This week’s parsha tells some famous stories starting with Isaac who is in red the color associated with him in the Kabbalah sephirot of Gevura – restraint, discipline; and here we also have the struggle of the two brothers – Jacob and Esau, a struggle of commitment and learning and expansion vs selfishness and destructive behavior. A struggle that we all have inside us.
The seven Aliyahs of Toldot
top right – Isaac is spoken to by Hashem saying his descendants will survive. Rebecca who has been barren for 20 years now conceives and inside her womb the two boys struggle as to who will be born first. Esau emerges and turns into a hunter and killer and trades his holy spiritual birth rights to Jacob for a bowl of beans.
top left – Isaac says his wife is his sister to ward off his being killed by Ambimelech who would do that to get her. But through a window he sees them intimate and realizes he has been deceived.
top center – Abimelech makes a deal with Isaac who is successful with many herds, but they struggle over water wells formerly built by his father Abraham which Isaac now repairs.
bottom right – Hashem once more communicates good futures to the sleeping Isaac who then builds an altar to Hashem, and his people make peace with Abimelech,
bottom left – Isaac who is now old and blind is deceived by Rebecca wanting the more appropriate son Jacob to get the father’s blessings. Essau marries women from idolatrous tribes.
bottom center – Esau then asks for his own blessing which he receives but it is less than his brother’s and in anger he is ready to kill Jacob who is told by his mother to flee.
center center – Esau now marries another woman, a daughter of Ishmael, Isaac’s half-brother. Jacob leaves home.
And from my father Rabbi Henry E Kagan:
