Jacob the Fox
Once, when the leopard was making a scornful comparison between himself and the fox, claiming that he had a coat of varying and many-colored spots, the fox replied that while the leopard’s ornamentation was on his skin, his own was in the mind. And truly it was much better to be endowed with cunning brains than with a party-colored skin.
Plutarch, Moralia (referring to one of Aesop’s fables)
Ya’akov Avinu, our ancestor Jacob, is a real heel. That’s what his name means anyway. He was born “holding on to the heel (ekev) of Esau; so they named him Jacob (ya’akov)” (Bereishit 25:26). As his story unfolds, his character seems morally tepid at best, and he is downright deceitful and manipulative to many of his closest family members.
And yet, he is also described as tam (Bereishit 25:27), a word which can range in meaning from “mild-mannered” to “morally perfect”. Ibn Ezra contrasts him to his brother this way: “Esau the hunter was constantly practicing deception, for most animals are trapped through trickery. Jacob was his antithesis, because he was a man of integrity.”
Given what he know of how Jacob steals birthrights and blessings, manipulates livestock, bargains with God for protection, shows favoritism among his children, etc., it is a little hard to square the text’s assertion of his integrity with the text’s description of his apparently loose association with ethical concerns.
One of my favorite midrashic attempts to reconcile the term comes from Avot deRabbi Natan, in which they assert that the “integrity” implied by tam means Jacob was born circumcised. He is born with a very specific type of wholeness, in which his body does not require the adjustment of circumcision in order to enter the covenant. When you find interpretations like this in the tradition, you know you aren’t wildly off base thinking the text is hard to understand…
In this week’s parashah, Vayishlach, Jacob yet again turns to a clever and cunning strategy. As his large family journeys to his home of origin, they hear that Esau is coming to greet them with 400 men, and Jacob understandably fears retribution. He devises a scheme of sending waves of gifts, and then splits his camp so that if the bribes don’t work at least there will be some survivors. By the end of this episode, however, “Esau ran to greet him. He embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him; and they wept” (Bereishit 33:4). Although there are some who are ready to read Esau as hiding ulterior motives, the plain sense of the text is that Esau is just happy to see his brother again. He has forgotten old grudges, and only Jacob still carries around the burden of his past behavior.
What are we to make of Jacob? The 20th century philosopher Isaiah Berlin once wrote an essay in which he explored an ancient Greek aphorism, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The fox is clever and comes up with many tactics to find its food, while the hedgehog simply rolls into a prickly ball anytime it is threatened. Berlin uses these two animal archetypes to discuss great writers and thinkers, dividing them into hedgehogs who have a single coherent, all-encompassing vision or theory, and foxes, who are more eclectic and willing to engage with and incorporate diverse sources, even when they are contradictory.
Jacob is a bit of a fox, a trickster who evades expectations, a resourceful and clever ancestor. He is only tam on the outside, but within the tents of his mind he holds complexity, possibility, and fluidity.
He may not always act in ways moral hedgehogs would prefer, but he is also uniquely among the forefathers capable of uniting all of his children (eventually, and tentatively, and still with tension, but truly) such that when we refer to the entire Jewish people, we say b’nei yisrael, the children of Israel/Jacob.
He is the first to bequeath a complex multiplicity rather than an ideological vision’s purity test (which had severed him from his brother Esau, and his father Isaac from his uncle Ishmael, and his grandfather Abraham from his great-grandparents and everyone who came before).
Each ancestor asks us questions.
Abraham asks us, What is true? What do you believe?
Sarah asks us, What is possible that you may have given up on?
Isaac asks us, What are you willing to sacrifice?
Rebecca asks us, What are you willing to endure, and why?
And Jacob asks us, What do you need to do to survive? And, what do we need to do to stay in this family and community together?
Does Jacob have all the answers? Definitely not. After his night-long wrestling session with the man or angel, he walks away limping, with a new name “Israel (god-wrestler)” that simply reminds him and us that we will always keep wrestling with ultimate questions. But that is the way of the fox, always curious, always clever, carrying the burden of overthinking, and creating eclectic and invigorating communities where the possible is imperfectly practiced.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
