Rapprochement is a Jewish Value - Vayyishlaḥ 5786

What Ya'aqov and Esav can teach us today

Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday. Everybody gets some time off from work, and we spend the time with family and friends sharing a great meal. Yes, I’m a vegetarian, so no turkey for me, but that simply opens up many more possibilities for the meal. And in some ways, it is more enjoyable than the many Jewish yamim tovim, festival holidays when we have family meals, because on Thanksgiving I can get in the car and travel to my sister’s home, or somewhere else, while of course I do not travel on Shabbat and Yom Tov, in accordance with halakhah / Jewish law.

I have begun to notice a curious thing about Thanksgiving in the last several years: that prior to the holiday, I encounter articles and video clips and radio pieces (e.g. this NPR podcast) about how to have conversations with your family members when you know that you disagree about politics or current events or social issues. And while I’m always interested to hear the advice given, I must say that it makes me really sad that anybody needs to be offering this advice in the first place. And, of course, as your pastor, I have heard stories from some of you about how you can no longer have holiday meals with some cousin or sister-in-law or uncle because you simply cannot have a conversation with them. And this is a truly awful situation.

Why is this happening? Were there not disagreements in the past? Have we become so hardened in our own personal beliefs, so intolerant of those with whom we differ, that we cannot even share a meal together?

I must say that I am thinking about this challenge quite a bit right now in particular, not only because of Thanksgiving. I have recently found myself involved in a handful of interfaith initiatives:

• a long-standing friendship and extended theological discussion with Rev. Canon Natalie Hall and the Church of the Redeemer, which hosted our local interfaith Thanksgiving service two weeks ago;

• an easygoing occasional partnership with representatives of the local Hindu community, with whom we hope to hold a joint Holi/Purim event in the beginning of March;

• and an intense, thoughtful conversation between Jewish and Presbyterian clergy, precipitated by recent events involving Micaiah Collins, the daughter of a local Presbyterian minister who was indicted in the spring for apparently intending to bomb Jewish buildings, and having procured explosives and tested them.

At a joint Hindu-Jewish music program, June 2025

This is all new to me, and even though I grew up in a very not-Jewish place, surrounded by Protestant and Catholic friends and neighbors, I never really thought of interfaith work as being a primary pursuit of my rabbinate. As it turns out, we have much to learn from these initiatives, not only about our non-Jewish colleagues, but of course about the Jewish world.

Just as we learn to have interfaith conversations, which can occasionally be difficult, we must also learn to have difficult internal conversations, with our fellow Jews and of course members of our family.

Disagreement, of course, is a standard feature of Judaism. Two millennia before there were Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Haredi, and secular Jews, there were Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, and probably other factions lost to history. And even before that, there were the schools of Hillel and Shammai, who disagreed on many points within Jewish law, and even so, the Talmud tells us, still managed to marry into each other’s families (BT Yevamot 14a). Resh Lakish, one of the more colorful figures in the pages of Talmud, reads the mitzvah of not cutting oneself (Devarim / Deuteronomy 14:1, apparently an ancient idolatrous practice) not about one’s own body, but rather about not cutting ourselves into factions.

And yet, we somehow seem to be so talented at doing exactly that. The Jewish encounter with modernity has brought us new challenges in this regard: halakhic disputes of all kinds, the ever-popular controversy over who is a Jew, and of course the latest challenge of Jewish anti-Zionism.

But we also have a talent for rapprochement. In fact, what we read this morning in Parashat Vayyishlaḥ describes a scene that is the greatest reconciliation in the Torah: that of Ya’aqov and Esav. And the fact that it takes place in the context of Ya’aqov’s second angelic encounter, when he is given the name Yisrael, suggests that this particular moment is in fact fundamental to who we are as a people. Ya’aqov works to regain Esav’s favor by sending him tribute gifts, and even though he is prepared for the possibility that Esav is still angry and is coming with 400 men prepared to slaughter Ya’aqov and his family, he nonetheless rises to the challenge of estrangement and past wrongs to try his darnedest to make this work out better for all concerned.

