PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5770)
DOES THE SOUL SURVIVE?
“And Esau said, I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?”
(Genesis 25:32)
I may be a descendent of Jacob but I have always tried to understand Esau. Why would a man sell his birthright for a bowl of soup? I realize that Esau represents an approach to life common today – call it the secular, materialist approach. All that exists is this material world of stuff. As long as we are alive we might as well fulfill our appetites. For when we die, we are gone and there is nothing more. So given a choice between an enjoyable bowl of soup today and some unknown spiritual future, grab the soup.
This is precisely how many people live. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” Life is about fulfilling our appetites in this world. According to the materialistic view of reality, our soul is simply neural activity in the brain. When our brain dies, our soul dies. There is nothing more. So we might as well enjoy that bowl of soup, that money, that sexual gratification, whatever pleasure life sends our way, now. There is no greater spiritual reality.
Jacob on the other hand does represent a greater spiritual reality. Tradition teaches that while Esau was out hunting, Jacob was in the tent learning. Perhaps Jacob believed that the soul comes into this world with a greater mission than simply enjoying whatever the appetite places before it. Perhaps, as the Rabbis would someday teach, the soul must one day give an accounting. Did it accomplish in this world what God sent it into this world to do? Is the soul more than a material reality? Does it have some spiritual purpose? And does the soul survive death?
I have been doing research on this question for a literature class. I see three possibilities. Possibility #1) the soul is merely brain activity, and when the brain dies, the soul dies. We can call this the classical materialistic point of view. Possibility #2) the soul has an existence beyond the brain, and when the soul dies it returns to God intact. Individual identity and personality survive after death. We can call this the classic Western religious point of view. Possibility #3) the soul does survive but not as a particular identity. There is no self. Our souls are like waves of the sea; when the wave breaks onto the shore it loses its individual identity, but is still part of the greater sea. This reflects the mystical ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism. We can call this the classic Eastern religious point of view.
So which is true? Does the soul die when we die? Does the soul maintain its individual identity after we are gone? Or does the soul return to some eternal soul of the universe? For my literature class, the popular answer is possibility #2. The soul survives and maintains its identity. I read the book The Lovely Bones about a murdered fourteen year old girl who sits in heaven watching her family cope with her death. She lives in a heaven of her own choosing but is frustrated by her inability to really help her family. The novel was a bestseller and the movie version will come out in January. I can think of countless other works of literature on the same theme, from the classical musical Carousel to the movie Ghost to the television show Ghost Whisperer. In the popular Western mind, the soul survives in some kind of world to come, and seeks to communicate and help those still in this world.
Countering this point of view is the atheistic materialist view of many militant thinkers – Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett among the most famous. All that exists is a material world. What we call the soul is merely part of that material world. The fancy word materialists use for the soul is epiphenomenon. This is something that exists because of the way our brains are hardwired, similar to the picture on a television. The picture has no reality beyond the wiring of the television; and when the television breaks, the picture is disappears. According to Dawkins, Dennet et. al, so when we die, the soul disappears.
My plan is to explore the third possibility. Perhaps the soul is not located in the brain at all, in fact is not located in any particular space at all. Modern physics speaks of non-locality. This is the reason many of the greatest quantum physicists such as Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm also become mystics. Our soul is part of some greater reality, with the illusion that it is located behind our eyes. But each of us is part of something much more; our soul exists beyond space and time. This is something worth considering before we trade our soul for a bowl of soup.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5769)
FINDING BALANCE
“Jacob was a mild man who stayed in the camp.” (Genesis 25:27)
This week I want to teach a little bit of kabbalah. According to Jewish tradition, the Torah can be read on many levels. One of the most intriguing is called Sod, the mystical understanding of the Torah’s words. On this level Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are no longer simply human beings. They represent various aspects of reality, or perhaps better, aspects of God. On the Sod level the Torah is no longer about human beings, but about the dynamics of the interplay between various attributes of God. There are ten such attributes altogether, known as sefirot. We will look at three of them.
The story of the first patriarch Abraham is really the story of the attribute known as hesed. The word hesed means kindness – it is the outflowing of energy towards the other. Abraham’s hesed never ceases; even when he is recuperating from his circumcision he runs out to help the three visiting messengers. Abraham is that part of God which is constantly flowing out to help others, whether providing for others or showing mercy towards others.
