Why Isaac, why Jacob? Why Isaac not Ishmael? Why Jacob not Esau? These are among the most searing questions in the whole of Judaism.

It's impossible to read Genesis 21 with its description of how Hager and her son were cast out into the wilderness, how their water ran out,

how Hagar placed Ishmael under a bush and sat at a distance so she wouldn't see him die,

without feeling intensely for both of them, mother and child.

They're both crying.

The Torah tells us that God heard Ishmael's tears and sent an angel to comfort Agar,

show her a well of water, and assure

her that God would make her son a great nation. The very promise he gave Abraham himself at the

start of his mission. Likewise, in the case of Esau, the emotional climax of the Pasha occurs

in chapter 27 at the point where Jacob leaves Isaac's presence,

having deceived him into thinking that he was Esau, then Esau enters.

And slowly, both father and son realize what has happened. This is what we read.

Then Isaac trembled with a very great trembling and said, who then was it?

Who hunted game and brought it to me,

and I ate it before you came, and I blessed him, and he will be blessed.

When Esau heard his father's words,

he cried an intensely loud and bitter cry,

and said to his father,

bless me too, my father.

These are among the most powerful descriptions of emotion in the whole of the

terror and they are precisely the opposite of what we would expect. We would expect the

terror to enlist our sympathies for the chosen, Isaac and Jacob. Instead, it almost forces us to

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