What We Learn From Esau and Jacob

Each fifth year rabbinical student writes and delivers a senior sermon.  I delivered this sermon on 11/17/2012 to the HUC Cincinnati community.  It speaks of the need to redefine masculinity in America and challenge the way our culture connects manhood with violence, dominance, and control.  It is time for men the join in the fight against gender violence.  We must become allies.  One of the fist things we must do is challenge the image and definition of masculinity that is contributing to the violence. 

We at Reyut are working to foster conversations within the Jewish world about unhealthy understandings of gender.  Join us!

Ari Lorge
Toldot 11/17

Advocating for the Voice of Jacob

There is an old story.  A man walks into a synagogue he has never been to before.  He recognizes the service up until the Torah is taken out.  As expected the Rabbi processes with the Torah for the hakafah.  He comes to a certain spot in the synagogue and suddenly bends down with the Torah and then continues.  The man had never seen anything like that before, so he approached the rabbi after the service.  “Hello, Rabbi, I’m a visitor in the community.  I really enjoyed the service, but I’m wondering if I can ask you a question.  I noticed that at a certain point in the hakafah you bent down with the Torah.  I’ve never seen that before.  What is the meaning of that tradition?”  “You know I’m not sure why we do that,” replied the rabbi, “It was a tradition in the community before I got here.  Let’s ask Mrs. Nussbaum, her family has been here for generations, she’ll know why.”  They found Mrs. Nussbaum at her usual spot, by the sugar-free cookies, at the Kiddush.  When they asked her, Mrs. Nussbaum responded, “Well, you know, before we renovated the synagogue there used to be a low hanging beam in that spot and if you didn’t duck you would whack your keppe.  I don’t know why we still do it.” 

Judaism is a religion with a rich tradition of passing down customs, history, and values.  We take pride in this fact.  It is something which defines us.  We speak often of a shalshelet ha’kabbalah – a chain of tradition.  For something to be authoritative we refer to it as Mi-sinai, from Mount Sinai.  If anyone doubts me on this, go into a student pulpit and suggest changing the version of Adon Olam the congregation sings…I dare you!  You can’t.  It is unthinkable because the things we pass down, and which were passed down to us, hold the greatest value.  However, sometimes, like the story about the hakafah, we perpetuate what we inherit without thinking critically about what we’re receiving.

            Passing on our heritage is a vital responsibility.  It is important for us to approach this task with intentionality.  In addition to the enormous riches contained within the tradition, there are aspects of our heritage which must be contextualized, lest we unintentionally pass on something harmful.

            In this week’s parashah, we heard the story of Jacob and Esau and their struggle for their father’s blessing, birthright, and love.  We teach this story to children in our religious schools.  Through the text an instructor can teach about parental favoritism, about sibling rivalry, about lying and dishonesty, about many things.  We often do this in order to frame the behavior we find problematic in the text.  We use Isaac and Rebecca as negative examples of parents.  However, there is a problematic aspect to the story we overlook. 

In our parashah we read that Isaac favored Esau because he was a hunter and an outdoorsman.  We read further that Rebecca favored Jacob because he was a mild child who stayed in camp.  When we tell this story we convey to the audience an ideal of manhood.  Boys learn that if they want to earn their father’s love they should be like Esau; outdoorsy, dominant, dumb and brawny.  Boys learn that these traits lead to acceptance into masculine peer culture.  We also learn that a boy like Jacob, mild mannered, sharp witted, and someone who was a help around the camp, is favored by the mother.  These traits will not endear you to your father or to other men.  In two verses we have unintentionally taught anyone who encounters this parashah how to be a man.  Moreover the masculinity we have promoted is both dangerous and damaging.  As Michael Kimmel, the foremost scholar on constructed masculinity in America wrote, “The belief that violence is manly is not carried on any chromosome, not soldered into the wiring of the right or left hemisphere, not juiced by testosterone.  Boys learn it.”[1]  In this case they learn it from the Torah.  This lesson, combined with countless others over the course of a lifetime, can lead to a toxic understanding of masculinity.  Judaism has a responsibility to respond.

You might ask why?  What is the hurt?  What does it matter if a young boy or girl learns that being a man means being dominant, powerful, and violent?  I would argue it matters a great deal.  Our culture’s definition of masculinity is contributing to the pervasive levels of gender violence in America.  Uplifting Esau masculinity and silencing Jacob masculinity have helped establish and sustain unprecedented levels of gender violence.  Nearly 1/3 of women report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives, more than one in five women experience completed or attempted rape while in college, and a study in 2001 found that 20 percent of adolescent girls were physically or sexually abused by a date.[2]  Don’t fall into the trap of denying this is a Jewish problem.  The statistics for the Jewish community are roughly equivalent to the national numbers.  I state these statistics not to shock, rather to accurately portray a picture of the world in which we live; we live in an age of Esau.

If we want to address gender violence, we have to address a definition of manhood that is rooted in concepts of power, dominance, and violence.  Embedded in America’s definition of masculinity is the subjugation of women by men.  Should we want to create a safer society, we must change the way we understand masculinity.  We must re-define manhood.  In the age of Esau masculinity, we must advocate for the voice of Jacob.

If you ask a group of young men and women to describe a “real man” you get strikingly similar answers no matter the group.  Men should be strong, dominant, in control, respected, independent, tough, powerful, athletic, and aggressive.  Men should be Esau.  Why are the responses similar?  We receive these notions of masculinity from the same places.  They come from family and friends, religion, TV, media, the toys with which we play, and almost every aspect of our culture.  As we spend more and more time in front of screens of various sizes our images of gender are constructed ever more narrowly. 

