Eisav Receives the 'Power of the Hand'

Yaakov Avinu received the blessings and left the room. A moment later, Eisav arrived and entered. He turned to his father Yitzchak and said, “Father, I have brought you food.”

Yitzchak was filled with bewilderment. “Who, then, was it who brought me food and received the blessings?” Then he turned to Eisav and said, “Alas, Eisav — your brother Yaakov has already been here, and he has received all the blessings.”

A tear fell from Eisav’s eyes, and he began to cry and plead: “Bless me too, my father!” (Bereishit 27:34). Yitzchak then blessed him: “Behold, from the fatness of the earth shall be your dwelling, and from the dew of the heavens above. By your sword you shall live, and your brother you shall serve; and it shall be, when you are aggrieved, you shall cast off his yoke from upon your neck” (Bereishit 27:39–40).

Through this blessing, Yitzchak Avinu gave Eisav the power of the sword, and from that moment, the struggle between Yaakov and Eisav began — the struggle between Yaakov’s power of Torah and Eisav’s power of the sword.

This is how Chazal expound the verse, “The voice is the voice of Yaakov, but the hands are the hands of Eisav” (ibid., v. 22): the struggle between them would be a struggle between Torah and physical force.

The Midrash states (Bereishit Rabbah 65:20):

Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: No philosophers ever arose in the world like Bilaam son of Beor and Avnimos HaGardi. All the nations gathered before Avnimos HaGardi and asked: “Can we defeat the Jewish people?”

He answered them: “Go around to their synagogues and study halls. If you find children there chirping with their voices in Torah, you cannot overcome them. For this is what their father promised them when he said, ‘The voice is the voice of Yaakov’ — when the voice of Yaakov is found in the synagogues, the hands are not the hands of Eisav. But if not, then ‘the hands are the hands of Eisav,’ and you can overcome them.”

The holy Rabbi Yosef Chaim, of blessed memory, raises the following question in Ben Ish Chai (Derashot, Parashat Beha’alotcha): Since Yitzchak blessed Eisav with the sword, the verse should have linked Yaakov’s voice with Eisav’s sword, teaching that when “the voice is the voice of Yaakov,” Eisav cannot use his sword. Why, then, does the verse link Yaakov’s voice specifically with Eisav’s hands?

He answers that, in truth, the primary blessing Eisav received was the power of the hands, not the sword itself. After all, a sword without a hand to hold it is worthless. Since Eisav’s true power lies in the hands, Yaakov pleaded, “Rescue me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Eisav” (Bereishit 32:12).

We will explain this idea further.