Hearts and Livers: The Conflict of Yaakov and Esav Over Survival and Meaning

The modern family can relate to the story of Yaakov and Esav more than is probably comfortable to admit. How two siblings can be so different and how two parents can be so at odds is beyond perplexing. From a genetic standpoint there is no one more similar to you than your siblings. This is all the more so true if we reject the Ibn Ezra and the Midrash Rabba (Bereshes 25:25) and argue they were identical twins (Rav Hirsch, Bereshes 25:25). Twins aside, your siblings are a collage of your parent’s personality. Not to mention looks, intelligence, and values. But each one of these concepts are complicated. Sure, on paper you’re most like your siblings but the level of variation here is so large that this isn’t saying much. Take personality traits. You can roughly break up a personality into five dimensions. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and threat sensitivity. Each, while distinct dimensions, intertwine with one another in interesting ways. To put the level of complexity into perspective, reality only has three dimensions. For kicks, throw in time. That’s tough enough to practically get a handle on. Five is impossible. And that’s just one level of conceptualization that I listed. You see how you have your dad’s work ethic and mom’s agreeableness. Heaven help you see how you relate at all to your kid brother.

Not only are you practically different from your siblings, but the areas of conflict are loaded. Even the best sibling relationship runs aground because there are two flash points. And boy, are they a woozie – space and parental love. “Stay off my bed or I’ll end you.” “Watch it bucko, I was talking to dad first.” It’s hard to find anything more primal to a person than their place in the world and their parents’ attention. The only solution cultures have figured out to fix this problem is hierarchies. How do you get extremely different people who are constantly at war over territory and want nothing more than to monopolize airtime with their parents to get along? You assign a pecking order of showing honor and respect from oldest to youngest. Family historian Stephanie Coontz reports that, up until 100 years ago, this solution worked swimmingly. Stories of siblings consulting the eldest and group meetings with the organization of the military abound. They’re really sweet to read. And also alien. While our community certainly preserves a strong smell of this approach, it’s fair to say it ain’t like it used to be.

Yaakov and Esav’s story is about how each carved out a very different place in the same world. This is made all the stickier when you throw in the different parental influences. Yitzchak was not only physically blind but psychologically blind to who Esav really was. While no fool, he held out real hope Esav would be the leader of the two twins. His strength and courage would be the governing virtue in their work together in making a better world (Rav Hirsch, Parshas Toldos). Rivka, quite correctly, saw the difference between potentiality and actuality. Hope is a powerful driving force for good. A necessary ingredient of a good life. But, misplaced hope is equally destructive. The difference between the two seems to be the former is more rooted in the facts. What is actually the case? Can you reasonably assume the status quo will carry forward to a more full actualization? Those are two questions that set apart real bitachon from its averah version (Mesilas Yesharim, Ch. 9). Rivka was a realist.

This parental conflict over values and potential can feel overwhelming. How can we hope to unravel the infinite variables of personality, life experiences, and decisions shaping the destinies of Yaakov and Esav? To tackle this complexity, we need the Ramchal’s advice. Seek a metaphor that simplifies and organizes the elements of complexity. We can’t sift through all the personality and life differences of Yaakov and Esav to know the root of their differences. We also can’t untie the infinite interactions between them and their parents that explains why Yitzchak put his hope in Esav. There’s just too much information to tackle, there. Instead, as the Ramchal advises in his book on rhetoric, you need a metaphor. An image, as opposed to a formal description, acts as a type of container of the near infinite facts and figures. A good metaphor also gives this infinite mess a hierarchical structure. Which fact is more important and how much more important than the others. By limiting infinite facts and rank ordering them meaning can emerge. The Zohar provides such a metaphor.

“When Rav Kahana arrived, he expounded: The body is governed by two components, the liver and the heart. Rabbi Yehuda explained: the brain governs the head, but the liver and heart govern the body. This corresponds to ‘And the children struggled within her,’ symbolizing the dual foundations of the body.” (Toldos 6:58). Ok, we’re getting somewhere. These two body parts symbolize the two main motivational drives of the body. But, this source doesn’t exactly crack the code for us, either. Step one in cracking an image is to first look at it from a physical and functional perspective. That’s the beauty of why a metaphor works so well. You start with the basic idea of what you know and is most obvious. Then, tethered to what you know, you can now scale the mountain of the metaphor to see more (Ramchal, Book of Rhetoric). You get farther being rooted in what you know.