Hesed in and of itself is a good thing. But too much hesed is a source of imbalance in the world. For example, imagine a parent who gives a child everything that child desires, who never holds anything back from the child. Such a child will never learn to become self-sufficient. Or imagine a judge who overflows with mercy, always finding a reason to let a prisoner go. Such a judge will cause criminals to multiply in the world. Hesed must be limited by some kind of restraint.
The second of the sefirot is called gevurah – literally strength. I like to call it restraint. It takes strength to restrain from constant giving, to hold oneself back. Gevurah is represented by Isaac, the second of the patriarchs. Isaac is far more passive in the Torah than either his father or his son. He was the only patriarch who was never permitted to leave the holy land. There is a restraint to staying in one place. Unlike Abraham who arranged a marriage for Isaac, Isaac allows his sons to find their own wives. There is a passivity to him, perhaps as a result of his near sacrifice.
Gevurah is an important value. There are times we need to restrain from overflowing towards others. This week is Thanksgiving, an important family time. Inviting guests is certainly a mitzvah. But I remember one year when a family member said to me, “Can’t we ever have a holiday dinner alone with just our family.” There is a time for some family privacy and restraint. Gevurah is important but it also has limits. Imagine the parent who never gives his or her child anything. Or imagine the judge who always demands strict justice, with no room for mercy. Gevurah can be out of balance.
In this week’s portion we read of the birth of Jacob, the third patriarch. Jacob represents the sefirah of tiferet, literally beauty. But perhaps a better translation would be balance. Jacob’s goal is to find a balance between the outpouring of kindness he learned from his grandfather and the quiet restraint he learned from his father. He will take many years to find such balance. Balance is clearly lacking when he forces his brother to sell him his birthright for a bowl of soup. And balance is also lacking when he blames his beloved wife Rachel for being unable to bear children. In fact, Jacob only finds the balance after wrestling with an angel until dawn.
Our own lives, like Jacob’s, ought to be a search for balance. How much do we give to others; and how much do we hold onto for ourselves? When are we merciful to others and when do we demand justice? How much do we involve ourselves in the community and how much do we protect our family’s privacy? When do we practice kindness and when do we show restraint?
The great sage Hillel taught, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, then what am I?” This is a statement about finding the balance. Like the story of Jacob, it is the search for tiferet.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5768)
MOTHER LOVE, FATHER LOVE
“Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game, but Rebecca loved Jacob.”
(Genesis 25:28)
Isaac and Rebecca had many favorable qualities, but they were not parents of the year. First of all, each one favored one of their sons. Playing favorite among children would fuel the problems between the two brothers and lead to a twenty year estrangement. However, this is not the issue I want to deal with today. Rather I would like to look at two kinds of love – mother love and father love.
Rebecca loved Jacob as only a mother can love a child – unconditionally, with no expectations and no conditions. In her eyes he could do no wrong. Isaac loved Esau, but it was a conditional love. He was a father who made demands of his oldest son. His son must bring him game to eat. (One wonders whether Esau’s love would continue if Esau announced one day he was becoming a vegetarian and would no longer hunt.)
Later the rabbis would differentiate between Rebecca’s unconditional love and Isaac’s conditional love. “Any love which depends on some condition, when the condition vanishes the love vanishes; a love which does not depend on any condition will never vanish.” (Avot 5:16) Nonetheless, all of us love sometimes unconditionally and sometimes with conditions. And this is particularly true when we speak of a parent’s love for a child.
Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving differentiates between two kinds of love, mother’s love and father’s love. Fromm is careful to remind us that these are archetypes, to use Jung’s term. “Of course, when I speak here of mother’s and father’s love, I speak of the ideal type … I do not imply that every mother and father loves in this way. I refer to the motherly and fatherly principle.” Each of us has a little bit of mother and a little bit of father in us.
What is mother’s love? According to Fromm, it is love with no expectations. To quote Fromm again, “There is nothing I have to do in order to be loved – mother’s love is unconditional. All I have to do is to be – to be her child. Mother’s love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.” Every child needs this kind of unconditional, total acceptance – love with no conditions and no expectations. But children need something else. That is where father’s love comes in.
Fromm writes regarding fathers, “Father is the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into the world.” To Fromm, a father’s love is conditional. It contains expectations; it makes demands. “The mother’s and the father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs. The infant needs mother’s unconditional love and care physiologically as well as psychically. The child, after six, begins to need father’s love and guidance. Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.”
