This week in Parashat Vayishlach (the Vayishlach portion), we are dealing with two different people, two brothers who represent two very different visions of what life is about.
On the one hand, we have Yaakov Avinu, our patriarch, somebody we look up to, somebody who created the nation of Bnei Yisrael (Children of Israel), whose vision in life was to be an Ish Tam Yoshev Ohalim: somebody who wanted to be a simple man, not too complicated, sitting in a tent and focused on Torah, focused on Chokhmah, focused on wisdom, focused on having the right values, focused on priorities in life.
And then there was his brother, Esav harasha (the wicked one), who was all about the physical. He was Yodea Tzayid Ish Sadeh, somebody who knew, who was an expert in trapping animals, a man of the field—not somebody who was in the tent, but somebody who was a man of the field, a man of the physical.
It is basically a matchup between the physical and the spiritual. The physical is represented by Esav, who was all about Olam HaZeh (this world), the man who rejected the Bechorah, the birthright, the man who said, “I’m going to die one day. I don’t need the Bechorah; I don’t need the birthright. I can’t envision a future for myself, my own neshama (soul), or for my children and grandchildren, my family ahead of me.”
And then you had Yaakov Avinu, a man who was all about living a legacy, all about creating a name for himself through a family—the 12 Shevatim (tribes), who would be able to live the life Yaakov Avinu thought was in line with what Hashem wanted. It was a matchup of two different visions, two different priorities for what they wanted out of life.
Eventually, after all these years, Yaakov Avinu had been far away, in Lavan’s house, studying in Yeshivat Shem Va'Ever, and all those years had finally passed. The Pasuk (verse) tells us that Yaakov and Esav are about to reconcile. They are about to see each other once again after all these years.
Right away, Yaakov Avinu knows what he has to do. He jumps right into preparing for this encounter and approaches Hashem with Tefillah (prayer). The commentaries say he did a few different things, but Yaakov Avinu jumped right into Tefillah. He asked Hashem, “Hashem, my God, God of my fathers, please, please help me. Save me from my brother. Save me from Esav.”
That is the power of Tefillah. Whenever a Jew is in trouble, whenever he is going through turmoil in his life, he lifts his hands, or her hands, to the Shamayim (heavens) and calls out to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. That is the way the Jewish people fight. That is the way the Jewish people attain Yeshuot, redemption in their life. They turn to Hashem and really understand that everything comes from Hashem.
Then we come to the encounter, where they do get together. There is a whole process of who goes first and who bows down to Esav, and this and that. Then Yaakov and Esav themselves get together. They are face to face. What we would expect at this time is a war. Esav pulls out his sword, Yaakov’s children come to fight, and there is a whole melee, a whole war going on.
But something very strange happens, says the Torah. The Pasuk says Esav ran to greet Yaakov Avinu. He embraced him, hugged him, and fell on Yaakov’s neck. Then—and this is going to be an important word—he kissed him. Esav kissed Yaakov, and they cried. Both of them cried together. It was a strange encounter, something we would not expect whatsoever.
As we said, we would expect a major fight. Esav was accusing Yaakov of taking the Berachot (blessings) that were rightfully his. The last time they were together, Esav swore he was going to find Yaakov and kill him. He was looking for bloodshed; he wanted him dead. And all of a sudden, they see each other, embrace, hug, and kiss. What is going on here?
Rashi notices something very strange right on top of the word Vayishakehu (he kissed him). This is something we do not often have in the Torah: dots right on top of that word. You open up the Torah, see all the letters, and all of a sudden there is this word, Vayishakehu, with a little mini dot on top of every single letter. What is going on here?
Rashi notices this and says, “Nakud alav.” There are nekudot, little dots, on top of every part of this word. Whenever there are nekudot on top of a word, it is basically telling us that something is going on deep beneath the surface. Something is being told to us, the reader, that we have to think about. What is going on here? What is happening? What is the Torah alluding to?
They quote the Midrash (rabbinic teaching), which gives a few different interpretations of what is going on here. We all know the famous Midrash that talks about what Esav tried to do. The Midrash we learned growing up tells us that Esav ran to Yaakov Avinu, and when it says he fell on his neck, he fell on Yaakov’s neck, what did he try to do? He tried to bite his neck. He tried to bite the neck of Yaakov Avinu. He did not try to kiss him; he actually tried to bite his neck. And then Hashem made a miracle, says the Midrash: Yaakov Avinu’s neck turned into shayish, marble, and Esav’s teeth cracked. The teeth cracked. Esav’s teeth cracked.
The Midrash tells us that he did not come to kiss Yaakov Avinu. The word was neshika, a kiss. Rather, Lenashcho: he came to bite him. He came to bite him right under the neck and kill him. Then Yaakov Avinu’s neck turned into marble, and the teeth of that rasha were broken. Yaakov’s neck, Esav’s teeth—they were broken by Yaakov Avinu. That is what happened. That is why there are nekudot, dots on top of that word, and that is why there is a similarity between those words.
The Pasuk says he gave him a neshika, a kiss. But the Midrash says, “No, no, it wasn’t a neshika; rather, it was a neshicha. It was a bite.”
