Thursday, May 3, 2012

Forefathers

All of our life (as far as I can remember) we have been taught about our great forefathers: Avraham, Yizchack and Yaakov. Now that we have analyized and looke more closely at the psukim and actions of our forefathers, my life has shattered. My idea of these amazing has been partially crushed and we are finally faced with reality.

What i simply wonder is why we have been taught all these great things about them (yes they were great and had many positive sides), but I feel like they were made to seem on a higher and better level than they actually are.

The same thing happened with the "bad, not zadikim" in the bible.
If you were asked who a bad, unchosen person in the bible was, many would think of Esav.

Why would many think that? Maybe because he ends up contrasting Yaakov, since Yaakov is all reighteous while he goes around trying to kill him. Well, I think this is very unfair, to judge someone as having internal factors even though it is actually external factors that drive them to act a certain way. What I mean is that Yaakov pushed him to do these things, and in some way he also had a "right" to get revenge. From the beginning he was not the spiritual one, who had it less in him to be moral and wonderful, but when Yaakov (and Rivka) took his bracha, what else were they expecting?

 I think we need to be more careful in the future about judging people in the torah, and this will certainly make me look more closley before I start analyzing a character from the torah, because as I have learned, I have been deceited in some way!

Thank you Mrs Perl for enlightening me.

1 comment:

  1. I agree wholeheartedly, Sharon. It's weird to think that we were raised in such a way to completely villainous people like Esav and maybe even Yishmael. It doesn't seem fair. It was probably just to teach us a lesson as kids, but it's important that as we grow up, we learn it in the text ourselves and are able to make decisive decisions based on our own reading and the readings of the commentators.

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