Elliot Cosgrove, PhD November 26, 2011
To sit down at a large family Thanksgiving dinner is to experience the pleasures and pressures of family dynamics…on steroids. All of our familial idiosyncrasies, fissures, and history are brought together around a single table for an exclusive one night engagement. Everyone’s behavior becomes the subject of dissection and drama – a 24-hour news cycle before the era of cable news. Will the dinner-hosting daughter-in-law allow the well-meaning but sometimes boundary-breaking matriarch to bring her own dish to the dinner or not? Should a parent interfere in how a grandparent chooses to entertain, feed or otherwise indulge their shared child/grandchild? Thousands of small decisions surrounding a single holiday meal touching on nerves whose sensitivities extend back decades if not generations.
Should you enjoy the blessing of sitting down at a dinner with extended family, then you know the real intrigue is not so much across the generations, but within them – among siblings. Siblings are, as the saying goes, nature’s way of creating slightly different versions of ourselves. A Thanksgiving dinner is like a house of mirrors as we look across at these alternative editions of who we are. We may no longer live in the same home and our lives have long since gone in different directions, but there is something about a brother or sister that burrows under your skin forever like no other relationship. To sit down for a meal and see the careers they have chosen, the spouses they keep, the decisions they are making for their children – it turns over the topsoil of your own identity in a way that nobody and nothing else can. By dint of our shared DNA and household of origin, they are probably the most honest and unforgiving prism by which to access our fears and hopes.
Siblings are our past, present and future all rolled up into one. Whenever I officiate at the funeral of someone who has the achieved the blessing of length of years, it is the children and grandchildren who speak. The elderly brother or sister of the deceased usually sits quietly to the side like a footnote – Uncle So-and-So who flew in from out of town. But I have often thought that a slightly less gracious, but altogether more honest way to eulogize someone would be to have siblings do it. How was his life a reflection of the demons of his youth? How did her choice of spouse reflect a heartbreak that nobody in the room knows about – except a sister? In the timeline of our lives a sibling is our longest-standing relationship, and even after death can be a steady presence in our lives.
There is nothing like a brother to make you think deeply about your present. This past week, I listened to my brothers compare notes about the Little League teams they coach – how in addition to their busy careers and full lives, they swagger around soccer and baseball fields with their kids every weekend – more than once causing me spasms of inadequacy. Yet I know I am no saint when it comes to the competitive nature of fraternal relationships. When I joined a gym last year, the membership guy asked me what my goals were: aerobic fitness, muscle mass, maybe weight loss? I responded, “I have one and only one fitness goal: when I see my brothers, I want to be in better shape than they are.” And then, of course, there is the role siblings will play in the years to come. The millions of decisions we make together about the relative who has yet to find his or her way, how parents will be cared for, or any of the other aspects of the shared language and responsibilities of siblings.
Jacob and Esau could not share a bowl of lentil soup without provocation, never mind a Thanksgiving dinner. Unlike modern psychology, the Torah does not find the primary shaper of human identity between parent and child, but rather between siblings. Beyond all the biblical fraternal dynamics we’ve read about so far – Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael – it is the bond between Jacob and Esau that receives the fullest attention of our narrator. It is not clear, and I don’t think it is meant to be, how much of their resentment is due to nature or nurture. Were the boys hardwired in their dispositions, or were their inclinations due to the clumsy parenting of Rebecca and Isaac? Esau, like Biff in Death of a Salesman, grew up on a steady diet of paternal praise, only to discover that the rest of the world operates on different principles. (See Kluger, p. 101) In Jacob’s case, the blessings he received from the womb and onward come at the expense of having a functional relationship with anyone, ultimately forcing him to flee to create a family of his own. Divine oracle, birth order, genetics, parental favoritism – all contribute to a toxic concoction that pits them against each other from the moment of conception onward.