Once again, it is important to say that every parent has a little bit of both mother and father in him or her. (In fact, sometimes I see too much Rebecca and not enough Isaac in myself.) Children need the kind of love that is filled with expectations and rules, love that carries with it the possibility of disappointment. One of the truths I try to express in my counseling is that children need mothers and fathers. When I speak to single moms bravely doing it alone, I advise them to find a significant male (grandfather, uncle, rabbi?) to be present in their child’s life. I have similar advice for single dads going it alone.
Parenting is a balance between a mother’s love and a father’s love. In fact, in Hebrew there is a word for father (av), a word for mother (aim), a word for parents in the plural (horim), but no word for parent in the singular. Perhaps the Hebrew is teaching us that parenting is not generic. Fromm is certainly controversial. But perhaps he is right – every child needs some of Rebecca’s love and some of Isaac’s love if that child is going to prosper in life.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5766)
JACOB AND ESAU
“And Esau said, I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?”
(Genesis 25:32)
Some of my greatest moments in the rabbinate are when I teach the high school students in my Torah Corps. Last week a number of ninth graders told me how excited they were that the movie Rent was opening. I have seen the Broadway play, love the music, and was looking forward to the opening myself. (Incidentally, the movie was wonderful, although I missed some of the music from the original show that was cut from the movie.) I was surprised that these young people were so familiar with a musical dealing with alternative life styles, starving artists, drug abuse, and HIV.
I asked them a question about the story. The main female character is a nineteen-year-old girl named Mimi, based on the original Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme. In the opera she is suffering from tuberculosis. In the play and movie, Mimi is a nineteen-year-old heroin addict who is HIV positive and earns her money dancing at a strip club. This is hardly the kind of character that ought to be familiar to our suburban Jewish kids. And yet they knew her story. So I asked them, “What would make a nineteen year old girl become a heroin addict?”
After much discussion, we pinned down various causes. There is peer pressure. And there is the joy of rebellion against parents. But perhaps most important, there is the quest for instant gratification. A person on drugs puts a chemical in his or her body and feels instant pleasure. It fulfils that part of us which says, “I want what I want and I want it now.” The drive for gratification is behind many of the problems that plague us humans. In Judaism we have a name for our appetites out of control, this drive for instant gratification. We call it the yetzer hara, the evil inclination.
On the other hand, sometimes we are moved to act in a way that goes against our appetites. We do something because we know in the long run it is the right thing to do, even if our emotions are crying to us “do not do it.” For young people, an example might be doing a homework assignment even when it is not immediately due, giving charity when it is more appealing to spend the money at the mall, avoiding unhealthy foods, smoking, or drugs even when all of one’s friends are using them. We call the drive to do the right thing the yetzer hatov, the good inclination. Within every human being there is a constant struggle between the evil inclination and the good inclination.
This week’s Torah reading is built around the ongoing conflict between Jacob and Esau. An expert on kabbala might say that Jacob and Esau are not simply human beings, but forces at work in the universe. They represent some deeper realities. Let us explore this idea further.
Esau was an outdoorsman who liked to hunt. He was red in complexion; today in modern America we would probably call him a redneck. One day he comes home from the hunt famished and sees his brother Jacob cooking a lentil soup. He asks for some soup, and Jacob agrees to give it to him in exchange for his birthright. Esau answers, “I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?” He is willing to sell something precious in the long term to satisfy his immediate appetite. Esau represents the evil inclination. He is all appetite, the appetite out of control.
Jacob on the other hand was a man on the tents. The rabbis interpret this to mean that he was a scholar, willing to study to find the right path to go on. Next week we will read how Jacob falls in love with Rachel. To gain her hand in marriage he agrees to work seven years for Laban, his future father-in-law. After seven years he receives the older sister Leah in marriage, and must work a second seven years for Rachel. Yet all this time seems short in his eyes because of his love of Rachel. Jacob is someone willing to work now for a future gratification. He takes a long-term view of what is worthy. He represents the good inclination.
Esau and Jacob struggle even while in their mother’s womb. The evil and the good inclination struggle within each of us. The only question is, which one is going to win that struggle. The answer lies in our hands.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5764)
TO SEE THE OTHER
"When Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see, he called his older son Esau and said to him, My son. He answered, Here I am." (Genesis 27:1)
Let me begin with a true story. A college president at a very prestigious university on the east coast suddenly quit his job. He explained to the board of trustees that his wife of over forty years was ill with Alzheimer's. She needed a full time care taker, and as her husband, that was his job.