The Sfat Emet is very bothered by this whole back-and-forth about the word. There are dots—what is going on here? If you want to tell me that what really happened was a bite, why does the Pasuk not simply tell us there was a neshicha, that there was a bite? If you want to tell me it was a kiss, that it was a neshika, then have the word there simply, and do not put dots on top of it. That is the Sfat Emet’s question: what is going on here?
He answers beautifully. You have to think about what was going through Esav’s mind at that point in time. Even though Esav was a wicked man, even though he lived only for this world and not for the next world, he did recognize the power of Tefillah. Imagine that. Esav harasha, whom the Pasuk says had 400 warriors walking with him to battle Yaakov—he finds that word. The Yaakov Avinu, the Yaakov Avinu who prayed a powerful Tefillah to Hashem: Hatzileni Na, Miyad Achi, Miyad Esav. Save me. From the hands of my brother. From the hands of Esav. He heard that Yaakov Avinu had prayed this, and what does Esav start to think? “I can’t win. Yaakov prayed. Yaakov beseeched Hashem. Game over for me. I can’t win. There’s nothing I can do at this point to make things happen, because Tefillah actually works.”
So Esav is stuck in a bit of a situation now. He does not know what to do. He wanted to destroy, to physically annihilate Yaakov and the Shevatim, but he is stuck in a situation where he no longer has the ability to do that. The Tefillah made an impact. If he goes there to fight, he and his whole team are going to be wiped out, and that is the end of the road for Esav.
So Esav starts to think: “How am I going to destroy Yaakov Avinu? What am I going to do? If I can’t beat him through physically fighting with him, what do I need to attempt to do? I need to try to sever the relationship Yaakov has with Hashem. If Hashem is acting as a force field of protection around Yaakov Avinu, I have to break that force field in order to eventually penetrate and destroy Yaakov Avinu. If Hashem is with him, I’m not going to be able to do anything.”
And how does Esav strategize to destroy Yaakov Avinu? He realizes he cannot destroy him through a bite. He cannot destroy him through physical attacks anymore. But what can he do? He can destroy him through a kiss, through closeness, by being one together with him, and eventually allowing the values he stands for to seep into Yaakov’s camp, slowly but surely assimilating his opinions and views. Then he can hope for the breakdown of all those great values of Avraham, passed down to Yitzchak, then to Yaakov, and then to the Shevatim.
He hoped to get so close to them that he would influence them in a negative way, to focus more on this world as opposed to the next world. That was Esav’s plan to destroy Yaakov Avinu. And that, says the Sfat Emet, is what the Pasuk means when it says it was a kiss that was really a bite.
We think about it: Was it a kiss? Was it a bite? What was going on here? The Sfat Emet answers that sometimes the worst kind of bite from an Esav is not the bite itself, which causes physical damage, but the symbolic kiss of closeness, togetherness, and oneness—the kind of closeness with the outside world that we should try to reject. That was Esav’s strategy. He wanted to get close and be friendly with him: “I want to be your brother. I want to be one with you.”
And that is what Yaakov Avinu was praying for, by the way, when he said those words. The commentaries all ask: Why use those two phrases? When he prayed to Hashem, why not simply say, “Save me from the hand of Esav”? Why does he have to say, “From the hand of my brother”? Isn’t that obvious? If it is from Esav, it is also from the hands of your brother. It is one and the same.
The rabbis answer that Yaakov Avinu was simply telling Hashem in his prayer, “Don’t only save me from the physical danger of Esav. Save me from him wanting to be my brother, from him wanting to be close to me and influencing me and negatively impacting me.” He was praying, “Please keep him away. I don’t want to be around him. If I’m around him, we’re going to have problems.”
And that is eventually what Esav tells him. The passage says that after the whole encounter, Esav tells Yaakov, “Yaakov, let’s go, you and I, together. Let’s be brothers again. Let’s be you and me. We’ll travel as one. Let’s go and be united.”
And what does Yaakov answer him? Very, very smart. You can understand deeply what he is talking about. He tells Esav, “My master, I can’t travel together with you. I can’t have our camps go as one.” Why? The children are frail; the children are weak. On the Pshat (plain meaning) level, he is really telling him that the children cannot march so fast and cannot go with his group, which is going to be moving at rapid speed. So he cannot do it physically. But on a deeper level, what is Yaakov really telling Esav? “The children are too weak, and I’m nervous that if we travel together with you, they’re going to be influenced by your evil way, Esav. They’re going to become assimilated into your path, into your derech (path). I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”
So he says, “You go ahead. One day I’ll meet up with you. One day I’ll meet up with you. One day. But I cannot go together with you because I’m nervous about what’s going to happen.” That is the idea, the interplay between the kiss that was a bite. It was a neshika that was a neshicha. The damage a bite can cause sometimes can be so much worse when it is a kiss from the outside world.
