He accepted life as it came, preferring to follow rather than be followed. Some seven years later, after he had married Rachel too and was blissfully living with the two sisters and two women servants as well, he would let them decide amongst themselves which one would spend the night with him. When Rachel took away her father’s images and idols, she did not find it necessary to inform him. No one ever did. Both innocent and guileless, he took only what was handed to him. The only time he showed any independence was when he glimpsed Rachel for the first time at the edge of the well. He walked up to her and kissed her immediately. Yet the next moment he burst into sobs. Remorse? More likely, he was startled by his own audacity. As a matter of fact, he seems to have cried quite often. As a child, as an adolescent, even as an adult he seemed forever on the verge of tears. He wept at home, he wept away from home. He kissed Laban and wept; he kissed Esau and wept. When others kissed him, they too wept. We get the impression of a big child yearning for love and protection. Nothing surprising about that; his possessive, dominating mother had obviously done her best to spoil him. She had been after him constantly: do this, do not do that; come here, do not go there. Of course, she had meant well; he was, after all, weaker than his brother, more gentle and frail; clearly in need of a buffer between himself and the world. And so she had covered him with affection to the point of stifling him.

The fact that Isaac was an outstanding personality did nothing to help. Isaac was taciturn, uncommunicative; he discouraged confidences and yet from beyond his silence one sensed the mystery of his youth. It was not easy for Jacob to grow up in the shadow of a man whom God had singled out and demanded in sacrifice. It was not easy for Jacob to be the son of the first survivor in Jewish history, the first witness of a holocaust.

Moreover, for reasons known only to himself, Isaac favored Esau. One wonders why. Father and son had nothing in common; in fact, they were complete opposites. Isaac was sickly and blind; Esau was strong and keen on sports, physically endowed for games and hunting. Isaac aspired only to serenity and meditation; Esau was attracted by blood and violence. Isaac spent his time at home; Esau was forever roaming the fields and forests. Isaac lived for things spiritual; Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils. And yet the two understood each other perfectly. Isaac loved his oldest son, who eagerly returned his love. Was it because opposites really attract one another? Or perhaps because Isaac, true to his name, wished to push laughter to its outer limits, thus showing God that man too is capable of combining peace of mind with brutality? The fact remains that father and son were close. To the point where the following question becomes unavoidable: Aside from all legal considerations, what would have happened to the people of Israel if the decisive encounter had taken place between Isaac and Esau? Without Rebecca’s intervention, without her intuition, her objectively immoral ruse, Isaac surely would have given his blessings not to Jacob but to Esau; then whose descendants would we be? What if Isaac had uncovered the stratagem? Are we then nothing but the result of a fortuitous encounter? Could Israel then not have been at all, or else been Esau?