Dr. Barry Leff
The Rabbi Midrash Archive
Jackson Snyder Biblical Literature ArcCenter
Toldot 5762 This week’s Torah portion is the beginning of the story of Jacob. The story begins with Jacob and Esau struggling in the womb, and these two characters continue to struggle throughout the parsha.
We have several stories of eavesdropping and deceit this week. These are topics to which I can confess some familiarity. When I was in the US Army at the end of the Vietnam era in the early 70’s, I served in the Army Security Agency (ASA), involved in electronic warfare. My contribution to the war effort was to sit in an air-conditioned building in northern Thailand eavesdropping electronically—much as Rebecca eavesdropped on a conversation between Isaac and Esau when Isaac asked Esau to go hunting for him, to bring him some delicacies, and then receive a blessing.
After I got out of the Army, I had a job with a government contractor teaching the ASA how to operate sophisticated communications intelligence equipment that among other things allowed a radio operator to make deceptive transmissions designed to fool the other side into thinking that the transmission was coming from someone else—using technology to perpetrate deception. Similarly, in this week’s parsha Jacob uses a primitive technology—goat skins—to trick his father into thinking he was someone else.
With both of these situations, one ancient, one modern, we are called on to address the question of whether the end justifies the means.
There is little question that absent some pressing reason to do otherwise, eavesdropping and deceit are not condoned. As Secretary of State Henry Stimson said in 1929, when he closed down a fledgling intelligence operation, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” a principle which is supported in halacha (Jewish law). Almost 1,000 years before Stimson, Rebeinu Gershom issued a cherem, a ban, on the reading of private letters by people to whom they are not addressed. This cherem was universally accepted in Jewish communities around the world and is still in force today. By extension it would clearly apply to electronic eavesdropping as well. Being truthful is so important it is one of the ten commandments: we are told not to bear false witness, and in Exodus chapter 23 this is extended with an injunction to stay far away from a false matter.
Certainly passing yourself off as someone else, whether you do it using goat skins or using radios, is a “false matter.” How do we deal with this?
There are those who would take an absolutist position. According to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, we should never, under no circumstances, lie. Not even to save a life. The Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas said the same thing; he held that to lie jeopardizes your immortal soul, therefore you should not lie to save someone else’s physical body because the price is too high. According to Aquinas and Kant, if you lived during World War II, and you had Jews hidden in your basement, and the Nazis knocked at the door and asked if there were Jews in your house, you should answer truthfully, regardless of the consequences. Such opinions can be found in Judaism: there is an argument in the Talmud, tractate Ketubot, where Rabbi Meir says someone should let himself be killed rather than falsely sign a document.
One of the things I love about Judaism is that we reject such simplistic constructions of what is right. We value life too highly to sacrifice it in an attempt to simplify the rules. In the Talmud, Rabbi Meir’s colleagues soundly rejected his position. There is a principle that “pikuach nefesh docheh et ha kol,” to save a life overrides everything. According to halacha, not only are we permitted to lie to save a life, we are positively commanded to do so. Rabbi Meir’s opinion was decisively rejected.
If you hold like Kant or Aquinas, or Rabbi Meir, your decision making process is simplified. You don’t need to weigh competing values. Never do “x.” Period. Real life is more complicated than that. We are presented with situations that challenge our values, where like it or not, one value we hold dear and sacred will be in conflict with another value that we hold dear and sacred. While staying far from a false matter is an incredibly important value, we have no trouble saying that saving a life is even more important.
Earlier in the book of Genesis, when Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister, and when Isaac does the same thing with Rebecca, I think most of us are not so troubled by the fact that the forefathers engaged in deception—it was a hostile time and place, and they felt in danger—but rather by their seeming lack of concern for the likely outcome of their deception. They did not seem to be valuing the chastity and comfort of their wives.
Where do we draw the line? How do we separate justifiable eavesdropping and deceit, from deceit that violates the precept to stay far from a false matter?