And the lesson to us is clear: family is essential, and repairing relationships is essential, even when we do not see eye-to-eye, even when there are hurt feelings, even when a fight might break out at any moment.

Just before I was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I almost failed a class, a required course in my last semester. And frankly, I deserved it. I was busy thinking about other things that semester, and midrash halakhah (that is, midrashim that teach a halakhic lesson rather than a personal lesson) was simply not high on my list of priorities. My professor, the sweetest man I had as a teacher at JTS, was Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, and I actually really upset him in the process of groveling for a passing grade and having a conversation with the dean to ensure that I would actually be able to be ordained. Because I really needed to be ordained. I think I passed the class with a C-.

And then, it so happened that we were both at morning minyan at the Women’s League Seminary Synagogue one Thursday morning during finals week, and I was given an aliyah. And when I came down from the bimah, Rabbi Diamond made a point of coming over to me and enthusiastically pumping my hand while offering a hearty Yishar Koaḥ! I was taken aback. I had figured that he would never bother talking to me again, as I was just one more annoying rabbinical student who had no abiding interest in midrash halakhah. But there he was, right in my face, smiling and extending to me an opening, and a joyful one at that.

You may have heard that the Oxford University Press, the folks who publish the Oxford English Dictionary, declared “rage bait” to be the Word of the Year. What is rage bait? Their definition is, “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive.” That is, you’re scrolling through Facebook or X or Instagram, or even the online Post-Gazette, and you encounter something that is tailored by the algorithm just for you, to make you upset. And we are surrounded by this stuff all the time now.

And it takes real work not to be sucked into that rage vortex. But perhaps one of the best things we can do as Jews and as citizens of these United States, is to not let rage guide us. Because your rage begets somebody else’s rage. Because right or left, Jewish or non-Jewish, pro- or anti-, these are all traps that we are increasingly inclined to fall into.

And we have to be committed to living together. To having polite conversations, and sometimes difficult ones. To thinking not only about our own goals and motivations, but also those of the people with whom we not just disagree, but whom we know have opinions that are in direct opposition to our own. It is up to us not to feed the rage trolls, but rather to take the high road, and smile and be nice and even occasionally offer a Yishar Koaḥ.

In the encounter between Ya’aqov and Esav, Ya’aqov bowed low to the ground seven times to his brother, and Esav ran to greet him, and they embraced and cried. It could not have been an easy moment for either of them. One midrash from Avot deRabbi Natan teaches us that “everything Esav ever did was motivated by hatred, except for this one occasion, which was motivated by love.” The rapprochement succeeds; they are brothers once again.

The interfaith initiatives are slow and measured, and of course we tend to lean into points of agreement rather than disagreement. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes in his magnificent work from 2002, The Dignity of Difference,

Often, when religious leaders meet and talk, the emphasis is on similarities and commonalities, as if the differences between faiths were superficial and trivial. That is not, however, what comes to the fore at times of conflict. It is then that what seem to an outsider to be minor variations take on immense significance, dividing neighbourhoods and turning erstwhile friends into enemies… We need… not only a theology of commonality–of the universals of mankind–but also a theology of difference… why God asks us to respect the freedom and dignity of those not like us.

Rabbi Sacks is urging us to look higher than what Freud called, “the narcissism of small differences.” Rather, we should seek out that holy spark in all of those around us, even that one crazy uncle from whom nobody wants to elicit an opinion of any kind.

So how might we move forward? By leaning into family, community, friends, neighbors, and not cutting ourselves off from one another; by remembering the reconciliation of Ya’aqov and Esav. By avoiding the rage. By building relationships with those with whom we disagree. By seeking out that theology of difference of which Rabbi Sacks speaks.

We have everything to lose by not doing so.