The board of trustees was dumbfounded. "You have a well-paying, prestigious job. Why would you give it up to take care of her? After all, she does not even know you. When you are in her room, she cannot even see you." The college president calmly replied, "True, my wife no longer sees me. The problem is, I can see her!"
True love begins with the ability to see the other. In our portion, Isaac was blind. He was unable to see his beloved son Esau. He could not tell Esau from his brother Jacob. That is how Jacob was able to sneak into Isaac's tent and steal the blessing meant for the firstborn Esau.
The Rabbinic Midrash said that Isaac's blindness was not a literal blindness. Rather, he was blind to Esau’s true nature. Esau used to bring him game from the hunt to eat. "Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game." (Genesis 25:28) His inability to see Esau's true nature was caused by his love of food. How often do bribes blind us to someone's true nature. "Bribes blind the eye of the discerning and upset the plea of the just." (Deuteronomy 16:19) How often do we not see the other because we only see ourselves, our own needs and wants. This was Isaac's great mistake.
This is a mistake many of us make. How often have I counseled a woman who was a victim of abuse by her husband or boyfriend. I would ask her, "When you started dating him, did you see his true nature?" She will answer, "I was so much in love, I was so happy, he was so good looking, I guess I did not see his true nature." Perhaps love is blind. But blindness is no way to enter a relationship.
In a similar way, many parents do not see the true nature of their child. A child will be acting out in school, not doing work, disrupting the class, perhaps even using drugs. The teacher or the principal will raise the issue with the parents. But the parents refuse to see that their child is in trouble. Perhaps admitting that a child has a problem threatens their self-image as a parent. Or perhaps it threatens their dreams for their child. But they are blind to their child's nature. And in their blindness, they do not help their child.
Love means taking away blinders and truly seeing the other. It means seeing their strengths and their weaknesses, their wonderful qualities and their needs. It means focusing on the other and not on ourselves. Perhaps if Isaac had been less concerned with eating his son’s game, he would have seen that Esau was a needy child meriting special attention. (Some moderns have suggested that Esua had an attention deficit disorder.) We cannot help the other until we see the other.
Love begins with seeing. To see we must take away our blinders. Only when we stop seeing ourselves and our needs, can we truly see the other and their needs.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5763)
APPETITE AND VISION
"When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors, but Jacob was a mild man who stayed in camp."
(Genesis 25:27)
Some people live by their appetites. And some people live by their vision.
Esau was a man who lived by his appetites. He was a hunter, an outdoors man, he was called Edom red because of his ruddy complexion. If he lived today, one can almost see him as the classic redneck, driving his pickup with the shotgun across the back. Esau lived a life of instant gratification.
We see this appetite most clearly in the story of the lentil soup. Esau returned from the field famished and saw his brother Jacob cooking lentil soup. He traded his birthright to satisfy his appetite with a bowl of soup. The greater privilege of being the first born had no meaning to him when he was hungry.
Esau is not all evil. In fact, it is easy to feel sorry for him as he cried out in pain after his brother stole his blessing. To quote a modern idiom, Esau wore his emotions on his shirtsleeve. In one scene, he displayed both pain and anger. He made no secret of his intent to murder his brother, forcing Jacob to flee his home and live abroad for twenty years.
Esau also married two local Hittite women, daughters of idolaters, to the consternation of his parents. His sexual appetite overruled his filial loyalty.
Jacob on the other hand was a man of the tent. The Rabbis saw him as someone steeped in learning and preparing for taking over the covenant from his father. I certainly do not support his method in stealing his brother's blessing. (In next week's portion he is punished for this.) But Jacob was willing to take a long term view, sacrificing now for future fulfillment. This comes out most clearly when he went to work for seven years before he was allowed to marry his beloved Rachel. (He was given the wrong wife, and then had to work an additional seven years.) Unlike his brother who acted out on his sexual appetite, Jacob delayed gratification for long term gain.
All of us sometimes act on our appetites. And all of us sometimes act on our long term vision. We each have a little bit of Jacob and a little bit of Esau within us. Each of us is involved in an ongoing internal struggle. Do I satisfy my appetite now? Or do I delay gratification for a long term gain? This question comes out when we decide whether or not to eat the extra helping of food, act out on a sexual desire, bend the rules for a some extra profit, display anger towards loved ones, or decide whether or not to apologize for some wrongdoing.
