Truth or Blind? Toldot

Doctors can be so arrogant: “Oh, so you just ignored it?” 

And flippant about dangerous “side effects” of medications they prescribe: “Just keep taking it,” a doctor said to me the other day. 

No, I didn’t “decide to ignore it!” I want to scream. “I was trying to avoid invasive procedures.” And I was scared. But I don’t say anything. I just shrug sheepishly. I should have taken care of it sooner. Now look. 

There are many reasons to “ignore” something. Maybe it means letting go of the image of myself as young and healthy and the “I can take care of it myself through a good diet, yoga and Qi Gong, meditation, exercise,” attitude. 

The truth can be scary. 

In the Torah, Isaac doesn’t want to see the truth either, and it’s really easy to do what my doctor did to me: judge him for it.

In this week’s parsha, Isaac and Rebecca finally have babies after at least twenty years: twins, defined by God as warring nations within Rebecca’s womb; Jacob manipulates his twin brother Esau into giving up his birthright, which Esau does flippantly in a moment of extreme hunger and weakness after a long day of hunting.

Later, Isaac, old and getting to the end of his life, asks Esau to go out and hunt and make him his favorite stew in preparation for the special blessing he will give his favorite son (did the boys not tell their parents they’d traded birth places? Or did it even matter in the end, because your favorite is your favorite?).

Rebecca overhears and devises a plan that will make sure that Jacob gets the blessing instead. She helps Esau clothe himself in Jacob’s best, and prepares the hairy skin of a baby goat to cover Jacob’s arms and personify the hairy Esau. 

We come to the moment of truth, and Isaac is blind to it. 

Yes, Isaac is in fact pretty blind, but he’s still got his hearing, and he knows right away that Jacob’s voice is not Esau’s. When questioned, Jacob denies his true identity, but Isaac’s suspicions are strong enough that he touches Jacob’s arm and smells his clothing. 

And he allows himself to be fooled just because a couple of things add up, even though in his heart, he knows it can’t be true.

In other words, with his hearing in tact, plus his intelligent brain that tells him that Esau couldn’t possibly be back from the hunt and have prepared the stew for him in the given time frame, he allows the wool to be pulled over his eyes, so to speak, gives his special blessing to Jacob, and breaks Esau’s heart. Esau is so hurt that he wants to kill Jacob, a foreshadowing of the two warring nations. 

Don’t we want to say to Isaac in great frustration, “Really?? You knew! The signs were all there!”

If we knew an Isaac today, we would probably call him an idiot.

But what was it? Did he not trust himself? Or did he not want to believe that one of his children would do such a thing? Or?

People are complicated, and whatever the reasons, we find ourselves saying the same thing we would like to say to Isaac when we hear or watch the news about our present day political situation: “How could this be?? How can people be so blind??” We shake our heads in disgust and disbelief. 

But are we really that different from Isaac and all those people out there that we each feel so superior to? Whatever our opinions may be, our mantra is the same, even if we don’t use these exact words: “They’re idiots.”

I’m reading a book, You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb.  It’s a fun autobiography of a therapist talking to her therapist. She cries for weeks, months maybe, about her boyfriend who broke up just before they were supposed to get married. The same day he buys tickets to the movies with her for the coming week he springs this on her--out of nowhere! What an asshole! 

There’s another character, her patient, for whom everyone in his life is an idiot. You just keep hearing, “What an idiot,” from him, which is really annoying because, of course, this guy doesn’t want to take responsibility for anything in his life so he blames it on everyone else.

After weeks, maybe months, of crying and retelling the story of this injustice done to her, Gottlieb is finally able to recognize that the signs that her boyfriend would not go through with the marriage were there all along. She just didn’t want to see them. And her patient, well, I’m at the point in the book where she finally starts to make progress with this guy and reach his heart, the place where he’s scared and hurt.

I don’t really want to face the fact that my body is getting older, that my blood pressure is high, that I may have other health issues and that I may need to take those prescription meds with side effects. 

And I can point to my doctor and say, “How arrogant!” But when it comes down to it, secretly I’m probably just as arrogant and self-righteous, and sometimes even flippant. Though I try not to be, I know that deep down (or maybe not so deep), I think I’m right. 

I’m not denying the political mess we’re in the midst of, and that there is real truth out there, and that there are really racist people out there. That right there is a truth in itself. And we are rightly worried about the fact that we have two warring nations within one.

But it’s too easy to judge others when we “hold the truth.” And there are many reasons other may not see.

Isaac is a reminder to all of us that we can be just as blind to the truth and that there are always signs. We just have to take the time to notice them. 

Isaac is also a reminder to work on our superiority complex. Because, do we really see any more clearly than other people, or do we mostly see what we want to see. (Yeah, that’s not a question. It’s a statement.)

In the end, I’m just scared. We’re all just scared. And maybe Isaac is too.