When Acceptace is Complete

This week’s Torah portion is Toldot, generations. It tells the story of the original dysfunctional Jewish family. Rebecca gives birth to the twins, Esau and Jacob. Jacob pressures Esau, who agrees to sell Jacob his birthright. Later, Isaac, the twins’ father, wishes to bless his firstborn, but Rebecca overhears Isaac’s plan and substitutes Jacob, who impersonates Esau, and receives his father’s blessing. The Torah tells us that the boys were very different: it says, “The lads grew up and Esau became one who knows trapping, a man of the field, but Jacob was ‘tam,’ whole or complete, abiding in tents. Isaac loved Esau, for game was in his mouth, but Rebecca loved Jacob.” Love is elusive – difficult to define or explain. It is hard to know just why we love someone, but we can ask the broader question, why do we love at all? This question takes us back to B’reisheet, the first Torah portion. This portion dignifies the emptiness in each human that is described metaphorically as the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Given that each human being has the feeling of not being complete, I would suggest that we love to become whole; to compensate for our own lacks and deficits. In the case of Isaac, he seemed to love Esau because Esau was a man of action, whereas Isaac was a more passive personality, evidenced by his compliance at the time of his father’s almost sacrificing him. Jacob, a quieter personality than Esau, was loved by Rebecca, the courageous and spunky young woman who left her family, friends, and native land to follow a strange servant to a new land where she would marry another complete stranger. In this family, opposites seemed to attract. But the fact that the parents Rebecca and Isaac could not love the boys equally points to a lack of acceptance of themselves. If they could have truly accepted themselves, with their faults and strengths, then they could have accepted their sons and loved each of them, perhaps not equally, but individually and fully. In child rearing, I am fond of saying that it is necessary to say YES to the whole person. When many of us were growing up, we had the experience that our parents accepted parts of us and not other parts, creating inadequacy, loss of self esteem, inner conflict, and self hatred. If we could truly love and accept all of ourselves, we could love and accept others. It is a failure of self love, a failure of self acceptance that leads to our projecting our self hatred onto others and dividing people into those we like and those we do not like. To heal ourselves, we have to be God to ourselves, the loving accepting parent we may have never had, in order to become a compassionate brother or sister to our neighbors. I am not however recommending the abandonment of common sense. Our quality of judgment about people is one of our necessary and useful gifts. One of the Chassidic masters, Rabbi Naftali, said that “innocence by itself is not necessarily a good quality.” But the quality of judgment can lead us astray, giving us an excuse for the refusal to accept others in their totality, the way God accepts us. My most recent tool for myself, which I use to talk to myself about people who are harder for me to love is that: the person is a wonderful, loving person, but that the person has a hard time showing that side of themselves to me. In order to fulfill the commandment in the Torah, Love your neighbor as yourself, we have to love and accept ourselves, choosing love over judgment, albeit with clear eyes. It is a skill that can be acquired; a habit of loving that will come back to us as the richest of rewards. Through the ability to accept and love our whole selves, we can become whole; experiencing the Divine love between people that we are meant to give and receive. Each of us was born to be loved and to love greatly. As we approach this holiday season, may we allow ourselves to love each person for who they are, knowing how alike we all are, knowing and accepting who we are: fallible creatures who make mistakes, but also magnificent, loving, and Divine.