The Rabbis have a name for the drive to act out on our appetites without concern for the larger consequences. They call it the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. They also have a name for the drive to do the right thing, even if our appetite is crying out to do otherwise. They call it the yetzer hatov, the good inclination. Each of us must struggle between our yetzer hatov and our yetzer hara.
Who is going to win in this struggle? Rabbi David Bockman tells a story he learned from an American Indian elder. The elder was describing his inner struggle: "Inside me are two dogs. One of the dogs is kind and good. The other is mean and evil. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time." When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most."
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5762)
JACOB AND ESAU
"The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau." (Genesis 27:22)
In this portion, Jacob stole the blessing designated for his older brother Esau. Isaac their blind father suspected that the young man who came for the blessing was really Jacob. His hands were covered with animal skins to make them hairy like Esau. But the voice remained that of Jacob. Isaac spoke one of the most quoted verses in the book of Genesis, "The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau."
This particular verse has profound meaning even today. Who is Jacob and who is Esau? What does it mean to speak like Jacob, but to have hands, to act like Esau.
Esau was a man willing to sell his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. According to a wondeful insight from my administrative assistant Rhonda Fatt, Esau lived life on a purely physical level. Soup was important. A spiritual matter like a birthright had no meaning for him.
Esau was also named Edom, a Hebrew word meaning red. He became the progenitor of the ancient Romans, people who lived by the sword. Esau was a ruddy, lusty man. Today, he would probably be a red neck, driving his pick up truck with a shotgun on the back, enjoying his beer, pursuing his appetites. Esau was a hunter and a man of the fields, who loved the outdoors. At a very young age, he married two Canaanite women, much to the chagrin of his parents who were hoping for a more spiritual marriage.
Esau did not receive his father's blessing because spiritual matters were not important to him. What was important was to satisfy his appetites, to fulfill his desire for meat, for drink, for sexual pleasure. Esau was probably a man who was fun to spend time with, to hang out at the local tavern drinking and swapping stories. But there was no spiritual side to him.
Jacob on the other hand was the opposite, a deeply spiritual man. He stayed in the tent while his brother was out hunting. According to an ancient Midrash (Rabbinic tale), he was learning Torah with the classical teachers Shem and Eber. Jacob was a momma's boy, the favorite of his mother Rebecca. He learned to cook from her, and was making the pot of lentil soup when his brother returned from the hunt. Later, he would show his spiritual sensitivity with his famous dream of the ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.
We can think of Jacob and Esau not as real people but as archetypes. Esau represents the physical, the person who lives life to satisfy his or her appetites. Jacob represents the spiritual, the person who seeks a higher purpose in life, even if it requires self-control. Jacob and Esau are really two ways to view the world.
With this in mind, Isaac's words make sense. The voice is the voice of Jacob, a person with spiritual concerns. But the hands are the hands of Esau, the actions are merely to satisfy appetites.
How often do we meet people who fit this description. They talk about the importance of spiritual matters, of religion, of God, of ethical living. But their actions show that they live to fulfill their lust, to satisfy their appetites. Their actions belie their words.
Our goal is to become like Jacob, not only with our words but with our actions. Life is more than the fulfillment of appetites, it has a greater spiritual purpose. Jacob and not his brother received the blessing of the covenant so that he could teach the world that lesson.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5761)
THE CYCLE AND THE CHAIN
"These are the generations of Isaac the son of Abraham, Abraham gave birth to Isaac."
(Genesis 25:19)
"A generation goes and a generation comes." (Ecclesiastes 1:4) So wrote King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes. My wife and family have felt the passing of generations with the loss last week of Dora Zuchoff, my mother-in-law. With her death the last of my children's grandparents is gone. The torch has been passed to a new generation.
The moving from generation to generation is a major theme in Genesis. The long lists of who begat whom are not in the Torah to fill space. They are there to speak of the importance of the links that tie generations. In last week's portion, Abraham and Sarah passed on to the next world. Isaac is the new patriarch. His experiences, the birth of his children, and the passage of responsibilities to the next generation are the major themes of this week's portion.
How can we understand the meaning of generations? In my forthcoming book The Ten Journeys of Life I speak of two metaphors, the cycle and the chain. Animals live in the world of the cycle. The human quest is to break out of the cycle, to see life as a chain.
