Posts Tagged: Esau Torah
Enemies Can Become Friends; Until Then, We Must Defend Ourselves
In last week's Torah portion, we read about how Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury their father. And in fact, they lived together at...
Esau, Jacob, and Poetic Justice
One of my favorite films as a teenager was the Robert Redford/Paul Newman classic -- "The Sting." It’s a complicated film, in which all the...
Esau’s Callous Ambivalence in 2020
I love this quote from Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." (Though I expect he wasn’t happy that...
Parshat Toldot: Love Heals the Lover and the Loved
It’s a haunting question. Why did Isaac love Esau? The verse says so explicitly: “Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebecca...
The Story of Esau: Be Honest With Yourself
In October 1897, Sigmund Freud wrote to his close friend and confidant, the idiosyncratic German-Jewish otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess, inter-alia telling him that “being entirely honest...
Like Esau, Today’s Terrorists Live Only in the Present
There is so much going on in the world today that makes absolutely no sense. The security camera footage that emerged this week of two...
Love is What Links Us to God
One of the most amusing scenes in Anglo-Jewish history occurred on 14 October 1663. A mere seven years had passed since Oliver Cromwell had found...
