Vayishlach 5785
Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?
Glinda 'the good' witch
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Loathing
Unadulterated loathing
For your face
Your voice
Your clothing
Let's just say, I loathe it all!
Every little trait, however small
Makes my very flesh begin to crawl
With simple utter loathing
There's a strange exhilaration
In such total detestation
It's so pure! So strong!
I realise at this point you’re either sitting here having mentally broken into song a while ago, or wondering what on earth I’m saying.
These words are lyrics from the blockbuster musical turned cinema sensation Wicked- that has topped the box office over the last few weeks, and has a particularly cult following.
The musical, written by the Jewish composes and lyricist Stephen Schwartz- better known around these parts perhaps for the Torah that is Disney’s The Prince of Egypt- tells the story of the witches of oz before the story we all know as it was told in the original 1930s film. It flips the story somewhat, and explores the question of whether the wicked witch of the west was wicked at all, or whether 'wicked' was a name given to her because of her rejection of the tyranny of the rule of the actually wicked wizard.
Our Torah portion has its own wicked character- known as Esau HaRasha, Esau the wicked, by the rabbis of our tradition. He HATED Jacob, in a way that the lyrics I begun with could probably give good voice to. He loathed him, everything about him. Jacob and Esau’s rivalry begins before they are even born but it really takes shape when Jacob tricks his brother and steals the birthright due to him.
Jacob, at least according to the pshat, the surface, reading of the text is duplicitous, cruel, and takes something from his brother that was not his to take, but for some reason Esau ends up with the label wicked. It’s not a label given him by the Torah but rather by the rabbis. Some say it’s because when Jacob steals the birthright, Esau swears he will kill him. Others, create further midrashic backstory for Esau’s wicked ways. But its not straightforward.
Esau is the one who has been hurt, and Jacob flees from Esau’s anger, afraid for his life and afraid of the consequences of his actions. I guess they’ve both got something pretty significant to answer for. While Jacob has hurt Esau in a measurable way, Esau doesn’t get the chance to hurt Jacob back.
We don’t know whether he would or could have, or whether his hurtful words were just an expression of extreme pain- and maybe that doesn’t matter.
When Jacob realises he can’t travel onwards without running into Esau, he sends him messengers, and Esau responds positively. They embrace as we heard this morning, and Esau falls on Jacob’s neck, in a moment in Torah that had a different dimension when viewed from Ella’s perspective up here on the bimah
If you look at the screens for a moment you’ll see what this moment looks like in the Torah scroll. There is a whole extra set of dots above the letters of the word וַיִּשָּׁקֵהוּ. That’s something that scribes did at the time to draw focus to a word, perhaps to note a mistake or query or to suggest reading the word differently.
The root of this word in hebrew is nashak- נ nun ש shin ק cuf, it means kiss, but if you change the ק kuf to a כ caf, one letter that sounds almost the same, the word doesn’t mean kiss but rather bite. So it’s possible that Esau didn’t kiss Jacob, but rather he bit him- and a fun legacy of this verbal confusion exists in modern hebrew today with the word neshek which means weapon and neshika that means kiss.
Kisses and bites, love and hate, good and evil, they’re all things that are often constructed as complete opposites, and yet also way closer together than we might like to imagine. Did Esau bite Jacob or kiss him? And is he the bad guy or the good one?
Is Jacob the wicked one for stealing the birthright, and Esau the righteous one for accepting his brother’s apology? Or is he the wicked one for threatening his brother, and insincere in his acceptance of the apology as shown by the bite hidden inside his outwardly apparent gesture of love and friendship.
The author of the book that the Wicked film is based on explains that he wrote it because he wanted to explore and understand how people in society become labelled as good or bad, as wicked, as outsiders or those deserving of fear and scorn.
In Jewish tradition the Esau character and his lineage become a container. He becomes synonymous with Rome, his redness parallels the Hebrew name for Rome- edom. Esau/Edom is the archetype of an oppressor who causes harm to the lineage of Israel- the name Jacob takes on after his wrestling with the angel.
But this isn’t there in Torah, it’s there in the rabbinic imagination because we needed a container for our experience of Wickedness. And that's ok, because we’re the good guys, right?
Can we notice what happens to Esau and the way his lineage functions as symbolic eternal wicked strain as a lesson in how rulers, governments and those in power construct and use villains?
When Wicked was written, it took something everyone knew- that the witch of the west is wicked- and turned it on its head. In doing so it pushed us to explore and answer for ourselves how society scapegoats, scorns, and how tyranny often involves a figure who people can unite against, someone who threatens something that the powerful value.
One of the ways that we resist tyranny is understanding the tools that it employs. In the ambiguity between the kiss and the bite perhaps we find a reminder that these things are rarely black and white. By reflecting on the way that the language of 'good' and 'bad' influences our reading of a situation and our relationships with others, we can sharpen our own ability to resist being swept up in systems that harm and ostracise by playing on our emotions, our fears, and by manipulating our desires to live in an emerald city where all our dreams come true.