To demonstrate the world of the cycle, let us look at the beautiful Disney movie The Lion King. The movie begins with Elton John singing the theme song of his movie The Circle of Life. A baby lion is born and held high for all the animals to see. The song tells of a great cycle, with events repeated over and over as each new generation comes. At the end of the movie, a new generation of lions is born, and the same scene is repeated once again.
To the animal world, life is a cycle. Each generation repeats what was done before. The life of a lion or a kangaroo or a parakeet is almost precisely the same as the life of these animals one generation ago. If we went back ten thousand generations and looked at the way a lion lives, it would be more or less the same as today. It was the power of this cycle that Disney caught so beautifully in the movie. Birth, weaning, adulthood, procreation, death, the cycle continues unchanging from generation to generation.
Thomas Cahill, in his bestselling book The Gifts of the Jews; How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, wrote that the ancient Israelites beginning with Abraham gave the world a new metaphor. To quote Cahill
"All evidence points to there having been, in the earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was profoundly cyclical. ... The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world."
The ancient pagan world, like the animal world, saw life as an endless repetitive cycle. The gift of the Bible was the vision that we humans can rise above that cycle, that we are more than mere animals. When God told Abraham to go forth from his home, God was saying break out of the cycle and found something new. Abraham introduced to humanity a brand new vision of the purpose of living.
The Bible introduces a new metaphor, one with a beginning and an end. It is best represented by a chain, with each generation a new link. Each generation builds and adds to the previous link. Previous generations contain a repository of wisdom and knowledge on which a new generation can build. Each new generation stands on the shoulders of their parents and grandparents. Each new generation sees itself as closer to the perfect Messianic age still to come. Humans experience a link between generations, an appreciation of the past and a vision of the future, which animals can never know.
PARSHAT TOLDOT
(5760)
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
"Isaac loved Essau because he brought him game, and Rebekah loved Jacob."
(Genesis 25:28)
In this portion we see one of the great mistakes made by too many parents. They fail to love their children unconditionally. Isaac loved Essau only because he was a hunter; if Essau failed as a hunter, would Isaac still love him? Rebekah chose to love Jacob instead of Essau, because obviously he had certain qualities his brother lacked. Neither parent loved both brothers unconditionally.
What does it mean for a parent to love a child? In a key scene in Steven Spielberg's movie Prince of Egypt, Moses' mother Yocheved rushed her baby down to the river hidden in a basket as marauding Egyptian troops searched for baby boys to toss into the Nile. She sang baby Moses a love song and sent him down the river to his fate, knowing that she would probably never see him again. Pharaoh's daughter pulled him out of the river and adopted him.
In the original Biblical story, Pharaoh's daughter actually hired Yocheved as a wet nurse; she fed her own son and then, when he was weaned, forever give him up. Imagine the love, and the desperation, putting aside her own needs to save her child.
A similar theme arises in the famous story of King Solomon, and the two women who claimed the same baby. King Solomon said, cut the baby in half and give half to each woman. The true mother was the one who said, "Let the other woman have him." True love means the willingness to totally sacrifice for the needs of the child.
As I read these stories, I think about parents during the holocaust who gave their children away rather than allow them to fall into the hands of the Nazis. What an overwhelming act of love to risk never seeing one's own child so that the child might have a chance to survive. Thousands of such hidden children survived World War II; some raised in non-Jewish families or even monasteries adopted the Christian faith.
I contrast these cases with the reality I often see as a rabbi. I witness many custody battles involving divorcing parents, or occasionally adoptions. Parents will fight for their right to maintain custody of a child, even if it means destroying the child in the process. Often they will rip apart their former spouse in front of their child, ignoring the need of every child to love both mommy and daddy. Their concern is with their own needs, not the needs of their children.
Most parents claim they love their children. Yet too many parents have children to fulfill some kind of inner need they have, to satisfy their own ego, to live out their dreams. This is the meaning behind the old joke about the mother who points to her three year old and her five year old, "This is the doctor and this is the lawyer." This problem of living our lives through our children seems to be a particular weakness of Jewish parents. We even have a phrase for it - naches from the kinder. Too often we receive our own ego satisfaction from the professional success of our children.
We will be most successful in raising our children if we view parenting not as fulfilling our particular needs, but rather fulfilling the needs of the child. Setting aside our needs for someone else entails sacrifice. As any successful parent will tell you, it is in the sacrifice that we discovery the true joy of parenthood