Our patriarchs and matriarchs were perfectly righteous. In the words of the Tanya, “Throughout their lives they sanctified their every limb to serve exclusively as a ‘chariot’ for the implementation of G‑d’s will.”
Yet, when our matriarch Rivkah was pregnant with twins, “the children struggled within her.”
Rashi explains, “When she passed the Torah study hall of Shem and Eiver, Yaakov struggled to emerge, and when she passed places of idolatry, Eisav struggled to emerge.” How was Eisav, the child of the saintly Yitzchak and Rivkah, already so innately attracted to idol worship when he was but a fetus in his mother’s womb, causing him to stir each time she passed a house of idolatry?
Our Sages tell us that the deeds and lives of our patriarchs and matriarchs paved the way for their descendants, the Jewish people, to fulfill their destiny.
One aspect of this legacy is that through their unassailable commitment to G‑d, our forefathers endowed every Jew with an inner strength of devotion to G‑d. With this strength, a Jew can overcome any challenge to his Jewishness—be it adversity from the outside, or his personal struggles from within.
Yitzchak and Rivkah themselves were perfectly righteous, but because the path to G‑dliness for some of their descendants would involve struggling with temptation, the legacy of Yitzchak and Rivkah also includes a natural inclination towards sin—in order to overcome it. They thus bore not only Yaakov, whose passions were entirely holy and pure, but also Eisav, who was born with an allure to sin and the inner strength to overcome it.
In fact, the Zohar states that as a child, Eisav, like Yaakov, excelled in the education he received from his grandfather Avraham—“Avraham’s merit assisted and caused them to thrive, training them in the observance of mitzvos.”
Undeniably, Eisav made the wrong choices as an adult. But until he went off on his own path, Eisav’s attraction to idolatry was simply a natural part of being Yitzchak’s child and Avraham’s disciple: he exemplified the Jew who is born to struggle and is naturally endowed with the strength it takes to win.
—Likkutei Sichos, vol. 20, pp. 109–113
