Toyldoys / תולדת

This is a weekly series of frum, trans, anarchist parsha dvarim [commentaries]. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns (or worse: is) Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make it more comfortable for us) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

Content note: mentions of Thanksgiving and stolen land, the occupation and genocide in Palestine, food insecurity, and gay stuff like bear-twink dynamics and piss play.

Appropriate for the week of Thanksgiving, this is a parsha about birthrights stolen. What are we entitled to by accident of birth?

Yakov is the cleverer child, and a patriarch of the Jewish people. He also tricks his brother and deceives his dying father for his own gain.

Yitskhok is blind. He tells Eysov, his favored son and firstborn, to go hunting and make him a meal so that be might bless him. Rivka hears this and instructs Yakov, her favorite, to trick Yitskhok so that he might receive his twin brother Eysov's blessing.

Eysov is a bear, Yakov is a twink. (The Rabbis read hairiness as wickedness and smoothness as goodness [Bereshis Rabo, 65:15], which is interesting if disappointing.) Eysov is brutish and not very bright, a hunter; Yakov is the second born, the weaker one, more feminine and frum (he "dwelt in tents"). Yakov is smarter. Both have a streak of cruelty.

While Eysov is out hunting, Rivka (not Yakov) does the hard work of killing, skinning, and prepping the goat meal before giving Yakov his brother's nicest clothes, plus goat gloves and a goat neck gaiter, in order to trick Yitskhok. Rivka is unhappy.