Chasing Dreams, Running from Lies

I went to an orthodox shul this Shabbat for a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. The Torah reading started with Genesis 28:10 And Jacob left Beer Sheva, and he went to Haran. During the Dvar Torah, the rabbi asked the famous question, why are we told that he left one place and went to another? He answered himself by quoting Rashi and saying that he followed his dream. This interpretation puzzled me, because I know that Jacob was fleeing from his angry brother Esav who he had just cheated out of his birthright and father’s blessing. It is clear why Jacob was leaving Beer Sheva, but why was Rashi understanding that he was chasing a dream?
My first mistake was taking this rabbi at face value. I went home to find the source of his reference and discovered what Rashi really had to say about the two phrases of this verse. “And Jacob left. Scripture had only to write: “And Jacob went to Haran.” Why did it mention his departure? But this tells [us] that the departure of a righteous man from a place makes an impression, for while the righteous man is in the city, he is its beauty, he is its splendor, he is its majesty. When he departs from there, its beauty has departed, its splendor has departed, its majesty has departed…and he went to Haran. He left in order to go to Haran. — [From Gen. Rabbah 68:8,]” Chasing a dream was not Rashi’s idea, not even later when he interprets Jacob’s dream of the ladder. But this is not uncommon practice among scholars who at times mistakenly attribute citations to the wrong people.
With no reason, at the time, to question the rabbi about Rashi, I asked him during the luncheon if Rashi was just trying to make Jacob better than his trickery towards his brother let on. I explained that the rabbis in the Talmud do this later when they reinterpret Genesis 33:4 “Esav ran to meet him [Jacob], and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept.” In my example, which I learned from Rabbi Dov Taylor, with whom I work, the rabbi’s tell us to change a letter in the Hebrew word for kiss to make the meaning “bite,” as if to show that Esav was the evil brother who takes revenge on Jacob.
What I was trying to show is that it is common that even scholars use their position of community leadership to guide in us to read the world as they do. This is a theme I always come back to; that we read and write the world, each of us in our own way. It is an idea that comes from Paolo Freire and Donaldo Mercado, and one at the center of my belief about the world. Each of us has a personal epistemology which guides how we understand things and, thus, how we act in the world.
The rabbi answered me in one of the uglier ways possible. He said that it was clear from scripture that Esav hated his birthright, Genesis 25:33, “And Esau said: 'Behold, I am at the point to die; and what profit shall the birthright do to me?” which was a bad argument on his part, but I didn’t push him. And then he said that Esav wanted to kill his father and brother, Genesis 27:41, “And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him [Jacob]. And Esau said in his heart: 'Let the days of mourning for my father be at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.” Also a bad argument, for two reasons. Esav never said he wanted to kill his father. If anything, he respected his father wanted to wait for him to die before he would take revenge on Jacob. And he had good reason to be angry at Jacob, even though the peace educator in me says that there is no justification for murder. But the rabbi continued, “Esav was a terrorist and a murderer. We need to call an Arafat by his name.”
Sometimes there are no better words than the colloquial “What the fuck?” Is he crazy? Did I just hear the spiritual leader of a congregation of my people compare Esav to Arafat? But of course I did. The way these guys read and write the world is bizarre and twisted, and I should be glad to not understand them. I just hate that they do it in the name of our tradition.