Lesson Two - Not Following Esav’s Approach

Lesson Two. Not Following Esav’s Approach

Another instructive point we can learn from our forefather Yaakov. When the brothers meet, Esav says: “I have plenty, my brother” (Genesis, 33:9), while Yaakov replies: “I have everything (I need)” (33:11). Everyone who is far from Torah and the mitzvot behaves like Esav: I have a lot, but I want more—more material pleasures, because it is impossible to be satisfied with them. “He has a hundred and wants two hundred.” Yaakov’s approach is: whatever I have is enough for me (he really did have enough; at that point Yaakov was wealthy, but he had behaved the same way earlier as well). And he thanked the Almighty for it.

A person cannot invest equally in the material world and the spiritual world.

Nowadays, enormous sums of money are invested in obtaining pleasure. A person does not need to be persuaded to drink “Cola”; he needs to be persuaded that drinking “Cola” will give him otherworldly pleasure and make him boundlessly happy. That is why 80% of a product’s price is the cost of advertising it. Advertising has even penetrated our world (the religious world): for example, before Shavuot there was an advertisement claiming that without a cup of coffee of a certain brand, a yeshiva student would be unable to study at night! Supposedly, this is already a tradition—you cannot break with it. Or in Meron on Lag BaOmer, where the large central bonfire is lit, they put up an advertisement for a snack—chips—that played on the word madlik (“wonderful,” as well as “fiery”), as though lighting a bonfire in honor of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai without chips just would not be the same. All “special offers” follow Esav’s approach: buy two, get a third free (“I have plenty”!)—two is a lot, but 3 is even more! They understand human nature perfectly! The house becomes cluttered with unnecessary things bought because “there was a special offer” (“mivtza”). We all get drawn into this acquisitiveness. This feeling becomes especially intense at the end of the fiscal year: everyone has rushed out shopping, so I have rushed out too.

Yaakov teaches us to keep things in proportion.

Of course, a person needs “bread to eat and clothing to wear” (Genesis, 28:20), but this should not become the main aspiration in life. Sometimes all one hears in a home is where the discounts are, which store is best for buying a certain item, when “market day” is, when the “end of season” is… If a child sees that turning on a light on Shabbat earns only a mild reprimand, while breaking a vase earns a slap and furious shouting, the child immediately understands what really matters to the parents. And afterward you can say as much as you like that Torah and the mitzvot are more important…

If a mother thinks it is more important for her daughter to get to a sale in time than to pray Mincha in time, it is no wonder that her daughter’s priorities will reflect that. As a rule, in such a case there is always time for shopping trips, but a desperate shortage of time for reading the Book of Tehillim. Children are highly sensitive to such things, even when they are not spoken aloud.

We are not saying that the material world does not interest us; quite the contrary. We are simply setting things in proportion: what is important and what is secondary.

To be continued

Prepared by: Mrs. Zissi Skarzhinskaya