At the beginning of this portion, Yaakov Avinu is filled with anxiety over the approaching meeting with his brother Esav after a twenty year separation. He doesn’t know what to expect. He only knows that Esav is coming towards him with four hundred men from his people.
Yaakov’s lack of certainty concerning his fate is expressed very well by Rashi, with his saying that prior to this meeting, “Yaakov prepared himself for three things: for a gift, for prayer and for war” (RaSHI on Bereshit 32, 9). In other words: Yaakov didn’t know what to do – whether to tempt his brother in order to find favor in his eyes and to develop a feeling of “political horizon”, or to prepare for a destructive war, or whether to depend on the grace of The Holy One.
Rabbi Gustavo Suraszki of Ashkelon comments: “From the perspective of this weekly portion’s reader, there isn’t much room for optimism. A person reading the Torah for the first time will immediately feel that there isn’t much room for making peace, rather for revenge and the beginning of waves of violence between the two sides. There is a great probability that in the end, blood will be spilled at the site of the meeting. However, in the end, the two adversaries kiss and embrace in the center of the arena. Many commentaries have been made on this very same embrace. There are those who say that Esav “nashak” (kissed) his brother with all his heart (Rashi on Bereshit 33, 4), and there are those who say that Esav “nashach” (bit) him with all his heart. Between “kissed” and “bit” (“nashak”- “nashach”) there are innumerable commentaries.
At the beginning of our Torah portion, the Ramban says “that all what occurred to our forefather with his brother Esav will always occur to us with the sons of Esav.” He is basically describing this meeting as a “prototype” of all of the meetings that occurred over the generations between the Jewish people and the nations of the world. Meetings in which there were kisses that were also bites, and embraces that were counterfeit; meetings in which the suspicion dominated the setting.
So what do we learn from this meeting between Yaakov and Esav? Rabbi Saraszki explains his thoughts: “The first thing that it teaches us is that even if the kiss was genuine, it didn’t make them friends forever. But the most important point is not in the present story. The important point is that on that occasion, they understood that there was room in the world for both of them. And most importantly: they understood that there is no more important battle than the struggle for co-existence between two entirely different conceptions of the world.
It’s reasonable to assume that Yaakov and Esav continued to live very differently from each other as they did at the time of their births. Even if Esav invited his brother to continue the journey together in saying “… “Travel on and let us go” (Bereshit 33, 12), Yaakov quickly realized that there was no point to it. Yaakov continued along his path to the Land of Canaan, and Esav made his way to Seir. That was perhaps one of the first opportunities in history in which the slogan was made: “Two countries for two nations”. ”
Prepared by Devorah Abenhaim
