Dear Rivka,
I discovered Yaakov left with his family about an hour after they abandoned us. No doubt you won’t believe me when I tell you that I’d already decided to let them go and would have given them my full blessing the next morning. You wouldn’t be able to accuse me of delaying them for a moment if Rokhel, whom Yaakov taught everything about your house’s god, hadn’t stockpiled hoards of gods from my own collection. Knowing the statues would easily be discovered and how much they would offend you and Yaakov, I immediately sent for my best horses to catch up with them, took my gods back and said a swift goodbye to my family that I love dearly in the best and most forgiving way. Rokhel is now your problem, a true Jewish Arabian Princess.
It’s made me unhappy to read you taking offense at my treatment of Yaakov so many times, but I repeat, all that I’ve done was for our family’s good. You have the luxury of viewing our situation from 650 miles’ distance. In my position, you’d make no decision differently and you can’t possibly tell me that I’ve withheld the dangers of our situation because I know I’ve sent decades of letters to you about it. Whether it was about our exodus from Ur to Kharan or the dangers of having Assyrian clients and tenants, there’s nothing I’ve kept from you. You just didn’t have eyes to see or ears to hear anything about it. Nothing here in Mesopotamia is more dangerous than Sumeria ever was, or Canaan is, An & Enlil and Enki be praised. If I spared you the explicit details, it’s because I know how you worry about Yaakov, but this is why I’ve constantly advised you you’re not a person of business. You never understood the risks, you never wanted to understand, and if you did, you’d never sleep.
You’re absolutely right, I’ve dismissed you for being a woman for a century, and it wasn’t right of me. I swear before Divine An that I repent and plead both An’s mercy and yours; but I do know you Rivka, and whether it has anything to do with your womanhood, I know that even if you had the kishkes for running a business, being a woman would make running a family house much more labor for you than it ever was for me - and it’s always plenty. You were always smart, and being smart is helpful in business, but what you really need is chutzpah of steel - which hasn’t been invented yet, but you know what I mean. You wouldn’t just spend the last century avoiding fraud, you’d spend it avoiding assassins who know that a woman as a household head endangers every male power in the world. You’d have to kill every powerful man before they kill you, because your death would be the example to every woman who dreamed as passionately as you did of a just world.
But to be perfectly honest, in recent years, my opinion of you changed drastically. What changed it was reading how you defrauded your own son, and I don’t know which I’d worry about more: whether you don’t have any killer instinct, or whether you have too much. Maybe you could have been the woman with the kishkes to succeed in a man’s world, but how can any person who kills that many people on the hope of creating a more just world be righteous?
And so, if “Yitzhak” is in a coma, there’s no sense in longer keeping from you my deepest secret. If I’d ever told you this information before now you’d have immediately told Yaakov, and he’d either leave or see through the lesson I tried so hard to teach.
Three days before Yaakov arrived at my well, high on hash if you recall, I got a letter from Yitzhak/Yishmael about which he clearly never told you. He ordered me to burn it immediately after reading, but I remember every word.
The original lie which gave Yitzhak/Yishmael his lifelong wealth was almost a century ago, but he felt shame at living Yitzhak’s life every day which only grew with every decade; and during your family’s more recent conflicts, so great was the shame that his head was stricken by a horrible voice; not a pleasant, blessed voice like An who kept company with his father, but a screeching, horrible voice like Nergal’s who every day pierced his skull and slit his flesh; a voice who never stopped telling Yitzhak/Yishmael that deception is built into the House of Avraham’s entire future; claiming your house’s idea of only one god who rules over all creation will always be tarnished with an original sin of dishonesty that will repeat itself from generation to generation for as long as the House of Avraham exists.
To be perfectly honest, I always thought the idea was a shandeh. Living is hard enough without convincing people they’ll live more honestly if they believe in a god who controls everything, reads all their thoughts, and follows them everywhere. I know your husband thinks the idea will redeem the world and make people act more decently, but it’s going to put every mind who believes it into a prison. It will only make them suffer more, tell more lies, be more violent, more covetous. If it ever caught on it could turn the whole world into meshuggeners like Avraham.
