(I am woefully behind in my writing but will use this week to catch up.)

Toldot. These are the generations of Isaac. You are part of the generations of Isaac.

We spend a lot of time working on genealogies. Online research. Ancestry.com. 23 and me. Just curious how many of you have done your 23 and me? Some even believe that you can trace whether you are a Cohein to your actual DNA. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Aaron) Or whether you are a crypto-Jew living in a Latin-American country. At least once a year I have someone sitting in my office wondering if their “weird” family traditions were a vestige of Judaism and if they themselves are Jewish. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/dna-reveals-the-hidden-jewish-ancestry-of-latin-americans/578509/At

Thanksgiving is all about family traditions—whether you came as a Puritan, or an immigrant from Eastern Europe or you were a hidden Jew from Latin America. Last week we talked about the values we want to pass down to our children and children’s children. Once one of my step-daughters said that our family had no traditions. It simply isn’t true, I realize, as we make all our family’s favorite Thanksgiving Day specialities–and we celebrate Thanksgiving Sheni tonight. Because, it is a traditional Jewish holiday. Two nights of festive meals.

Today, let’s talk about the traditions we want to pass down. What makes Thanksgiving special? What makes Judaism special?

At Thanksgiving, I miss my parents—and I often wonder what my father the geneticist would think about all this genetic testing. We can have a discussion over Kiddush about the pluses and minuses of testing.

Since this is Shabbat Thanksgiving, I am going in a slightly different direction. For many, sadly, Thanksgiving itself is a time of loneliness. That maybe true for some of you. And some of how that sense came to be may have come right out of this morning’s portion.

Our Biblical heroes are far from perfect. They are leaders nonetheless as they pass down traditions to their children. It’s a good thing. It gives us hope. We can be like Abraham and Isaac, or Rebecca and Jacob. How could you expect anything less. Isaac is wounded, damaged by his own father as he is nearly sacrificed. He takes Rebecca to be his bride and he loves her, the text tells us this, and is comforted by her after the death of his mother. They even live in her tent. When we next meet him, he is nearly blind. The midrash tells us from the tears he shed at his own binding and almost sacrifice…the Akedah.

Now Isaac and Rebecca are about to become parents, after a long bout of infertility. Twenty years! But the children are struggling in her womb. She goes to l’derosh, to seek out from an oracle, what was happening to her. L’derosh is where we get the word midrash from, it is where we seek out meaning from the text. It is also where we get Beit Midrash, House of Study and in Arabic Midrasha, their houses of study.

I introduce the Arabic deliberately here. Arabic and Hebrew, as you know are sibling languages. So very similar. And still the siblings struggle.

Here’s the thing. Isaac and Rebecca, the best of friends, the lovers that they were just chapters ago, here flunk parenting 101. Isaac who likes game prefers Esau, who enjoys the hunt. Rebecca prefers Jacob. Eventually Jacob lives up to his name of “heel” and tricks his blind father out of Esau’s natural blessing. Esau is so upset he wants to kill Jacob.

This is a story of sibling rivalry and a fear of scarcity. Even the text uses some pejorative language to describe these brothers. Esau, the other, is ruddy, hairy. And we Jews, we love our book-learning, Mama’s boys. At least we did. We prized the yeshiva bacher—the paler the better because that meant he was learning. And it is true that as AJ Liebling might have said—the freedom and the power of the press is limited to those who own one. Others have also taken credit for that quote. But this is part of what we hand down to our children and grandchildren, based on this text. Jacob is good—even though he tricked Esau out of his birthright. Esau is bad.

Anyone struggle through Thanksgiving dinner? Anyone have those old feelings of childhood that “she loves him more” or who didn’t even want to go because there would be someone you didn’t want to talk to or maybe you were worried that someone wasn’t even going to show up. There is so much written in the popular literature and women’s magazines on the etiquette of Thanksgiving dinner. We are past that now, for this year, however there are six more weeks of holidays to go through. The roots of that anxiety may go back to here. Imagine the conversation at the lentil stew dinner as Jacob is about to trick Esau and Isaac. Imagine the conversation after when Rebecca tells Jacob to flee before his brother can kill him.

Then the text continues. And it gets even more complicated, maybe bizarre. There was a famine in the land…we’ve been here before. And we are back to scarcity. Isaac goes to Abimelech. The same King that Abraham went to earlier, in Chapter 20. And Isaac tries the same ruse, passing off his wife as his sister. Really. Long before a #MeToo movement. So Abimelech protects both Isaac and Rebecca. And Isaac becomes wealthy—which causes the Philistines to become jealous. So, they stop up all the wells that Abraham had dug with earth. Again, it is a text of fear and scarcity. The rest of the text reads like a text over water rights. It could be a modern saga. The stuff I learned about as a global justice fellow with American Jewish World Service.

The arguments over the wells continue throughout the remaining part of our parsha. As noted Bible scholar, James Kugel says, Abimelech and Isaac have “rather frosty relations.” The Philistines suggest a sworn peace treaty, a covenant, to smooth things over. And they conclude this treaty with a feast. Play the images of the Puritans and Native Americans here. Or not. Because that story too isn’t the way we learned it. The Philistines leave and “that same day Isaac’s servants come to him and report about a well that they had dug; they said to him, “We found water.” (Gen. 26:32)

However, as Kugel teaches, that in another version of the text, the Septuagint, Old Greek translation. Here, the text is one letter different. Our text says, “they said to him, ‘lo’ spelled lamed vuv.” But in the Septuagint it says lamed alef, “we did not find water.” What a difference that alef makes, changing the meaning of the verse entirely.

Kugel continues that in the Book of Jubilees which did not make it into our canon but is the basis of much of what the Hashmoneans taught and is considered sacred by Ethiopian Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Jubilees is an incredibly xenophobic text, dealing with non-Jews and assimilation which is to be avoided at all costs—that’s why the Maccabees embraced the text. How appropriate to be discussing this morning as we move into Kislev and Chanukah mode. What the Maccabees were really fighting against was assimilation. What, then, is the plain meaning of the text? Which text? How do we relate to this text of scarcity?

I choose to find ways that we can embrace the other. That’s part of why we are opening our building for the filming of Fargo on Monday. Love your neighbor and love the stranger. Remember. It is like Rabbi Harold Kushner says. “But at the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another’s happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will ever know. We can achieve Paradise.” This is part of the tradition that I pass down to my children and grandchildren. That’s part of how I exercise leadership. There is truly enough to love around—at your Thanksgiving table, or even with water rights.