by Burton Visotzky, delivered at Minyan M'at

You gotta love this parashah! Our mother Rivka asks the $64,000 question, the very essence of existential angst, the ultimate wonder of a WestSider: when she's having a difficult pregnancy she says: Im Ken Lamah Zeh Anochi -

If so, Why me?

Isn't this ultimately the question we each ask at some crisis in our lives?

If I may be permitted a professional aside, I also love the fact that once she asks the question Rivkah knows what to do:

VaTelekh Lidrosh et Adonai - our matriarch Rebeccah is the first Jew recorded as "doing midrash!"

Even I have to admit, that the pshat of that verse is that she seeks an oracle from God.

What is remarkable in Rivkah's case is, she gets an answer - Shenei Goyyim Bivitneich, Ushenei Leumim Mimayayich

Now oracles are traditionally murky, they need to be vague enough that they can cover every future exigency and still be thought prophetic - so I would simply offer as translation for the Hebrew poetry of the oracle:

Yadda, yadda, yadda

the trick is that Rivkah takes it all to heart and therein lies the history of Israel – Eilah Toldot Yitzchak - and I mean this quite literally, Rivkah chooses to interpret these obscure words in a way that has meaning to her own desires - and so Jacob gains the patrimony in place of his older brother Esau, with his mother Rivkah aiding and abetting all the way.

We all live by these oracles: my wife Sandy always says: No acts without consequences, and then in the second line of her oracle: with privilege comes responsibility. Oracular words to live by.

My own personal oracles apply, I think, to Rivkah as I have just described her: #1: You have what you want. And, oracle number two: parents aren't stupid.

Rivkah hides behind the oracle, but she gets her favorite boy what she wants for him - or shall I say, what she wants for herself. She surely isn't stupid - if anything she's a bit too smart for Jacob (and Esau's) own good.

Truth be told: Isaac isn't stupid either. Oh, we paint him as a pale imitation of his father, a bound boy raised in father Abraham's giant shadow, but if we attend to the evidence of the parashah, we will see that while Isaac imitates Abraham, he reproduces his successes - by the end of this week's reading Isaac is rich, quite rich, happily married, has a gourmet chef at his disposal, and works out the inheritance in a way that God and history prove to be just dandy.

So Isaac may be blind, but he's not stupid. He, in the end, has what he wants, too. He goes along with Rivkah's ruse so that clever Jacob gets the family company - and while he's at it he gets to jerk Isaac's chain all the while by asking: who are you? Are you my first born? Can't you just hear him say, "The voice is Jacob's, but the hands are Esau's. I'm shocked, shocked."

Jacob's practically peeing in his furry pants for fear of being found out, while Isaac is doing his best not to giggle over the charade. The blessing Isaac gives to Jacob: My son smells like a fertile field - redolent, I might infer, of bull, uh, fertilizer.

There's one more oracle we should throw into the mix here, it is Midrashic, and modern all the same. Many of us in this room have felt the horror of this oracle in our own lives: As the rabbis say it: Maaseh Avot Siman LaBanim, and in loose translation: We turn into our parents.

No there is no quibbling about this as far as Isaac is concerned - Abraham digs wells, Isaac digs wells. Abraham does the wife-sister, Isaac does the wife-sister. Isaac even finds comfort with Rivkah in his mother's tent - whatever that means - but he is, Akedah notwithstanding - his father's son.

The trouble with this reproduction of fathering is that even as it is happening, we don't or can't always see it all unfolding - perhaps we're each in deep denial at this essential truth. Perhaps we rail against the oracle and seek to cheat fate, or God, or the oracle, or Freud.. Yes, I may have the same male patterned balding as dad, the same physique, the same gestures, but that doesn't mean I'll replicate his mistakes. No, no, no. I'll learn from my parents mistakes, won't I??

So Isaac leaves Abraham back at Moriah and marries Rebecca content to raise his children in Sarah's tent, yet far from daddy's shadow. Isaac won't replicate the errors of Abraham, who listened to his wife Sarah and so lost BOTH his sons - one to the wilderness and the other to the knife. No, Isaac may prefer one boy over another - but he won't make Abraham's mistake, will he???

We've come to the end of the parashah and I to the end of my Dvar Torah. Jacob has fled his brother's wrath and his mother's machinations and his father's berachah and gone of to Laban and his fate. Esau has left behind the easy ways of the hunt and barbequing for pops and taken up with uncle Ishmael and his delectable daughter. Rivkah has what she wants. She isn't stupid.

And Isaac, our father, has nothing - his boys have flown the coop. He may not be stupid, but like so many of us parents, when it comes to his children, he is blind.

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