Breaking – Free
Thoughts on Torah portion Toldot 2024 (adapted from earlier versions)
Polonius, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is presented as a shallowly sincere, but insufferably garrulous “tedious old fool.” The character of Polonius is the one who says the words,
This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Polonius (as brilliantly drawn by Shakespeare) uses this adage to cap a series of prattling proverbs that he pontificates to his son Laertes, as the latter is heading back to his studies. I can imagine Laertes rolling his eyes as Polonius preens before the audience. The adage, in the mouth of Polonius, is dripping with savage irony. Polonius has no true self to which to be true. He is a clanging, empty teapot.
I’ll unpack the irony with questions: Who knows oneself enough to be true to oneself? Who can claim true self-knowledge? I have a theory: Most of us don’t know ourselves, unless and until our mettle has been sorely tested, and even so, steel wired resilience in the face of the test is just a small step toward self knowledge.
You might gain an examined life if you do the assiduous and painful work that, according to Socrates, makes life worth living. Hard work, with no external measure of success and no visible payoff.
We have several competing selves. To which self be true? Certainly not to the self that is seeking its own ego-interests, while masquerading in fancy pious subterfuges. Not to the self of day-to-day prevarications, lest we admit to ourselves who we are.
Polonius is all the more insufferable because the character is so conniving, so deceitful and so contemptible. As presented in the play, his sententious officiousness is either a complete lie, or evidence of a person suffering from near complete lack of self knowledge.
Jacob and his mother Rebecca in our parsha are the opposite of Polonius. Jacob loathes that he must wear a mask, to present himself as other than he is. Rebecca rues that she has to deceive her husband. This Torah portion carves out yet another narrative from the existentialist quarry of the Bible: Who am I? How did I get here? What am I supposed to do? To what self ought I be true?
The acute existentialist quandaries in Genesis of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar (and even of God) seem to converge in the characters of Jacob and Rebecca. Avivah Zornberg emphasizes Jacob’s starting place as being an “ish tam” – a pure, simple, blameless, innocent man, dweller of tents. If you sit alone in your tent, untouched by the outside world, looking only inward, sure, you can remain innocent. You are only conning yourself. “Tent” here, then, is a metaphor, referring to a purposeful shutting out of the world of suffering, even your own.
Rebecca is that woman bearing unbearable “secret knowledge,” a knowledge that once acted upon will tear her family apart.
(Sometimes when I read a book on ethics, the author presents some quandary where if you intentionally kill one person you can save five others. I want to ask the author, “Did this ever happen to you or someone you know? Have you ever killed someone to save someone else? Did you ever watch somebody die? Did you maybe then officiate at the funeral of the innocent person you killed to save others?” I think those artificial ethical quandaries are vulgar, written by professors who “dwell in tents.”)
Zornberg writes, “The disintegrated, alienated and distraught consciousness . . . represents a higher mode of freedom than that of the ‘honest soul’. . . ” (The Beginning of Desire, p. 154). Jacob symbolizes this freedom by his becoming someone other than who he has been, because the moment requires it. Not just that he disguises himself as his brother, but more – that in disguising himself, in having agreed to disguise himself for a higher purpose, he merges on to Highway 61, driving into a world of ambiguity where the clear moral road seems to end, where a former identity has to be left behind.
If Jacob will become equal to what the moment demands, he must abandon “ish tam” – the blameless, innocent, dweller of tents. When people say, “It wasn’t morally right for Jacob to deceive his father and steal the birthright from his brother,” the response is, “That’s exactly the point of the story.” It is called a moral dilemma. Maybe it asks of you: How far will you go to do what must be done?
The ego-self seeks continuity, that you will live life in a linear way. What you will think, feel, say and do tomorrow will link evenly with what you thought, felt, said and did yesterday. You don’t change your mind, and you don’t change your stride. You stay inside your tent.
Something happens – a curve ball, a swerve that leaves you with the realization that ‘what you will become’ is at stake.
What you do now will shape everything that happens next.
I sometimes counsel people in those situations, and I see it. The momentary flash in someone’s eyes where they feel a moral flicker and that the way forward is open. I detect that moment of terrifying freedom, where, at least for a moment, the will to do what is required is greater than the habit to listen to a voice of fear, of pettiness, of self-righteousness, a voice of avoidance.
You can only feel regret when you realize you could have done something differently, something truer and more right. Regret for not having done the right thing leads to a certain kind of heartbreak – heartbreak from the knowledge of what you could have done, could have been. You live repairing that moment. That is a well-lived life.
I can never predict who will live toward the future and who will die, tied to the past. In the one-second flash in the eyes of wondering – “Can I do this?” “Can I become other than how I have been?” – we find the existential crisis. Can I break – free?
When Jacob put on the mask, another mask fell away. Jacob went from being an “ish tam” a “whole man,” to an “ish shavur,” a “broken man,” fragmented by the wisdom that is required for hard choices. And there’s nothing more precious before God than a broken heart. To know yourself is to know your broken heart.
