Thursday, November 08, 2007

Toldos: wasn't he in a rush?

Parshat Toldos

In 27:9 Yitzchak sends Esav to go hunt food for him. Yitzchak appears to be on his deathbed, or at least close to it. He is acting very rushed.

If that is so, why did he send Esav out hunting - hunting can take a lot of time. He should have just said go slaughter a couple of my goats from the pen (as Yaakov ended up doing). That is much quicker. And why did Esav go hunting? He should have just grabbed a couple of goats.

If Yitzchak is in such a rush, the whole process could have happened much quicker... So why did he tell Esav to go hunting?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I forget where I heard this,and it's difficult to explain on paper but here goes. In order to give the berachos Yitzchak needed to have a feeling of gratitude towards Eisav (the giving of the berachos built on existing feeling and magnified it). This gratitude had to be pure. Hence the meal had to be totally from the giver, not just something given to Eisav to prepare. Yaakov got around this by using Rivka's portion from her kesuba.

Rafi G. said...

one of the meforshim (I think the ramban) on the page talks about it that Rivka gave from the two goats she received daily from the kesuba. I hear about the gratitude, but it could have taken a day or two to hunt a deer and he seemed to be in a rush...

Anonymous said...

I hear you. Maybe Eisav was such a renowned hunter that Yitzchak expected him to be quick.(In the end Hashem delayed Eisav so much that he got frustrated and shechted a dog,according to one peshat.)

Also if it's part of the process then you do what you have to do.
Maybe that's why there was some urgency. When you have an open-ended process that needs to be done then you give yourself some lee-way to guarantee that you will have enough time.
Although how long could it take already...so i don't know.

(I thought I posted this already so I'm trying again. My apologies if it doubles.)