Parashat Toledot
December 3, 2005


Jacob’s parashah opens the intriguing history of the interaction between Esau and the progenitor of the Jewish people, his brother Jacob, whose name God will eventually change to Israel.

The biblical Esau, as the Bible makes clear, is the father of the Edomite people. The Edomites, who lived in southern Jordan, later became the only people forcibly converted to Judaism. Herod the Great, Governor of Palestine when Jesus of Narazeth was born, came from an Edomite family. Thus Esau begins a line of cousins to the Jewish people who live an uncomfortable family relationship over centuries.

I believe that Esau lived; which is to say, I think someone with that same name actually existed in Israelite history. I believe the same thing about Jacob as well, and Isaac and Rebecca and Abraham and Sarah. But that is not what is important. Whether the founders of our people actually existed in a physical sense is simply interesting. Much more important is their mythic history. Jacob’s name means deceiver. Thus the Bible is recounting for us that his character had to be altered. Born to deception, he needed to change his behavior to become the father of the Jewish people. Only when Jacob struggles with God’s angel, and God changes his name to Israel, does he become appropriate as the spiritual father of God’s chosen. He learns the impact and injustice of deception. Thus it is not the factual history of Jacob that is important, but the mythical history – who we say Jacob was in terms of our belief system of what it means to be a Jew. We are not descendants of a deceiver, but of a person who has struggled with God in his life and triumphed.

The same is true of Esau. Perhaps Esau lived, perhaps not. But the struggle between Esau and Jacob became the mythic archetype for the struggle between Judaism and Christianity: two religions born of the same mother who have struggled with each other ever since.

In the common parlance myth equals untruth, as in the common phrase, “Urban myth.” But when studying religion myth means a story that expresses an important underlying reality. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, was not created as a scientific account of how the world came to be, as claimed by the Kansas State Board of Education. Our ancestors did not ask such questions. Rather its underlying meaning describes the Israelite vision of the structure of the universe as a orderly, moral place, created by God, in which we humans serve the purpose of carrying out God’s will in the world. Myth describes profound insight. The story line of the myth Jacob read this morning, the birth of Jacob and Esau, may be factually true or not. But its importance lies not in its historical veracity, but in what it created as a mindset of the relationship between the descendants of Jacob and the descendants of Esau.

This distinction between fact and myth got Prof. Paul Mirecki of KU into big trouble this week, according the Kansas City Star. Prof. Mirecki, chairman of the religion department at KU, intended to teach a course in cosmologies, including the notion of Intelligent Design. He rightfully placed Intelligent Design among various nations’ ideas of how the world came into being. Such a course would not examine the truth claims, meaning the historicity, of a people’s idea of the structure of the world. That would be the job of science. The job of academic religion is to understand how an ethnic group, how a people, sees the structure of the world. Is the world a benevolent or a violent place? Is the world structured or chaotic? What is the human role in creation? Are we simply the spit of the gods, meant to suffer throughout our lives, or are we “little lower than the angels,” capable of great good in cooperation and partnership with the deity? These are some of the religious questions of cosmologies, and I assume that Dr. Mirecki’s course would have examined not the truth of the cosmologies but the meaning of these cosmologies.

Unfortunately, once again in Kansas ignorance has triumphed. I remember well when Mayor Anthony Williams of Washington, D.C. accepted the resignation of an aide because he used the word “niggardly,” meaning miserly, in a conversation with two other employees whose English vocabulary didn’t extend to such depth. David Howard was forced to resign in January 1999, even though he had no racial intent in the word, it was a perfectly appropriate word to the situation, and it was the ignorance of the two people who heard the word that was the real issue. But in this case, ignorance triumphed, and Mr. Howard had to find a new job.

So too, in Kansas, ignorance once again rules the day. Of course, Prof. Mirecki didn’t help his course or his case by sending emails, again according to the Star, that said that the course title, including the word mythology, was intended to be a slap at fundamentalist Christians. Among the things I learned in the same religion courses that taught me about analyzing mythologies, was that the first step in the study of religions was to respect the believers. We were taught that to analyze a religion correctly you must be able to write about it in such a way that the believers themselves would acknowledge the truth of the analysis. Clearly, Prof. Mirecki’s personal statements did not meet that criterion. That is unfortunate for a professor of religion, particularly in the politically charged religious atmosphere of Kansas today. But nonetheless, the proposed course might have made a very legitimate contribution to the understanding of Intelligent Design in the history of religious thought. That would have been a wonderful thing for well informed students to learn.