Who Are You, Esau or Jacob?

Babies are the worst roommates. They’re unemployed. They don’t pay rent. They keep insane hours. Their hygiene is horrible. If you had a roommate who did any of the things babies do, you’d ask them to move out. ‘Do you remember what happened last night? Today you’re all smiles, but last night you were hitting the bottle really hard. Then you started screaming, and you threw up on me. Then you passed out and wet yourself. I went into the other room to get you some dry clothes. I came back, and you made my entire bed dirty. Dude, you gotta move out. 

The scene in the Torah where Jacob takes Esau’s blessing is one of its most emotionally powerful moments. Jacob has just left when Esau enters, full of anticipation. The Torah, usually sparse in emotional detail, suddenly becomes vivid: Isaac trembles; Esau cries out in bitter disappointment; father and son stand stunned, grieving the moment that should have been tender—a son feeding his father, a father blessing his son.

Reading the text alone, our sympathy naturally leans toward Esau. He returns exhausted and hungry, only to find his brother bargaining for food as a birthright. Later, on his way to receive his father’s blessing, he is again overtaken by Jacob. Throughout the chapter, the Torah says nothing explicitly negative about Esau—other than selling the birthright in a moment of hunger and later wanting to kill Jacob in a moment of rage. His actions are human, relatable, even understandable.

Esau appears as a man of the field—impulsive, physical, deeply devoted to his father. The harsh portrait of Esau as a violent sinner comes only from Midrash, not from the biblical text itself. Why the discrepancy? And if Esau was wicked, why did Isaac love him so much? Why didn’t Rebecca reveal his supposed evil to her husband?

The Torah seems to be revealing something deeper about Esau’s essence—something redemptive. It presents him not as a villain, but as a soul with profound internal struggle.

In the Womb

The Midrash describing Rebecca’s tumultuous pregnancy—one child drawn to holiness, the other to idolatry—raises its own question: If Esau was destined toward negativity from the womb, how can he be judged for it? A lion is not “wicked” for acting like a lion. Struggle is not sin; predisposition is not guilt.

Two Types of Souls

The Rebbe, drawing on Maimonides, explains that humanity contains two general archetypes:

1. The “cruiser”:
A naturally balanced, consistent soul. Obeys easily, succeeds smoothly, lives with inner harmony. This is Jacob.

2. The “conqueror”:
One who wrestles constantly—with impulses, distraction, trauma, temperament, or emotional complexity. Life is a daily battle. This is Esau.

Neither child is “good” or “bad.” One is simple; the other is struggling. The struggler’s challenges are not a flaw—they are his mission.

Isaac’s Two Delicacies

The Alter Rebbe explains Isaac’s request for “delicacies” in the plural. There are two spiritual delights God loves:

• The sweetness of the tzaddik—the naturally righteous soul.
• The sharp, spiced offering of the struggler—the one who battles darkness and transforms it.

Sweet and sour. Simple and intense. Both are beloved.

Esau’s Mission

Esau was created to grapple with inner turbulence and elevate it. His struggle was not a sign of inferiority but of purpose. Isaac saw in Esau not a criminal but a conqueror—a soul with immense potential whose challenges could yield extraordinary spiritual depth.

Rebecca understood this, too. When Esau threatens Jacob, she sends Jacob away—not Esau. Esau needed to remain near the one parent who believed in him and could nurture his potential.

Tragically, Esau eventually stops struggling and gives in to his impulses. His downfall was not that he struggled, but that he stopped fighting.

Yet the Torah preserves his original purity, so we never forget who Esau was meant to be—and so we don’t repeat the mistake with our own children.

Seeing the Struggler

Every person contains both Jacob and Esau—moments of clarity and moments of chaos. We must never shame the struggler, in ourselves or in our families. The child who battles anxiety, impulsivity, trauma, or inner storms may be offering God the deepest delicacy of all.

Our task is to love them, validate them, celebrate their victories, and teach them to transform struggle into song—like King David did, like the modern Israeli singer Chanan Ben Ari writes:

In a haunting song, Chanan depicts the epic struggles of the major characters in the Torah:

“Every person is expelled from the Garden of Eden

Everyone undergoes a flood
Every person has some Abel
About whom he is deathly jealous.

In everyone there is a tower of rebellion and confusion...

Deep inside, there is a small Sodom

That he wants to erase already
And some angels will rescue him

And I also dream like Joseph.

Yes, they also threw me into the pit.”

But then he concludes with this devastating, uplifting line:

...And like David, I make it into a song

This is the objective of the conqueror. To take the struggles, the trauma, the wounds, the skeletons, the sins, the murderous impulse, the Sodom within, the jealousy, and turn them into a song.

A Final Lesson

We must embrace each child fully—cruiser or conqueror, Jacob or Esau. When we do, our homes and communities become places where every soul can shine, and where even the struggler’s journey becomes a divine delight.

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky