Esau Cried Once and God Collected the Debt in Shushan

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The Meat Was Still Warm

Esau came in from the field with the dish he had hunted and cooked himself, and he was pleased with it. He set it down in front of his father and told him to sit up and eat, so that his soul would bless him.

Isaac asked who he was.

The old man had gone blind years before. He had eaten already. He had put both hands on a head that smelled like a field and said everything he had to say, and now the son whose voice this was stood at the foot of the bed holding a bowl, and Isaac began to shake. He shook so hard the frame moved. Then he said that someone had come before him and had eaten and had been blessed, and that the blessing would stand.

Esau heard it and let out one cry. Not a word. A very great and bitter cry, the kind that empties a man, and then he found the words underneath it. "Bless me too, my father."

Clearing His Throat for a Second Blessing

Isaac told him that his brother had come with cunning and taken what belonged to him. Rabbi Yohanan looked at the word Isaac chose and would not let it be an insult. The word was not the ordinary word for a lie or a swindle. Jacob had come in with the wisdom of his learning, and that is a different thing from a thief in the dark.

Esau did not care what kind of thing it was. He started to speak and could not, and Reish Lakish caught the sound he made first: a man clearing his throat and spitting before he can get a sentence out. Then it came. Called Jacob, was he. He took my birthright and I said nothing to him. Now he has taken my blessing. Am I supposed to say nothing to him again?

And then, because there was nothing else left to ask for, he asked for a leftover. Have you not reserved a blessing for me? One of the small ones. One of the ones at the bottom of the basket.

He was a grown man with weapons on his belt, and he was begging his father for the scraps of a sentence.

Nobody Says the Holy One Is Lax

Rabbi Hanina heard the cry and said something with his hand on the table. Anyone who says the Holy One, blessed be He, is lax about these things, may his own insides go slack. He is not lax. He is patient. He waits, and He collects what He is owed.

One cry had gone up out of Isaac's tent. Jacob had caused it. The account stayed open while Jacob buried his father, while his sons went down to Egypt, while the sea split and the Temple rose and the Temple burned and the survivors were marched east in chains.

The Cry Came Due in Shushan

Generations later, in a walled city on a Persian plain, a courier put up a copy of a new law. Every Jew in a hundred and twenty-seven provinces was to be killed on one day, and the goods of the dead were to be taken as plunder.

Mordecai read it and tore his clothes. He put on sackcloth, poured ash over his head, and walked out into the middle of the city, and there, in the open, in front of the king's gate, he cried out a great and bitter cry.

It was the same cry. The rabbis heard it land. The debt Jacob had run up in a tent in Canaan was collected from a man in mourning in the middle of a Persian street, and heaven had waited that long to do it.

The Laugh That Opened Every Shut Womb

The same household had once sent a different sound out into the world.

Sarah was ninety when she held her son and said that God had made laughter for her, and that everyone who heard would laugh along with her. Rabbi Berekhya asked the obvious thing. When Reuben is celebrating, why should Simeon care?

Because Sarah was not the only one remembered that day. Women who had stopped counting the years conceived in the same hour she did. Deaf men turned their heads toward a voice. Blind eyes opened. People whose minds had never held a thought held one. Rabbi Levi said the lights in the sky were increased that day, and the sun came up brighter over a tent in the Negev than it had the morning before.

Sarah's verse says God made laughter for her. The verse about the day in Shushan when the king lifted the taxes and sent gifts out to every province uses the same word for what was made. Both days, something was handed out to people who had not asked and did not know where it came from.

Seventy-Five Years Old on Two Roads

Abraham was seventy-five when he walked out of Haran with everything he owned on the backs of animals, and Lot walked out behind him owning none of it. The younger man had no promise, no call, and no land waiting. He went because his uncle went.

The rabbis in Babylon put the two roads next to each other. You left your father's house at seventy-five, God told Abraham. By your life, the one I raise up from you to redeem your children will be seventy-five as well.

Rav said Esther was forty. Shmuel said she was eighty. The rest of the rabbis counted the letters of the name Hadassah and said seventy-five, and left her standing in the corridor outside the throne room at the same age as the man who started walking.