Unpacking this image, physically, the liver isn’t just large. Weighing in at three pounds and being the size of a football, it’s the largest organ of your body. Functionally, it purifies your body of toxins and is pivotal in your immune system. It sits mostly in the upper right part of your abdomen but trails off a tad on your left side on top of your diaphragm. It’s thick, it’s heavy, it’s soft and flexible, it’s foundational. The heart, on the other hand, is a whole different story. The size of a fist, it only comes in at around 10 ounces. Functionally, it’s not an organ. It’s a muscle. While the liver is busy making real changes to the material nature of your body – processing nutrients, synthesizing proteins, regulating glucose, purifying, breaking down waste, helping out with digestion, and being all fancy – the heart is mechanical. With its four chambers, it pushes oxygenated blood from your lungs to the rest of your body and deoxygenated blood back to the lungs for a refill. Simply put, the liver is complicated and creative. The heart is a low-level paper pusher.

Interpreting these two images, the liver is the source of primal survival emotions. The heart is the locus of intuitive understanding (Kisvei Ramad Vali, 363). Everything about the liver is about life overcoming death. Deep in our body, but still above the gunk of total waste that sits in our intestines, it straddles two worlds. Our liver is like a warrior sitting in the mud of the trenches. It is in the thick of it getting its hands dirty with the physical. However, in so doing, it purifies the poisonous elements of death out of our very blood – the life force of us all. Its regulatory and regenerative functions align it with chaos but is what enables transformative and creative purification. It’s the unfiltered survival responses that dominate in moments of crisis. It’s able to entirely hold the waste of those crisis moments Functionally, it contains and is able to endure and metabolize the “toxins” of life. Trauma, fear, and anger. The heart, although also straddling the physical and the spiritual, does so much differently. It is elevated above the liver. It’s light, even hallow. Airy, as it were. It’s constant rhythmic consistency, while not creative like the liver, plays an organizing function. This is far more refined and abstract. Not in the dirt concrete. In moving the blood to the lungs, it reinvigorates what is dead with new life. A ruach. It then takes this spirit of life distributing it throughout the body. It fills the physical with the airy spiritual. It’s tempting to associate spiritual meaning with wisdom. They’re close but not the same. The heart, like the liver, is still a bodily motivational force. Neither is the chochma of intellect, seated at the most elevated place in our body – the brain.

Both are transcendent and both are transformative. Both bring about life but in very different ways. While the liver removes death from the already living body preserving and refining the meaning it already has, the heart fills the body with spiritual potential. It gives the body new meaning. While roughly similar, these two vantage points in the creation of meaning stand in tension. They also need each other. Our instinctual drives, of the Liver, seeks survival. Its reality is one of constant struggle, war, and strife clawing against death. For this you need weight. You need strength. You need raw power. All the things Esav represented and even looked like in his physical form – hairy and ruddy red. Fully formed ready for fight. The heart, on the other hand, stands above the war. It has nothing to do with the primal struggle to hold on to life. It gets to be safe. I don’t mean this pejoratively, but it does “get to indulge” in meaning as nothing really stands in the way of this. The symbolic liver is what provides the energy, resilience, and metabolic endurance for the heart to do what it does. It’s the grounding force of survival that anchors the heart allowing it to exist to begin with. Sure, the heart is the stage of revealing meaning to the body but it’s the liver that sets the stage.

After unpacking the image of the liver and heart, we have a shot at seeing what was going on between Yitzchak and Rivka. Yitzchak, knew the powerful symbolic energy represented in the liver. This symbolic meaning was the DNA of the Akeda. Yitzchak was brought to the very edge of death and was purified of it and transformed through it. His life story onward was one of survival and the transcended renewal in that survival. That’s the underlying theme of the re-digging of the wells. He knew, intimately, the result of digging deep in the dirt to purge it resulted in the creative force of life. He saw Esav’s primal instincts as necessary to channel the chaos of the world into meaning. Rivka, on the other hand, acted as the heart. She perceived the higher, intuitive truths that transcended Esav’s raw vitality. She knew Esav lacked the moral integrity required to be a just and good leader. This too Rivka knew from experience. As a young girl, she saw what muck looked like. Lavan, Betsuel – Her brother and father were the lowest of the low. As a mother, she also knew the transformative power of infusing an entire family with meaning. She tied everything together as the heart of the family. Rivka saw Yaakov as the one capable of infusing the family’s mission with purpose. She knew this task was not a matter of preserving life but elevating it to align with divine will. The liver’s vision, while vital, was incomplete without the heart’s discernment. Rivka stepped in to balance this dynamic.

Families, like bodies, are systems where survival and meaning are constantly negotiated. Yitzchak and Rivka’s conflict reminds us the liver and heart have essential roles. But, their roles must be integrated for the family to thrive. Survival instincts alone, while necessary, cannot guide a family toward its higher purpose. Conversely, spiritual insight requires the grounding strength of survival to manifest. More than that. As the Zohar makes clear, the mind stands above these two forces and acts to integrate each together. In navigating sibling differences, parental roles, and the inevitable conflicts of personality, we can learn to balance these forces. A family that can “use its head” to honor both the liver’s grounding resilience and the heart’s intuition will find a way to not just survive, but grow to its fullest potential.