On Raising Hunters and Tent-Dwellers
This Shabbat, synagogues around the world will read Parshat Toldot, the story of two brothers who could not have been more different.
The Torah sums them up in a single verse: “The boys grew up. Esav became a skilled hunter, a man of the field, and Yaakov was a quiet man who stayed among the tents” (Genesis 25:27). Same parents. Same home. Born minutes apart. Yet by the time they were grown, it was obvious they were made for very different lives. One child was happiest outdoors, moving, chasing, building. Another was happier with a book, a question, and a quiet corner. Neither is better. They are just different.
The 19th-century thinker Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch read this verse as a warning to parents. Yitzchak and Rivka, he argued, raised both boys the same way, with the same lessons and the same expectations, without asking what each one actually needed. He pointed to the verse in Proverbs, “Educate a child according to his own way” (which, incidentally, was the motto of my own elementary school). Had someone looked closely at Esav’’s strength and personality, Rabbi Hirsch suggested, those traits could have been applied and amplified positively. Instead, one path was laid down for two very different boys, and Esav turned his strength toward destruction.
What Rabbi Hirsch does not say explicitly is that Esau’s nature was the problem. He says ignoring it was.
Thousands of years later, we still do this
Over the years, hundreds of yeshiva and seminary students have sat around our Shabbat table. Somewhere between the soup and dessert, the conversation almost always drifts to the same question: what are your plans for the future? For school? For your career? Surprisingly, only a small percentage actually have concrete plans. The rest hope to ‘figure it out’ somehow along the way. Sadly, many don’t know how to figure it out, and end up working in a career that isn’t the right fit, that they don’t truly enjoy. (Know any adults that struggle with the same issue?)
That isn’t their failure. It’s ours. Even in 2026, our community still prizes a narrow idea of what ‘good at something’ looks like: sitting still, following the rules, getting good grades. The child who can take apart an engine, calm a room full of strangers, or charm the skin off a snake rarely hears that those are strengths too, so they grow up unaware of these valuable abilities. The working world needs every one of those skills. Young people just need someone to explain that to them.
If Yaakov and Esav teach us anything about work, it is this: our natural abilities are not an accident, and they are not something we outgrow. The hunter and the tent-dweller each have real, necessary skills. They’re different but equal. The tragedy was not in the fact that they were born different. It was that nobody took the time to channel both strengths in a positive way.
Learning to recognize and appreciate our children’ s skills (and our own) is not self-indulgent. It is responsible. A person that chooses a career in line with how they’re built tends to do better work, last longer and come home happier and more fulfilled at the end of the day. That is true for the electrician and the engineer, the teacher and the entrepreneur, the 22-year-old and the 52-year-old.
So this Shabbat, we’ll be asking a different question at the table, and I encourage you to do the same. Ask not “What do you want to be?” but “What activities make you feel the happiest?” Ask your kids. Ask the students at your table. Ask yourself. Then really listen to the answer. It might point toward the field, or toward the tent. Either way, it’s pointing somewhere real.
