Was Jacob right to take Esau’s blessing in disguise? Was he right to deceive his father and to take from his brother the blessing Isaac sought to give him? Was Rebecca right in conceiving the plan in ...

Jacob and Esau reunite after decades of separation following Jacob’s tricking Isaac into blessing him (while masquerading as Esau). Esau felt livid, cheated, and destroyed, determined to kill Jacob in ...

Say what you will about what Esau, it is hard to read this week’s sedra without feeling sorry for him. Having traded away his birthright, he now loses his blessing, as well. The Torah portrays the ...

What is worth striving for? Fighting for? Dying for? This week’s Parsha, Vayetzei, focuses on how Jacob became Israel, the next in line after Abraham and Isaac, the successor in the covenant that ...

In this week’s Torah portion, Jacob is grappling with fear at the prospect of returning home to his parents’ house more than 20 years after he left. Last he heard, his father Isaac was dying, his twin ...

One of the most anguished and compelling sections of the Book of Genesis tells the story of Jacob and Esau vying for their father’s blessing. As many of us know, Jacob—with the help of his mother, ...

The classic wrestling match in Biblical literature is that between the most dissimilar twins, Jacob and Esau. They began their struggle with each other even before they were born, in their mother ...

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Thanks for joining Part Three of our occasional series about “flawed biblical characters blessed by the Lord.” The purpose is to remind us that God sometimes chose men (yes, usually men) with less ...

This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. I was thrilled ...

In our Torah portion, Va-Yishlach, we have one of the most dramatic and vivid scenes in the Bible – Jacob wrestling with an angel. Except, in our Torah portion, it is never written that Jacob wrestled ...