My work in the military is pretty easy to justify on the basis of saving lives, of pikuach nefesh. We were in a time of war, and the information we were collecting, and any deceitful activities we engaged in, could very well have saved the lives of many soldiers. Similarly, intelligence work today, aimed at stopping terrorists, can clearly save many innocent lives. It may be a little more of a stretch, but even in peacetime intelligence work is concerned with preventing war and loss of life. This is the justification—not that “everyone does it.”
The story of Jacob and Rebecca’s deception of Esau is a little harder to justify. What lesson can we learn from this story? It does not appear to be a matter of “life and death.” Jacob will probably not die, at least not literally, if he fails to receive this blessing. By presenting us with this story, is the Torah telling us that the end justifies the means, not only in cases of saving a life, but also in cases where you are serving God’s will?
Rashi tries to justify Jacob’s actions by making it appear that he didn’t really outright lie, he just left some information out. For example, there is a line in the Torah where Jacob responds to his father saying, “It is I, Esau, your first born.” Rashi says Jacob was thinking to himself “I am the one bringing you your meal; Esau is your first born.” This is a technique described in Sissela Bok’s excellent book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. Bok calls this technique the “mental reservation” or “mental restraint.” The logic is that if you say something misleading to another and merely add a qualification to it in your mind so as to make it true, you cannot be responsible for the “misinterpretation” made by the listener.
With all due respect to Rashi, if one of his kids did this to him, would he have bought it? Despite Rashi’s attempts to avoid calling Jacob a liar, this would certainly qualify as a “false matter.”
One could argue that the story tells us that if you really know the will of God, as Rebecca did—after all, God told her “the elder will serve the younger”—you can use any means to get there. We could then argue that since the days of prophecy have ended, no one can know with certainty what God’s will is, and therefore we are not allowed to follow Jacob and Rebecca’s example, even though it was permissible for them.
I think a better explanation, however, is that it was NOT OK. Rebecca and Jacob did it, Rebecca believing it was necessarily to fulfill God’s prophecy, but this was NOT what God had in mind. We see that Jacob later becomes the victim of deceit himself, at the hands of his uncle, Laban. Not only that, but he gets punished for the same thing that he himself did, supplanting the elder. After having been given Leah instead of Rachel, Laban tells Jacob, “it must not be done so in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn.” Jacob “serves time,” serving Laban an additional seven years to earn the woman he really loved. Jacob’s punishment, is truly “midah c’neged midah,” measure for measure, the punishment fits his earlier crime. To paraphrase a bit, “one who lives by deceit, dies by deceit.”
We see later in his life Jacob earns the blessing in his own merit, not through deceit. It is interesting that Jacob did not merit receiving a blessing in his own right, from the angel of God that he struggles with all night, until he was on his way to go back and appease his brother Esau. Rashi’s explanation of the episode with the angel says “It shall no longer be said that the blessings came to you through guile and deceit, but by princely right and publicly.” This sounds to me like a condemnation of Jacob’s earlier usurpation of the blessing.
There are so many different ways that Jacob and Rebecca could have acted. What if Rebecca had told Isaac of her conversation with God, begged him to give his blessing to Jacob? What if Jacob and Rebecca had waited, allowing Esau to receive a blessing, but also having faith in God’s prophecy that some day Esau would end up serving Jacob? What could Jacob have done to convince his father that the blessing should go to him?
While there clearly are times when it is permitted, or even necessary, to lie, I would not hold this week’s Torah portion up as a good example; rather I would say this week’s parsha, and the fallout in later parshas, shows the danger of lying when it is not clearly justified.
Quite often people fool themselves as readily as they fool others. Was Jacob kidding himself when he went along with his mother’s plan? There is a midrash that says Isaac knew what was going on, look at the questions he asked…he let himself be deceived. When deceivers deceive themselves, they often say the deception is for the other person’s own good, when in point of fact it is primarily the deceiver who is the beneficiary. If you ask the person who has been deceived whether it was good for them to be deceived, they will usually disagree.
There are certain settings where the halacha approves not telling the complete truth, generally in situations when someone else could be harmed by telling the truth. Outside of these limited cases, and otherwise exceptional circumstances, it is good to follow Mark Twain’s advice: “Always tell the truth, it will confound your friends, and astound your enemies.”
Shabbat Shalom.