In this episode, Rabbi Reinman discusses the succession of the patriarchs and the raging conflict between Esau and Jacob over Isaac’s blessings.

Chapter Seventeen

Esau’s Tears

The Torah’s biography of Abraham is incomplete. We meet him when he is seventy-five years old. God tells him to forsake his homeland and travel to an as-yet unspecified destination, and Abraham obeys without question or protest. Clearly, he has already recognized God and rejected pagan society. Clearly, he has developed a complete and profound faith in God. Clearly, he has achieved the exalted level of prophecy. But we are not told how he arrived at this point.

The Talmud and the Midrash fill in the blanks. They tell us how Abraham arose from a pagan background and recognized the one true God and how he risked his life to disseminate the great truths he had discovered, but the Torah tells us nothing about his heroic earlier years and how he came to be a prophet of God. Why are we not told about the accomplishments of his earlier years?

Furthermore, the last we hear about Abraham in the Torah is his arrangement of a suitable marriage for his son Isaac. Afterward, he disappears from the text, even though he lived for another thirty-five years. It is inconceivable that a towering figure such as Abraham, a strong, brilliant, charismatic prophet, did nothing noteworthy during the last three decades of his life. Why are we not told about the accomplishments of his later years?…

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