Sixth Reading: It Has to be Jacob
“I blessed him [Jacob]—he should be blessed”
What is lenient judgment?
Isaac and Rebeccah have the same goal: bringing the Redemption. But how it will happen and how long it will take? Rebeccah is not locked onto one specific plan. The Redemption can come one way or another; it can take this amount of time or a different amount of time. You need a lot of patience. This is still judgment, but it is “lenient judgment” (דִּינָא רַפְיָא).
Since we said earlier that we spread Chassidut, let’s return to Abraham’s mindset. It’s not enough just to say Chassidut in the previous generations style. We have to make sure it fits this generation. In the same way that the Rebbe used the word campaigns (he loved the army in Eretz Yisrael, so he adopted words from its jargon), we also like doing the same thing. Why does Isaac want to bless Esau and why does Rebeccah want to bless Jacob?
The answer is that Isaac wants a knockout blow. He wants to KO reality. Isaac is all about harsh judgment, and he imagines that the power of the blessings he will give Esau will be so great that reality—Esau represents reality—with one punch will be knocked out. But Rebeccah knows that it just will not work. It is a nice idea Isaac has, but it is not realistic. Recently, it was written in the papers regarding Iran, whether to strike them or not. One of the papers read “Knock-out, and it will not be over.” That is Rebeccah’s argument. Both she and Isaac want to strike reality really hard, the only question is whether it will end with that (which is what Isaac thinks) or whether it will not, in which case you find yourself in a problem, because reality will strike you back, like a boomerang. This is very relevant to our policy question today. Jacob is not about knockouts at all. He is about slow and steady toil, the service of clarification.
In the end, thank God, it was Jacob who received the blessings and the incredible power that came with them. And even though Isaac failed to bless Esau, who he thought was the natural choice to use such great power, he agrees to the result and says, “And he [Jacob] will be blessed.” He understands retroactively that his plan would not have worked properly, and that using Esau could not change the fact that Redemption would take a long time. Even if Esau had received the blessings, reality would not have ended today and God would not have been revealed.
The word, “will be” (יִהְיֶה) alludes to the famous verse, “On that day, God will be One and His Name will be One” (אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד הוה-י יִהְיֶה הַהוּא בַּיּוֹם).
Thus, the moral of our entire parashah is about how to actually bring Mashiach. According to what we learned, we have to give this quite a lot of thought. The Lubavitcher Rebbe knew all that we have explained. What then does his famous call, “Mashiach Now” mean? It would seem that the Rebbe was advocating for Isaac’s harsh judgment.
The difference is that in our times, the Rebbe felt that Esau was already prepared. He is ready to play a part in the Redemption, and so, he is expecting a Knock-out blow, and we must learn from him. We could simply say that in the patriarch’s generation, it was still not the right time to give reality the punch, but now it is. Still, even with this argument in place, it does not sound like the Rebbe would advocate throwing a powerful punch at reality. The Rebbe’s mode of action was to use much more sweetness and to bring about the hoped for change using peaceful ways, etc.
(from a lecture given on the 28th of Cheshvan 5773)
