T

here are Mozarts and 
there are Beethovens. 
Which are you?
I have only the most ama-
teur knowledge of music, but 
the impression 
one gets about 
Mozart is that, 
from him, music 
flowed. There 
is something 
effortless and 
effervescent 
about his com-
positions. They are not 
“sicklied o’er by the pale cast 
of thought.” He wrote at speed. 
He carried the worries of the 
world lightly.
Not so Beethoven, for 
whom it sometimes took years 
for an idea to crystallize into 
its final form, with countless 
drafts and revisions and cross-
ings-out. This was a man who 
could be angry with himself 
and with the world, for whom 
creativity was a struggle from 
which he emerged triumphant 
with work that is rarely less 
than strenuous and full of 
conflict until its final majes-
tic resolution. The ethereal, 

mystical, almost other-worldly 
quality of his last composi-
tions, the sublime late piano 
sonatas and string quartets, 
are the creations of one who 
has finally found peace after a 
life of wrestling with his own 
angels and demons.
All of this is, for me, a way 
of coming to understand 
Jacob, the man who became 
Israel, our father in faith. 
Jacob is not the most obvious 
choice of religious hero. He 
does not appear — at least on 
the surface of the biblical text 
— as a man with Abraham’s 
courage or kindness, Isaac’s 
faithfulness and self-restraint, 
Moses’ vigor and passion, 
David’s politics and poetry, or 
Isaiah’s lyricism and hope.
He was a man surrounded 
by conflict: with his brother 
Esau, his father-in-law Laban, 
his wives, Leah and Rachel, 
and his children, whose sib-
ling rivalry eventually brought 
the whole family into exile in 
Egypt. His life seems to have 
been a field of tensions.
Then there were his trans-
actions: the way he purchased 

Esau’s birthright, took his 
blessing and eventually out-
witted his wily father-in-law 
Laban. In each case, he seems 
to have won, but then his 
situation deteriorates. The 
episode in which, at Rebecca’s 
request, he dressed up as Esau 
and deceived his blind father, 
forced him to leave home and 
— as we see in this week’s par-
shah — left him traumatized 
with fear at the prospect of 
meeting Esau again. Almost 
the same deception he prac-
ticed on Isaac, he suffered at 
the hand of Laban. 
Even his escape from Laban 
might have ended in tragedy, 
had God not warned him 
not to harm Jacob (hence the 
passage in the Haggadah: “Go 
and learn what Laban the 
Aramean sought to do to our 
father Jacob”). His life as por-
trayed in the Torah seems to 
be a constant series of escapes 
from one trouble to the next.

WHO JACOB WAS
So, who and what was Jacob?
To this there are two radi-
cally different answers. There 

is the Jacob of Midrash who 
even in the womb longed for 
a synagogue, who spent his 
years as a young man study-
ing in the bet Midrash, who 
looked like Abraham and 
whose arms were like pillars of 
marble.
His motives were always 
pure. He bought Esau’s birth-
right because he could not 
bear to see Esau offering 
sacrifices (the privilege of the 
firstborn) to idols. As for his 
father’s blessing, the very rea-
son Isaac became blind in old 
age was so that this could be 
possible. Esau was the oppo-
site, a violent and mercurial 
character who had deceived 
his father into thinking he was 
ultra-pious, but who had — 
on the day he came in “tired” 
from the field — committed a 
whole series of crimes includ-
ing murder. 
This is an extreme portray-
al, but not without scriptural 
basis. Jacob is called an ish 
tam, which conveys the sense 
of simplicity, integrity and 
single-mindedness. The plain 
sense of the oracle Rebecca 
received before the twins were 
born was that “the elder will 
serve the younger.” She knew 
Jacob was the son destined 
to prevail. Besides which, as 
Maharatz Chajes says in his 
Introduction to the Aggadic 
Literature, Midrash paints 
biblical characters in moral 
black-and-white for obvious 
moral and educational rea-
sons. It is difficult to teach 
children how to behave if all 
you have to offer is a series of 
studies in ambiguity, complex-
ity and shades-of-gray.
The other Jacob, though, 
is the one we read in the 
plain sense of the text. The 
obvious question is: Why did 
the Torah choose to portray 
the third of the patriarchs in 
this way? The Torah is high-

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

The Struggle of Faith

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

60 | NOVEMBER 30 • 2023 