When Yitzhak/Yishmael saw how easily you decided to lie when you second-guessed your husband’s judgement, and how quickly Yaakov agreed to conspire with you, your husband decided he had proof that the voice was absolutely right, and I don’t doubt that when Esav unknowingly married his half-sister, the voice sent him into a permanent sleep.
Yitzhak/Yishmael saw that Esav was a slow learner, but was good natured and always did the right thing. When Esav handed Yaakov his Birthright, as a joke, Yaakov immediately claimed Esav’s joke was a serious exchange and threatened to throw the document into the fire rather than return it, then he hid it in a place which only he knew. When Yitzhak/Yishmael heard what Yaakov did, he saw that the voice’s suspicion was true; that dishonesty motivates your faith like yeast leavens bread, and that however shrewd and charming, Yaakov was dishonorable and false-hearted.
And you not only believed Yaakov, you helped the son you love more steal the blessings and possessions of the son you love less! That was your plan, Rivka, not Yaakov’s. Thanks to you, Yaakov is the designated heir and there’s no way for Esav or Yitzhak/Yishmael to reverse the effects of your betrayal, but it was Esav, not Yaakov, who ran the House of Avraham brilliantly for twenty years, and the disasters you predicted for Esav’s period as household head never materialized.
What Yaakov required, Yitzhak/Yishmael wrote to me, with underlining, was brutal discipline. According to your husband, Yaakov’s dishonesty was due to his mother spoiling him. You insisted that Yaakov was not cut out for challenging work, you made sure he got easy jobs shepherding the herds while Esav hunted large animals in the desert, going without food and sometimes water for days, endangering his survival against savage beasts. Whether Esav has any brains, he has the seykhel for business, he has the kishkes, and he has the…
So if Esav was angry enough to say he wanted to murder Yaakov a few minutes after learning that his own brother and mother betrayed him, he soon realized he didn’t mean it; and even if he did mean it at the moment he said so, he long since repented his words and told me he regrets them every day.
If you were paying attention, you’d see that Esav’s long since forgiven his brother and, more obviously, forgiven you. His scribe wrote me that Yaakov will be welcome at a surprise celebration with hundreds of Hittite guests. Esav forgave both you and Yaakov, but neither of you have forgiven me for my deceptions, deceptions that are obviously on a level more trivial than your own betrayal of your son and husband.
And even so, when I heard everything that Yaakov did, I appreciated straight away that this is a guy with the chutzpah to be a great businessman, but he needed to learn business’s risks, he needed to accept the price of success, he needed to understand exactly what it means to be a cattle trader and endure all the humiliations of apprenticeship just like I did. Being a boss is no easier than being an associate. A good head of the house still carries the heavy stones by himself, still picks the weeds with the bondsmen, still gets on his knees to wash the sheds; he cleans sheep drek from the backside wool, his hands have bloody scabs from plucking the chickens, this is the way Abba learned, this is the way Zaydie learned, the way apprenticeship is always done and I guarantee it was much more ruthless in the past.
I don’t expect to be thanked, but Esav assured me Yaakov will return a hero. Esav is nearly 100, claims he has enough savings and wants nothing more than to take a cruise down the Nile. Even if Esav stays in Canaan, you’ll have two sons near home who can run the House of Avraham brilliantly and make a living that keeps your descendents out of the slave house forever. Meanwhile, the House of Terakh has no capable heir yet, and even at the age of a hundred thirty, I can’t retire. You can’t possibly know what a burden it is to work as hard at one-hundred-thirty as you did at thirty and there are no words for my exhaustion. At times I even believe I’m hearing the voice Avraham heard all those years ago….
An & Enlil and Enki be praised, all my love, and your welcome,
Lavan
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