Victims of the Past

So that day Esau started on his way back to Seir.   Jacob, however, went to Sukkoth,   Genesis 33:16-17a  NIV

However – Take a moment to read Genesis 33, Jacob’s reunion with Esau.  You’ll find something odd about Jacob’s protests.  Again and again, Esau shows no animosity, no hidden agenda of revenge, but Jacob turns away every one of Esau’s offers with obsequiousness.  His face is smiling, lauding compliments on his brother, but you get the impression that it is all camouflage.  Jacob doesn’t trust Esau.  In the end, after Esau leaves for Seir; Jacob goes another way, to Sukkoth.  The translators have inserted “however,” just to make sure you understand the hidden agenda (it’s not in the Hebrew text).  We probably would have caught the drift anyway.  Jacob’s excuses are just a bit too self-serving, a bit too flattering.  Esau appears entirely genuine.  It’s Jacob whose past history determines his behavior.

Like a lot of us, I’m afraid.

“The mutative force in therapy is not intellectual insight, not interpretation, not catharsis, but is, instead, a deep, authentic meeting between two people.” [1]  This Jacob cannot manage.  He’s not capable of an authentic encounter with his long lost brother.  The past crushes his present under the weight of guilt.  He’s still yaʿăqōb, not yiśrāʾel.  Despite God’s promise of protection, despite the validation of angels, yaʿăqōb isn’t ready for authentic encounter.  He does what’s necessary to placate his brother—and then he turns away, far away, never to see Esau again until the death of their father.

I’m just like him.  I haven’t seen one of my brothers for more than thirty years.  No, that’s not quite right.  I saw him at my mother’s funeral, a few hours in a lifetime of separation.  I’m the oldest.  I didn’t steal a birthright for a bit of soup.  There were other things—small things in the scope of life—things that used to matter but stopped making a difference decades ago.  Now the momentum of separation keeps the chasm in place.  What do you say when it’s been so long? “How are you?” seems unfeeling, formal, distant.  Not like Esau who ran to embrace Jacob.  Thirty years of silence.  What words can soothe that loss?  Nothing I can think of—and so I leave it alone by being alone.  His whole life is a mystery to me; an empty hole in who I am, refusing to be filled.

Then I notice that this crisis of compassion has been passed on to one of my sons.  Distance measured in emotional miles immobilizes me.  Perhaps I’ve discovered that the guilt I feel about my brother forces its way out of my unconscious when I consider the desire for reconciliation with my own son, and that trauma, thirty years’ worth, puts him on the other side of my grand canyon of despair with my brother.  Isaac escaped from the trauma of Abraham’s act by running to Hagar and Ismael, but all he really did was pass that legacy to his son, Jacob.  The tragedy of the brothers wasn’t Jacob’s deception.  It was his fear of reunion.  Like me.

Topical Index:  Jacob, Esau, reconciliation, separation, fear, Genesis 33:16-17a

[1] Irvin D. Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir, p. 247.