Was Esau wicked?
Hello Rabbi!
An innocent question that occurred to me yesterday. In the Torah’s plain language, it doesn’t seem that Esau was overly wicked. And technically, all the bad things he did were precisely because of the “sting” that the fathers (Jacob) and mothers (Rebekah) organized against him…
Like, I don’t feel like in the Torah’s plain language, Esau was as wicked as Chazal describes him in the midrashim…
Am I wrong? What do you think, Rabbi?
Thank you very much!
A well-known and familiar feeling. And indeed true.
Someone who plans to murder his brother is still evil, even if he is born evil.
If I am not mistaken, it was the Mahar”tz Hayut who spoke about the purpose of the sages” lectures in the agdadahs on the Bible being to convey educational messages, and therefore the characters will be depicted in black and white, with clear contrasts to reinforce the idea-morality of reason that they want to convey.
In other words, to present a normative truth in order to conclude what is appropriate and less of a factual description of what happened in reality.
From the perspective of the text, Esau seems more like an impulsive person who acts on momentary emotion and decides in a frantic and hasty manner without thinking too much about things, both in selling the birthright and in expressing the desire to kill Jacob, less of an evil murderer but more of a complex person, and on the contrary, the wording and description of the verses at the moment of the discovery of the theft of the blessing create in the reader an identification directed towards Esau.
He wanted to kill Jacob, but the dung was a blessing.
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