The Voice and the Hands of the Twins of Toldot

For fifteen years, nobody could tell them apart. Esau and Jacob walked the same road to the same schoolhouse, ate at the same table, slept under the same roof, and a stranger seeing the two of them coming up the path would have had no way to guess which was which. They were that alike. The womb that had held them wrestling had given the world no clue, at least none the world could see.

Two Saplings Side by Side

Rabbi Berekhyah the Priest, teaching in the name of Rabbi Levi, reached for the only image that fit. Picture a myrtle and a thorn-bush planted in the same soil, he said. While they are young, your eye cannot part them. Two slender shoots, two sets of leaves, identical green. But let the seasons turn. Let them grow into their nature. Then the myrtle breathes out its fragrance, the kind Scripture calls good, and the thorn-bush thrusts forth the thing it was always going to become. Thorns.

So with these twins. The teaching is preserved in Midrash Tanchuma in its Buber recension, the strand of midrash on the weekly Torah portion that scholars trace through manuscripts copied across the medieval centuries from far older homiletic material. (Genesis 25:27) says simply that the boys grew up. The midrash hears in that one clause the entire problem of how a single household can raise a tzaddik and a hunter who look like mirror images until the day they no longer do. The years drew the line the womb had hidden.

The Hunter Who Trapped at Home

Then they parted, and the difference, once it showed, showed all the way down. Scripture calls Esau "a man knowing the hunt." Rabbi Abbahu asks the sharp question: knowing what, exactly? The knowledge of the trap. Esau snared his prey in the open field and he snared it just as well inside the house. He hunted beasts, and he hunted men. The same boy who had looked so like his gentle brother had become a setter of snares wherever he stood.

Jacob, the wholesome man dwelling in tents, took the other road, into the tents of study. And the midrash gives him a promise spoken in God's own voice. You were the first to sit in those tents, the Holy One tells him. By your life, when I return to Jerusalem, I return on the strength of your merit. The proof is in the wording of the prophet, who does not say God will restore the tents of Abraham, but "Behold, I will restore the captivity of the tents of Jacob" (Jeremiah 30:18). The boy in the study tent was building the foundation God would one day come home to.

The Day the Birthright Was Sold

The break came hard. On the day Abraham died, Esau came in from the field and said, "Behold, I am going to die. And of what use is this birthright to me?" (Genesis 25:32). The midrash does not let that line pass as exhaustion. In the days before the Tabernacle stood, the firstborn carried the priesthood. The firstborn brought the offerings, and everyone who offered was worthy to be blessed, for God had said, "An altar of earth you shall make for Me. I will come to you and bless you" (Exodus 20:24).

That is what Esau was throwing away. Not a legal title. The right to stand before the altar with blood in his hands and be blessed. He wanted neither the offering nor the blessing, and so, the prophet tells him, "Because you hated blood, blood shall pursue you" (Ezekiel 35:6). Rabbi Levi, in the name of Rabbi Hanina ben Hama, says the hated blood is the blood of the sacrifices he refused to bring. The Rabbis say it is the blood of circumcision, the covenant in his own flesh that he tried to erase. Either way, the blood he despised would hunt him down across every generation that came after.

You Act With Your Voice

Years later, the line finally surfaced in the dark of Isaac's tent. The old man lay blind upon his bed, and Jacob came in dressed as his brother, the food in his hands. Do not say Jacob lied, the midrash insists. Read his words rightly. He said, "I am Jacob; Esau is your firstborn," and even Balaam, hired to curse, was forced to confess, "He has not beheld iniquity in Jacob" (Numbers 23:21).

What gave Jacob away, and what saved him, was a single sentence. Isaac asked how the food had come so swiftly. "Because the LORD your God caused it to happen before me" (Genesis 27:20), Jacob answered. And Isaac, who had once lain bound on the altar himself while an angel cried, "Do not stretch out your hand against the lad" (Genesis 22:12) and a ram was made to sprout for his sake alone, weighed those words. Esau, he knew, does not carry the Name on his lips. "This is not Esau," he thought.

So he reached out his hands. "Come near, that I may feel you." Jacob drew close, and Isaac spoke the line the sages of Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Toldot would turn over for centuries: "You are acting with your voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." Rabbi Judah bar Ilai heard prophecy folded inside it. The voice of Jacob, he said, is the roar of Hadrian Caesar, who slew eighty thousand myriads at Betar when the second-century revolt was crushed and the study tents ran red.

Rabbi Yohanan heard something else in the same words. Not Hadrian's roar. Jacob's. It is the voice of Jacob himself, still crying out over what the hands of Esau did to his children there. The myrtle and the thorn-bush, planted in one soil, looked the same for fifteen quiet years. The crying has not stopped since.