I think that is the primary test we deal with nowadays. Of course, unfortunately, we see a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism going on right now—in the colleges, with BDS, anti-Israel activity, and pro-Palestine activity, and everything that comes with that. The level of fear of the bite out there is profound, and I do not want to minimize that whatsoever. There is definitely a real fear of being beaten up and attacked, and everything that has been going on in the last year of the news cycle we have seen post-October 7th and afterwards. The Jewish people are under physical attack as a nation, without question.
At the same time, most of us are not in that battle right now. We are living in our comfortable homes in Brooklyn, in Deal, in the city, living our lives with our friends and family, involved in the community, doing everything we are doing. The physical fight, the bite of Esav, is not really being dealt with. We are not being attacked individually; we do not feel that. But what we have to be much more on guard for is not that bite, but the kiss of culture, the kiss of Esav all around us, begging us: “Throw your Torah values away. Throw away these values that have been given to you for 18 years of your life, while you were in yeshiva, while you were in school, while you were with your families, while you were in your community synagogues. Everything you have been given—get rid of it and let yourself become immersed in the outside world. Be open-minded. Be cultured. Be somebody who is involved in general society.”
That is what we are hearing, and it happens a lot of times in very subtle ways. Very subtle ways. Through the media, through books, through music, through movies, through anything like that, anti-Torah values can slowly but surely penetrate your mind. And that is a much more dangerous kind of danger to the Jewish people, because we do not even see it coming. We do not even see it. To us, it is not even out there. We do not even acknowledge that there is a war going on. We do not even acknowledge that we have a different view, and that we cannot allow these other values to penetrate the holy neshama we have been safeguarding for all these years. That is the scary part.
Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, in Pachad Yitzchak, talks about this danger. We are not going to get too much into it now with Hanukkah (Festival of Dedication). It is definitely the war of Hanukkah. Maybe we will talk about that next time. The difference is basically between somebody coming in, running in lo aleinu (God forbid) with a gun and trying to kill people—an obvious danger, and the damage he could do is of course tragic. But it is limited in scope. It could hurt lo aleinu, a few people. Once that is wiped out, it is over.
The damage that can be done by a culture war that undoes the Torah’s values is much deeper, and it uproots a lot more of what we have, because we do not even realize it until it is too late. It is like a spy in the government. He is wearing a suit and tie; he looks nice. Everything on the surface looks okay. But the chaos he has caused in the back rooms of the government is crazy, insurmountable. You cannot overcome that type of challenge. That is the mashal (parable), and that is really what we have to be very aware of.
I would say that is the first step in the battle: being aware that I have a holy neshama within me that Hashem implanted in my body, and that I have to be very careful to safeguard it. Whatever I involve myself in is automatically going to be mashpiyah. It is going to affect in some way, shape, or form the neshama that I have.
I once heard somebody say, “We are simply a sum of our experiences.” Sum—if all you honor students are adding things up—we simply are. Our views, our perspectives, everything we do, are a combination, an adding together of every experience we have in our life, everything that goes into us and becomes part of ourself, becomes part of who we are as a people.
That is why we should not have this wholesale taking in of everything that is going on in the world. Just because it is going on in the world, in the news, and they see it here does not mean it fits with the perspective of who we are as Torah people. We have to have the ability to be a Yaakov Avinu. Yaakov Avinu lived his life focused on his family, focused on perpetuating the Mesorah—the traditions he had received from his parents and grandparents, passing them on to the next generation and building beautiful, happy, proud Jewish families.
That is the perspective we have of creating beautiful families in the ways of our community and the way of our tradition. Sometimes that gets confusing because of the push and pull, and we do not know what or who, and because of the confusing nature of the outside world. That is our test. That is our Nisayon (test) in this generation.
The more we are exposed and the more we are out there, and the more the outside world feels unthreatening—which a lot of times it does—the more we may not realize there is a struggle out there in the first place. That is really the test of our generation.
For people involved in the city, in commerce, in business, and in the culture of the outside world, not all of it is negative, God forbid. There is a lot you can gain from being open and exposed and looking. But if you allow it all to seep in, unfiltered, without having some understanding and awareness of who you are—“I am a holy neshama. I am a holy neshama”—that could cause problems.
The first step, like we said, is simply being aware. Aware that there is something out there that does not fit with who I am. And you will start to see yourself slowly saying, “You know what? Maybe that’s not for me. Maybe I don’t want to see that. Maybe I don’t want to read that. Maybe that idea is not on par. It doesn’t fit with my values.” And it can come in all different ways.
And that is the Tefillah. Just like Yaakov Avinu prayed to Hashem, we pray to Hashem with our whole heart: “Hashem, we don’t only pray that. Of course, Hashem, save us from and the brutal murderers out there, people who are anti-Semitic and trying to destroy who we are as a people, trying to destroy the nation of Israel. Our holy soldiers are fighting them. Of course, save us from that. But also, save me from my brother. Save me from thinking that whatever is out there is the same as me. It’s all war. It’s all good. It’s all one. We’re all the same. We’re all family. Hashem, please save us all.”
We go into this beautiful month of Kislev, the month of light, the month of Hanukkah, the month when we realize that the Jewish people are unique and the Jewish people will defeat all of the Hashmonaim (Hasmoneans). And we will go into it with complete victory.