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This is the story of Issac- but that's not quite right.

This portion is about a series of funny little tricks Issac's son Jacob pulls.

We open this portion from Genesis with the birth of Jacob and Esau and immediately establish that mom and dad are playing favorites, and then follow that up with Esau selling Jacob his birthright via the first of several funny little tricks. It's all framed around Esau coming home starving and asking Jacob for soup, but the sages don't agree whether the soup was exchanged for the birthright or incidental to the situation.
It's important to know that everything to do with Jacob and Esau's names involves some sort of pun
Genesis 25:30
This is followed by a famine occurring and G-d telling Issac not to go to Egypt like his father. Instead, he stays with Abimilech and the philistines and for the third time we get one of the patriarchs lying about their wife being their sister. This keeps happening. And further, this is the second time they've done this with the same king. This gets sorted out, Issac grows wealthy, they push him out of the land because he's too wealthy, and then they make peace.

We then see the second funny little trick when Rebekah and Jacob trick Issac into giving his innermost blessing to Jacob rather than Esau, followed by the comedy beat of Esau walking into the room to get his blessing immediately after, and then a lot of lamenting when Issac makes it very clear that he doesn't have any other blessings for Esau and has to do a blessing about swords for him. It's all very messy and Esau decides he's going to murder Jacob the moment their dad dies, so Rebekah gets him to go back to Issac's family to find a wife1.

Jokes about gulping down red stuff aside, this portion is interesting just in how unflattering it all is, even with the sages attempting to explain to varying degrees how culpable Issac is or isn't, or the extent to which G-d was involved in making this happen versus this being what naturally falls out of a family playing favorites against each other and also there's a prophecy in the background[^2]. It's hard to make a read off of as well because, at least at this point, not much has actually been said about Jacob and Esau that isn't us knowing future events and the sages working backwards to explicate why these things happened the way they did. It's very... why did it have to turn out like this?

Anyways, Rashi has some interesting stuff to say here about mourning, lentils, and grieving
rashi lentils
There's also this interesting bit from Rashi about vegetables and two righteous guys that we didn't quite get-
rashi lettuce and radishes
-and then we followed up on the cited bit of talmud and learned some fascinating facts about the dangers of large cucumbers
talmud on cucumbers

😳
swallowing

see yall next week
silly little tricks


  1. those familiar with the story of jacob and his wives will quickly identify that jacob is about to be on the receiving end of an exciting new funny little trick in the next portion
    {^2]: ibn ezra makes an interesting distinction here between prophets who bring commandments from g-d, who as a matter of course cannot lie; and prophets who predict the future, who can lie a little bit, sometimes


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