If I had to put my finger on the source of the problem, it would be the hazardous biblical belief that God’s blessing is a zero-sum-game. Jacob and Esau believed that blessings and birthrights were by nature both limited in number and indivisible. Only one of the brothers could be a dweller of tents, only one of them a man of the field. Only one could be his father’s favorite and only one his mother’s. Only one could receive the birthright, only one could receive the sought-after blessing. Their competitive and destructive relationship was based on the corrosive idea that what one brother had, the other could not. They needed to box each other out for fear of becoming the brother left out. The most emotionally searing verse of the entire tale, if not the Torah itself, is Esau’s cry to his father upon learning that Jacob had taken away his blessing. “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father.” It was inconceivable to any of the family – Isaac, Rebecca, Esau, Jacob – or even God, that maybe, just maybe, life, love and blessing need not be limited to only one of them. Nowhere does the biblical text allow for the possibility that when it comes to the things in life that really matter, the calculus of family dynamics could occur in an altogether different, more generous way.
While the biblical laws of primogeniture have long since fallen to wayside, I think deep down many of us somehow still believe, as Jacob and Esau did, that siblings operate in a zero-sum matrix. For some reason we let ourselves believe that that there actually exists a wise child and a wicked child, an academic one and an athletic one. Against all logic and medical evidence, we think DNA is distributed first come, first served, like a black Friday sale – “get the musical gene now, quickly, before the second child arrives!” Or, if you like, that our family roles are auditioned off like parts in a musical, and only one person gets to play the lead. Because we see our own families, or even worse, our own children through this imagined, self-imposed lens, we emerge with what is ultimately a self-destructive way of looking at the world. After all, if there is a limit to God’s blessing, then it is understandable that we should trip over the logical corollary – that our siblings' blessings come at the expense of our own.
Our biblical stories contain an unavoidable thread of destiny foretold. It would misrepresent the text to say otherwise. But it is also true that our subsequent tradition is a fierce defender of the notion that each of us is the captain of our own fate. You may or may not be musical, happily married or professionally satisfied. But I promise you that the shortcomings and blessings of your life have absolutely nothing to do with the shortcomings and blessings of your siblings. Happiness is not a bowl of lentil soup that if one brother takes a gulp, less is left for the other. Of course there are inequities when it comes to the genetic lottery, and all parents fumble with the question of how best to encourage a child towards personal strengths without pigeonholing him or her prematurely. But at a certain point, regardless of our birth order, the hand we have been dealt, or the missteps our parents may have made along the way, we are who we are and who we will become owing to nothing but our own choices. It is so painful to bear witness to people assessing their own potential – realized or failed – by comparison with their siblings. There should be only one answer to Esau’s throbbing question. “Yes, of course there is more than one blessing.” Life is not a football game where only one Harbaugh brother gets to win. The blessings that we seek are not commodities with set limits. The Midrash explains that the Messiah will not arrive until the tears of Esau cease to flow. In other words, only when siblings cease to experience Esau’s agony – the mistaken belief that only one blessing exists – then and only then will redemption arrive.
Unfortunately, unhealthy sibling rivalries do not end with Jacob and Esau. They continue in the tale of Joseph and his brothers, the history of the Israelite monarchy and for that matter, in the stories of our own families. We know the pitfalls even as we step in them. There is, thankfully, a glimmer of hope. Two weeks from now, Esau and Jacob will meet again after having spent decades apart. They will embrace and they will weep, putting the missteps of their past behind them. Jacob will come bearing gifts, and in response Esau will look at his brother and say, “I have enough,” going on to state, “for to see your face, is to see the face of God.” It is a profound and moving exchange that the sensitive reader understands to signal tremendous personal growth and a lesson for us all. “You, the measuring stick by which I assessed my own self-worth. You, whose countenance in our youth was a trigger for my own rage and a prod for my resentments. You, with whom I had so much in common but with whom I never shared. You are not my enemy, you are my brother, both of us created equally in the image of God, and now years later I know that there is more than enough to go around, there is more than enough blessing to share.”
Israel Zangwill once wrote, “It takes two men to make one brother.” As our biblical forbears learned, in order be the brothers and sisters we want to be, we must first be sure that we are able to be the men and women we know that we can be and to be grateful for what I believe to be the greatest gift of all: the gift of a sibling. This Thanksgiving weekend and in the years ahead, we should merit reciting at our tables the greatest and truest expression of thanks Jews know: "How good and how pleasant it is that siblings dwell together" (Psalms 133:1).