Moreover, the messages sent to us about masculinity are growing increasingly tied to violence and control.  Just go to the local toy store if you doubt me.  Many have talked about Barbie’s changing shape, but did you know GI Joe’s biceps calculated into real life equivalents have gone from 12.2 inches in 1964 to 26.8 inches in 1998?[3]  Essentially, they’ve gone from large to crazily disproportionate.  Or think of the difference between Adam West’s Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman.  Even more timely might be Sean Connery’s image of James Bond compared to Daniel Craig’s which is even more amped up.  These images are constructed to reflect our understanding of what it takes to be manly.  Over the past several decades there has been an intensifying of the power, violence, and strength needed to prove masculinity.  We are living in a society that glorifies the image of Esau over the image of Jacob, and Esau’s biceps are bigger than ever.  Nowadays, instead of a hunting bow, he uses an assault rifle and a helicopter to fulfill his father’s request for fresh meat.

You say, surely it is possible to break out of this boxed-in definition of masculinity.  It is not easy to do so.  Society works hard to keep men inside this box.  Our education about gender norms starts early.  At a very young age we begin to act as, what has come to be called, the gender police.  Those of you with children in elementary school know this.  Try sending your son to school wearing pink or purple.  My 4 year old niece knows that purple is a “girls’” color.  We teach these expectations to children.  Then they, like the adults around them, can serve as gender police. 

If boys or men do not conform to every aspect of this society’s definition of masculinity they are quickly labeled by their gender policing peers in order to call their manliness into question.  They are called, “Sissy, whipped, fag, mama’s boy, or worst of all, simply a girl…”  Gender policing exists at every age, and leads to the suppression of men’s authentic selves.  It has also become militant in recent years.  We’ve seen a sweeping series of suicides in the last ten years by heterosexual boys who could not tolerate the attacks on their masculinity which they received because they expressed a belief or hobby that lay outside of the boxed in definition of masculinity.  Boys and men who want to get by learn quickly to put on a hyper masculine mask.

The consequence of this is that we are teaching men and women earlier and more pervasively that the definition of masculinity is rooted in notions of power, control, and dominance.  When this is coupled with a terrible, yet widespread, cultural belief that women are subordinate to men we have a dangerous combination: a combination that leads some men to make sexist jokes, and others to control, abuse, and perform violence against women.   For most of us though, it leads to hiding the “Jacob aspects” of who we really are.  We put up an Esau-like front for the benefit of other men and quietly acquiesce to beliefs and actions we know are wrong.  It is time to speak out, and it is time to stand up.

The truth is nobody fits this definition of masculinity.  No one can live a healthy life acting like Rush Limbaugh and looking like GI Joe.  Yet men are working harder than ever to try.  Most of us are tired of it.  We are tired of bending to avoid the invisible beam during the hakafah.  I think most of us want to stand up for the Jacob aspects of who we are.  We are men who like football and French impressionism, who like boxing and the ballet, who like NASCAR and knitting.  These things do not make us manly or effeminate.  They simply make us who we are.  We refuse to conform to any one image of masculinity. 

Moreover, as men, there are some aspects of the current definition of manhood we reject outright.  We will not hide that we think sexist jokes are offensive.  We will not hide our disgust of our culture’s sexualization of coerced and subjugated young girls and women by making them the pornographic norm.    We will not hide that we wish for our romances with women to be relationships of mutuality, and this does not make us whipped.  We will not hide that we wish to see women achieve every aspect of equality in our society, that we are ready to give up heterosexual white male privilege and power to see it happen. That makes us strong not weak.  It is time to redefine masculinity to allow for both the Jacob and the Esau parts of us; to allow for a real and complex sense of ourselves to be expressed in public.

Our Jewish communities must lead the way in this movement.  After all, we are descendants of Jacob.  We have a tradition of rejecting society’s image masculinity and defining it for ourselves.  We could be the revolutionaries in this work.  In the Jewish community we must challenge unhealthy understandings of gender in our synagogues and schools.  We must teach against our tradition when we abhor the messages it sends.  We must begin these conversations with our youth and our adults.  Will this end gender violence?  Sadly, it will not.  Will it create a Jewish society that is not willing to tolerate it and silently acquiesce to it?  Yes it can.  It is not manly to dominate; it is not lady like to be submissive.  It is Jewish to stand up and be counter-cultural when the cultural norm promotes injustice and subjugation.  It is Jewish to respect and honor all creatures no matter their gender.  It is Jewish to be true to who we are. 

In America, one in four women is a victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in her lifetime.[4]  Even one in the entire world is too many.  It is time we stopped thinking this is solely a women’s issue.  It is a men’s issue.  It is a Jewish issue.  It has been said that the paramount moral challenge of this century will be the struggle for gender equality in the world.[5]  Men must be allies in this struggle, but we must challenge the way all of us, men and women, think about masculinity.  It is time to stop pretending this is not a pervasive and systemic problem.  As husbands and wives, as sisters and brothers, as mothers and fathers, as friends, as Jews we have an obligation to respond.  Let us all leave this service ready to say that change will come, and let it begin with me. 

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[1] Kimmel, Michael. Manhood and Violence: The Deadliest Equation. National Organization For Men Against Sexism. accessed November 5^th, 2012. http://www.nomas.org/node/106

[2] Katz, Jackson. 2006. The Macho Paradox: why some men hurt women and how all men can help. Naperville, Ill: Sourcebooks, Inc.

[3] Jhally, Sut, Susan Ericsson, Sanjay Talreja, Jackson Katz, Jeremy Earp, and David Rabinovitz. 2002. Tough guise violence, media, and the crisis in masculinity. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.

[4] Center for Disease Control (December 14, 2011) http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2011/p1214_sexual_violence.html

[5] Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. 2009. Half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.