Yaakov gets a blessing this week by pretending to be his brother Esav.
Quick recap of the story: Yitzhak tells Esav to go out hunting and bring back something for him to eat so that he can bless him before he dies. Meanwhile, Rivka overhears the conversation and tells Yaakov to go pretend to be his brother and get the blessing first. She dresses him up in Esav’s clothes and puts hairy skins on his arms and neck so that he will seem more like Esav. Yaakov goes in, his father touches the fur disguise and smells the outdoorsy smell and blesses him (Genesis 27:1-27).
Not Blessed For Who You Are
There is something so sad about this scene. Certainly it will be sad for Esav when he comes back and finds out, terribly sad. But it is also sad in a different way for Yaakov. Consider the message here – the only way to receive a blessing from your father is to pretend to be someone else. He does not love you for who you are. Your authentic self is not valued, not enough. And your mother thinks this mask is worth it, pushing you to wear the disguise, to game the system and sacrifice your integrity, your sense of self.
Pausing here to feel into any version of that in yourself, the sense that who you naturally are is not enough to deserve blessing and love, to be accepted, to be successful, to belong, that you need to put on a mask and pretend to be someone else, something more pleasing to those around you. Can you sense that not enoughness, the reaching, the restlessness, the need to perform, to put on a disguise, the unsteadiness of that core belief, the constant looking outward for validation? If I become more like this, then will you bless me and honor me? Feeling Yaakov there in his disguise trying to win his father’s heart and the hurt under that, the hurt of not being loved as you are, and the self disgust, the way you, too, learn to turn away from yourself, to change yourself to be more likeable. If I just had hairier arms, or maybe smoother legs, or a thinner body. The contortions we put ourselves through, the stress, the overwork, becoming a pretzel to please others, to win that blessing, doing circus tricks, performing like a monkey for peanuts, all the while abandoning our true selves, entrenching the message that we are not enough as we are. They won’t like me if I just act like myself.
Distorted Lenses
These are distorted messages. We view ourselves through the distorted lens of our family and culture. Think about Yaakov. His father Yitzhak has an idiosyncratic preference for hunting. He likes the taste of meat in his mouth; maybe it has something to do with his own akedah trauma on the altar, or maybe he admires the adventurous nature of Esav precisely because he lacks that himself. Who knows. The point is that Yitzhak’s preference for Esav’s wild hunting nature is not an objective evaluation of worthiness, but highly idiosyncratic and subjective, a skewed human lens. And yet it has so much power. Yaakov is naturally an ish tam yoshev ohalim, a person who likes to sit at home and read books, and this natural inclination is not acceptable to his father. The skewed lenses of our parents and teachers and peers and community have such a strong impact on us. They feel like the truth to us. We learn to judge ourselves as they judge us, to reject parts of ourselves that are not welcomed by them, to hide our true selves and to offer up a false self, a disguise like Yaakov’s, in order to receive approval, validation, honor, love, connection.
Checking for any distorted lenses you may carry inside you. It’s not easy to see because it does feel like the truth, our conditioned truth, the way we view ourselves, what we consider worthy and ok to show to the world and what we must hide and disguise. Maybe there is a parallel to hunting in your own familial, educational or social environment, something that was highly prized that maybe you had or didn’t have a natural inclination for, how that might have impacted you. Also noticing any places and moments where even today you feel particularly in need of wearing a mask, not fully comfortable being yourself. And maybe bringing some spaciousness around the assumptions behind those distorted lenses. Surely there are character traits of yours that were considered difficult or embarrassing or uncool that are actually quite beautiful seen in a different light. For a moment, imagining that you can take off those conditioned self perception glasses, throw them off to the wind and run free, just being yourself, loving and accepting yourself exactly as you are.
Giving Away Our Power
We give away so much of our power to other people when we look to them for affirmation and validation, for blessing and approval. Yaakov sacrificed his power and integrity in relation to both his parents here. With his mother, Yaakov wanted to get along and stay connected by going along with her plan even though it is clear that he had some qualms about it (27:11-12). She pushed it on him, and he let himself be pushed, relinquishing his own wisdom and agency, losing himself in his desire to follow her lead and please her. And with his father, Yaakov wanted to receive blessing, even if it meant losing himself, pretending to be someone else. He put himself in the hands of his father to either be blessed or not blessed. As if his father had that power. As if any human has that power, to determine whether we are blessed, to decide if we have a right to be ourselves. We give away so much power, sometimes by the truckload.
