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[Esau would ask his father:] “How does
one tithe straw?”
Midrash Rabbah, Bereishit 63:15
And the house of Jacob shall be fire ...
and the house of Esau, straw
Obadiah 1:18
Straw, being animal fodder, is absolved from
the obligation of tithing,[1]
which applies only to produce grown for human consumption.
Esau inquired of Isaac as to how to tithe straw, wishing to
impress his father with a demonstration of copious piety;
in doing so, he also demonstrated a fatal flaw in his approach
to life.
Man, the Kabbalists tell us,[2]
is vitalized by no less than two souls: we each possess both
an “animal soul” and a “G-dly soul.” The
animal soul is the motor of physical life, incorporating the
instincts, drives, desires and faculties that serve the survival
and perpetuation of the physical self. In this, the human
being is another animal, however intelligent and sensitive
an animal. What distinguishes him from the animal world is
his G-dly soul, which embodies his striving to transcend the
animal state and relate to the Divine.
All endeavors of man are either “human food” that
fuels the spiritual life of the G-dly soul, or “animal
fodder” that nourishes the material life of the animal
soul. Both are indispensable to our purpose in life, for the
soul can operate and achieve its goals only via a physical
self; but one must take care not to confuse the means with
the end. One must always be able to distinguish between the
sacred and the mundane in one’s life, and remember which
exists to serve which.
Esau wished to tithe the straw of life, to attribute spiritual
worth to animal fodder. Instead of exploiting the material
to serve the spiritual, he wished to invest the material with
a significance and value of its own.
The end, of course, was that the “dew of the heavens
and the fat of the land”[3]
intended for Esau was given to Jacob, who could be trusted
to “tithe” or idealize only what nurtures the man
in man—the G-dly drives and aspirations that distinguish
the human from the animal.
Unfit Fodder
In the end of days, prophesies the prophet, when the purpose
of creation will reach its fulfillment, “the house of
Jacob shall be fire... and the house of Esau, straw.”
This is not the same straw of which Esau spoke to Isaac.
The Hebrew word used in that connection by the Midrash is
teven, while the prophet describes the house of Esau
as kash. While both words loosely translate as “straw,”
teven is more precisely the chaff that is harvested
together with the grain and is subsequently fed to the livestock,
while kash is the stubble that remains in the field
and is too coarse even for animal consumption.[4]
Esau was initially entrusted with the teven, the straw
symbiotically related to the grain—the straw that feeds
the animal that serves man. But when he sought to reverse
this relationship—to make straw the focus and object
of life—his teven turned to kash, into
a hollow husk depleted of all nutritive potential.
In the perfect world of Moshiach, such empty materialism
will cease to be—the kash of Esau will be utterly
consumed by the spiritual fire [5]
of Jacob. Teven, on the other hand, will become the
staple of the animal kingdom, as the prophet says, “the
lion, like the ox, shall eat straw (teven).”[6]
Based on an entry in the Rebbe's journal, circa 1942[7]
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[1] Giving a tenth of one’s produce to the Levite
or the pauper.
[2] Rabbi Chaim Vital, Shaar Hakedushah; Etz Chaim,
Portal 50, ch. 2; elaborated in Tanya and Chabad Chassidic
literature
[4] Talmud, Bava Metzia 103a and Shabbat 36b.
[5] “My word is as fire, says G-d” in reference
to the Torah, the “voice of Jacob” (Jeremiah 23:29;
Talmud, Berachot 22a; midrashim on Genesis 27:22).
[7] Reshimot #19, pp. 7-10.
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