet.
For example, the word "I" didn't appear anywhere in the first draft of this dvar.
This isn't something that we can simply say "thou shalt not" about, because there's no "true self" without any layer of narrative, and we are all of us different people in different circumstances. But I do think this is something to take seriously, because it is so easy to rationalize this kind of behavior, and to lose control of it. What starts as a tool of necessity can so quickly become a tool of convenience. Instead of returning again and again to ehyeh, we hide ehyeh in a sea of midrash.
Rebbe Nachman teaches that this hiding of ehyeh is numerically equivalent to the word דָּם/dam/blood (see postscript for the technical details). The tikkun/repair of this hiding of ehyeh, he says, is to change דָּם/dam/blood to דׁם/dom/quiet. The solution to the problem of compulsively hunting with our mouths, running away from ehyeh? Just shut up, says Nachman. Be quiet. Don't say anything. Return to the center. Prepare to exist.
I think it is interesting, in a very meta way, that the character traits of Esav that started these reflections are all themselves inventions of midrash. In the original story, we just know that Esav was firstborn, hairy, a hunter, and Yitzkhak loved him. From the details of his story, the Rabbis themselves go hunting with their mouths, trying to trap us into thinking of Esav as manipulative and unworthy compared to our patriarch Yaakov (thereby justifying Yaakov's own manipulations). When the Torah tells us only that Esav "came in from the field", the Rabbis tell us that this occurred on the day of Avraham's death, and while everyone else mourned him, Esav went about his day as normal. When the Torah tells us Esav was one who knows hunting, the Rabbis inform us (as above) of Esav's manipulative nature and even (quite homophobically) that he "was penetrated like women." (No wonder I find him a sympathetic character!)
To quote Rebbe Nachman at our beloved sages: be quiet!
As always, I'm very interested in any thoughts you might have on this, and please feel free to forward this email along to anyone you think might find it interesting.
Have a wonderful Shabbos,
ada
Gematria Postscript
The standard method of gematria is called Mispar ha-Ponim, the "face number". There's a dual method to this called Mispar ha-Akhor, the "back number." This allows us to calculate, for example, the numeric value corresponding to the hiding of the face of ehyeh, as opposed to the numeric value of ehyeh revealed.
In Mispar ha-Ponim, the standard values of each letter of a word are added up. For example, the word דם becomes ד + ם which is 4 + 40 = 44.
In Mispar ha-Akhor, the standard values of each letter of a word are added up and each is multiplied by its position in the word in descending order (sometime ascending order is used.) In a four letter word, the first letter (right-to-left) is multiplied by 4, the second by 3, the third by 2, and the last by 1. So the word אהיה (ehyeh) in Mispar ha-Akhor breaks down to
(א = 1)x4 + (ה = 5)x3 + (י=10)x2 + (ה=5)x1 = 4 + 15 + 20 + 5 = 44
which is the same as the Mispar ha-Ponim for דם, as Rebbe Nachman claimed. Fun, right?