In this week’s Torah reading Rebecca gives birth to twins, Esau and Jacob, whose conflict will lead Jacob fleeing for his life.
Sibling relationships in the Torah are often fraught – Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Leah and Rachel, even Moses, Aaron, and Miriam – we have no shortage of difficulties in among our founding families.
Still, we must persist in looking at these relationships as the bedrock of building good society beyond our immediate families. When Esau and Jacob, and Isaac and Ishmael, reconciled they laid the foundation for peace between the large clans that they built as adults. When Leah and Rachel, along with their co-mothers Zilpah and Bilhah, figured out how to tend to their many children together, they nurtured the ancestors of all the People of Israel.
Let us learn the lessons of our ancestral families and take on the efforts of reconciling before too many years or decades pass.