a fraudulent inheritance
The Bible story of twin brothers Esau and Jacob is about an inheritance obtained through fraud. It’s a story about human nature and—on the face of it—troubling. Those of us familiar with it have groused over the apparent unfairness of the Most High God, who, if Biblical authors are to be believed, chose Jacob as the promise-carrier from the womb and rejected Esau.
The story of Esau and Jacob is a story about what we long for when we don’t have it, and what we struggle to live up to when we do: coveted inheritances and the responsibilities of blessings.
higher nature, lower nature
Genesis tells us that Esau was a skillful hunter, but Jacob a “peaceful man, living in tents.” Though we’re not given much more information about these brothers, what we are given says volumes. Everything about Esau portrays the earthy, instinctive nature of man, whereas Jacob’s energy is that of the spiritual man, able to till the ground and wait for its produce, pursuing a greater blessing than those gained in the immediacy of the moment. These two are much like their prototypes Cain, the hunter, and Abel the tiller of soil. Vegetarians and other non-violent protesters against our lower natures find ready support in the Old Testament (as they do in Buddhist teachings), for hunters are not the ones most often rewarded in ancient tales. Violence begets violence; those who live by the sword shall die by the sword: these are the principles we see in the threads running through these old tales.
Even so, there’s a place and a time for violence, for hunting, for calling the hounds and pursuing prey. “To everything there is a time,” Ecclesiastes says, “and a season for every event under heaven.” If we fundamentalize and isolate the differences between Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, we’re likely to provoke the same type of violence their differences provoked. We will have gun-toting conservatives facing down New York Times Review of Books-wielding liberals on the other. We’ll be fooled into thinking this is about either-or, right-wrong, good-bad, and we won’t notice that Esau and Jacob are twins produced by a common womb, or become curious about the tendencies of our earthy and spiritual natures. Our lower and higher natures tend to fight and separate from each other just as these brothers fought and became estranged from one another. We will fail to recall the monomyth of God becoming man in the flesh, experiencing every temptation, “yet without sin.” We’ll forget who we are, how whole we are in our cores, and we’ll choose one side over the other.
the lessons of suffering
One major difference between Esau and Jacob—and between Cain and Abel—is the capacity to delay gratification: to value what truly matters, to endure patiently, and to choose the good even when it wounds. Jacob, at first, shows little of this virtue. Perhaps this is why he was sent from home to seek a wife among distant kin, where he himself would taste deception—promised one bride, but given another. His “superior inner man” was not yet evident in outward practice; it needed the tempering of long and humble training.
Jacob’s training came through suffering. Again and again, his father-in-law Laban deceived him, binding him to years of labor to secure first one wife, then the other, along with the children they bore him. Nearly twenty years passed before he could leave that foreign land and make his way home. By then, hardship had taught him fear, shown him his limits, and impressed upon him—Jacob the cheater—the bitter taste of being cheated.
The Bible says that even Christ learned obedience through the things he suffered. In the game of life, it seems that we do not pass Go and collect our $200 until we’ve suffered. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, suggested that neurotic suffering is counterfeit suffering designed to distract us from transformative suffering.
Transformative suffering reveals the opposites within us, just as we see in the archetypal figures of Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel. In such suffering, I discover I am both cheater and cheated, hunter and farmer, civilized and Wild Thing, conservative and liberal. I have come to believe that the fiercer a person’s condemnation of “the other side,” the more likely he is blind to his own shadow—the very traits he condemns in others are lying dormant within himself.
We are such hypocrites.
we have met the enemy, and he is us
To see that we sometimes embody the very things we claim to abhor—this is suffering. To realize we had a calling yet missed it, settling for a second-rate life—this is suffering. To know we once held treasures of immeasurable worth, only to squander them for a fleeting appetite, is suffering. To be the one who betrayed another’s trust, leaving them helpless, is suffering. And to be betrayed by one we loved and trusted—that, too, is suffering.
Only when I face my own suffering and the suffering I have caused can I take the next step toward becoming whole.
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