Blessed By God
The truth is that no human has that power or authority over us, the power to decide if we are blessed, the power to give us permission to be ourselves. We are blessed by God by virtue of having been born. And we are continually blessed by God in each breath we take, each breath a secret internal whisper that says – I want you here, I need you to be you, don’t try to be someone else. It’s you I need in the world. No one else is going to be able to do that. God doesn’t make garbage. Don’t throw your precious self away to be someone else.
The Craftsman Who Made Me
I am reminded of a story in the gemara about a rabbi who was riding high on his donkey travelling one day when he encountered “an exceedingly ugly man.” The man greeted the rabbi politely, but the rabbi looked down at him and said – reika, worthless one, how ugly you are, are all the people of your city as ugly as you? The man replied – I don’t know, but you should go and tell the Craftsman who made me – what an ugly vessel you have made. The rabbi, understanding his mistake, gets off his donkey and walks behind the man, trying to appease him (Taanit 20a-b).
I love this story because the man stands up for himself. He does not let himself be degraded. He knows he was made by a divine craftsman and he holds that knowledge as a protective shield against degradation and as an empowerment to be himself. Perhaps you can feel a little of that in your body, the sense of external – or mostly internal – attempts to degrade you, someone (often an inner critic) sitting above you on a high horse, but you holding yourself with pride as divinely crafted just exactly as you are, exquisitely made, walking tall, impervious to insult. That is how we reclaim our power. We gird ourselves with the knowledge of our divine source, with a sense of God’s continual affirmation.
Yaakov’s Divine Blessing
Yaakov gets a dose of this divine affirmation and blessing at the beginning of next week’s parsha in the form of the ladder dream (28:10-15). He thought he needed to wangle his way into getting his father’s blessing by pretending to be his brother, but here he receives God’s blessing freely, without having to earn it in any way, just by lying there and being Yaakov, as if to make it clear where true blessing ultimately comes from.
We are normally like Yaakov in the earlier scene, hungry and grasping for blessing and recognition, reaching, performing, putting on masks, making sure we are pleasing to others, conforming, always looking outward to others to bless us, to affirm our right to be ourselves, please, sir, may I have some more, not being totally ourselves because we want so much to be accepted and blessed, to finally belong.
All of that is exhausting, the constant reaching outwards and the attempt to adapt ourselves to what is expected, how much effort it takes to keep up that charade. Yaakov, too, is tired, bone tired. He leaves that world behind next week and he lies down outside with nothing but a rock for a pillow, and he sleeps. And it is in that sleep, that unconscious return to self – we are never anyone but ourselves in our sleep – that prostrate position, that letting go, that place of complete lack of disguise or effort, it is in that sleep that God comes and blesses him. You don’t need to be anyone other than who you are right now. You don’t have to put on a disguise or do fancy footwork. You are enough just lying there, being yourself. I am with you and bless you now and always, exactly as you are. Sensing yourself deeply resting like that, prostrate, no effort at all, leaning your head on the Rock of God, and letting the blessing come to you on its own. You are enough. Shed your false skins, let go of the effort and simply be yourself. It is this self that I bless, says God.
Returning to Your Truth
Maybe turning back now to any places in your own life where you feel some constriction around being yourself, as Yaakov did, some pressure to wear sheep’s clothing, to pretend, to give away some of your integrity and power, to conform in a way that violates something essential in you – and experimenting with saying: No. I need to be true to myself. Yaakov is associated with emet, truth, perhaps because he leads us there. We see him pretending to be his brother and it makes us long for our own authenticity, to take off the mask, to shed the false furs. Did any good come of that ill-begotten blessing? I don’t think so. We can only receive blessing when we are true to ourselves. Then it comes flowing towards us in exactly the form we need, not someone else’s blessing, but our own. It is out of the authentic seed of our divinely implanted truth that we blossom and grow, like a flower. A daffodil does not do well to try to bloom into a rose. Our blessing comes in growing into ourselves, into the emet implanted in each one of us in our own way.
Resting and sensing God’s support for you in being yourself and letting yourself be strengthened by that.
