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This week’s reading tells of how Yaakov dressed in the garments of his brother Aisav and tricked his father, Yitzchak, into giving him Aisav’s blessings.
This does teach us how important blessings are (even the wicked Aisav wanted them) but it doesn’t seem to put Yaakov ‘Our Father’ in a very positive light.
First of all, why did Yitzchak want to bless Aisav in the first place? Didn’t he understand that Aisav was evil? Why did he force Yaakov to steal the blessings?
And why did he have to cheat? Yaakov was supposed to be a spiritual person, why didn’t he trust G_d to give him the blessings? And why did he want them so badly?
And finally, why didn’t G-D help just bless Yaakov or make Isaac change his mind and bless him?  Why the conflict?

I’d like to answer these questions with a story.

It was a beautiful autumn day in the Ukraine. The open fields were in blossom, the warm sun was illuminating the distant mountains, the winter was still weeks away, and the weather was perfect for a stroll or a picnic.
But Shlomo the innkeeper was facing humiliation and death.
That night he would be taken from his pit-dungeon and hundreds of drunken barbarians would stab him to death when he fell down in the ‘Dance of the Bears’.
He was so sick and depressed he wished it were over right now, that he would just die in his sleep tonight. “Oy, Hashem” he whispered to himself “Please do something, please help me!”
For almost a year, since he had been thrown into the pit for not paying his rent, he’d been saying the same prayer in a hundred different variations, but now he understood that it must be that G-d wants another martyr.
He thought about his wife and six children, what would become of them? And he began crying again for the thousandth time. “Oy! Rebono-Shel-Olom, help me!! Ratavet! (Save me) Have mercy!” But the only reply he heard through the barred-up hole above him were the crickets outside and the drunken guard singing some off tune melody.
“They will come down to get me soon from that hole.” He thought to himself and he shuddered from cold fear, huddled up on his straw and tried to close his eyes.
Suddenly he heard the lock clicking above him. Someone slid away the bars covering the hole and threw down a rope ladder. He noticed that the singing had stopped, and his eyes were glued to the man descending.
Gevalt!!! It was an old Jew, maybe sixty, maybe ninety years old, with a long white beard and a shining face climbing down the ladder! It was a Jew! Maybe it was an angel!?
When he had finally descended, he brushed himself off saying, “Don’t worry, the guard is good and drunk! I told him it was my birthday and wanted to drink with him, after two bottles and all the singing and dancing he did, he’ll sleep soundly for a while.”

Shlomo’s heart was pounding with excitement, despite the darkness he recognized the old man! It was none other than the great Tzadik, the Shpola Zaide (Grandpa of Shpola). They say that he received a blessing from the Baal Shem Tov when he was just days old for warmth and enthusiasm in serving G-d and to be “A Grandfather (Zaide) in Israel”. From then on, he was called “Zaide” and was renowned for his wisdom, Joy and ……. dancing.
He was famous for his dancing and sometimes on Motze Shabbos (Saturday night) he would call musicians and dance for hours. (Some said that with each step and graceful turn he was really fighting spiritual battles and fixing unseen problems according to deep Kabalistic secrets.)
“Your only chance is to dance as well as you can.” Said the Tzadik. “Don’t try to escape. If you run away and they discover there is no one here they will just take your family in your place. But don’t worry I’m here to help you. I’m going to try to teach you how to dance. You will win, DON’T WORRY.”
But poor Shlomo was so weak and sick that try as he would, he could barely move his feet. And after a futile half-hour the Tzadik changed his plan.
“Nu, Shlomo. Give me your clothes and put on my coat! Good! Now take this money, climb up the ladder and run home! Take your family to the town of Shpole. The people there will care for you. I’ll stay here. No one will notice the difference. Go!!! Go home!! Just remember, pull up the ladder and, here is the key, pull the bars back over the hole, lock it and put the key in the guard’s pocket, and RUN!!! Now GO!!”
The frail, bewildered man did as he was told and in minutes the Tzadik was alone.

Four hours later, at midnight, he was lifted out of the pit, dressed in a bearskin and led to the center of a torch-lit, makeshift arena. There, facing him was a huge Cossack also in a bearskin and in the ‘stands’ surrounding them were several hundred drunken, red-eyed townspeople, with the eerie flickering torchlight flashing off their knife blades and gold teeth.
They began to sing and stamp their feet with a known Cossack song that began slowly and gradually sped up and the contestants had to dance to the rhythm.
They began slowly circling around. Usually, it was easy to know which of the ‘bears’ was the Cossack because he was livelier. But now the Tzadik moved and danced with such agility that, after just a few minutes of dancing it was hard for the crowd to discern who was who. So they jabbed whichever ‘bear’ was slowest with their long knives and roared with laughter when he screamed and quickened his pace. “Hup Cossack! Hup Cossack!” they all chanted, clapping their hands faster and faster, and the pace of the dance increased. The Tzaddik began spinning and his opponent (who they were sure was the Jew) had to keep up with him. He jumped agilely from foot to foot, twisted, and leapt in the air faster and faster, five minutes, ten minutes, now fifteen, finally reaching a maddening speed with the words “Hup Cossack! Hup Cossack!!!”
“HUP COSSACK!!!! HUP COSSACK!!!” The crowd was screaming, clapping, on their feet; their eyes were bulging with excitement! “HUP COSSACK!!! HUP COSSACK!!!!”

Suddenly one bear stopped…. dizzy, exhausted, confused and…. fell!
OOOUUUUPPPAAAA!!!!! Screamed the crowd as they jumped into the circle and pushed their knives into the fallen dancer while the other contestant, still dressed in his bearskin, made an unnoticed getaway. Imagine their disappointment when they removed the bear skin and revealed …. Alas, poor Yorik.
The Tzadik had saved the Jew, himself, put awe in the hearts of the gentiles and won a bearskin to boot.

This is the answer to our above questions about Yaakov tricking his father to steal the blessings.

When G-d created the world, He ‘concealed’ its true value and created Adam to reveal it.
But Adam failed.  The Serpent tricked him and because of this deception; instead of clarifying things, it just increased confusion.
Tzadikim are people who realize this and they have been forced to resort to trickery to heal and repair it. That is why Yaakov resorted to deception. And this was why Yitzchak wanted to bless Aisav.
Yitzchak knew that Aisav was evil, but he also knew that he had a lot of potential good in him (he represented the power of nature and all creation) and if he were corrected it would correct the sin of the Tree of knowledge and bring the Moshiach.

Yitzchak’s error was that he thought that this could be accomplished quickly and directly by giving him a powerful blessing.

But Yitzchak’s wife, Rivka, knew he was wrong. And that is why she dressed Yaakov in the garments of Aisav to trick his father. He knew that Aisav could only be fixed by a long process of trickery, something like the bearskin and the dance in our story.
This is our job today; to use our most mundane actions i.e. the garments of Aisav such as eating, earning a living etc. as a garment to our loyalty and love of HaShem, and His Torah.
Then the entire world will become a vessel to reveal the Creator.

The best example of this today is the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He performed countless miracles and published hundreds of volumes of the deepest Torah ideas.
But he clothed them in garments of understanding and knowledge (ChaBaD). And his Chabad Houses throughout the globe made every aspect of the modern world, including the latest technology, vessels to reveal G-d and put the finishing touches on fixing Eisav … the end of the dance.
And the Rebbe said many times that our main job today is to “open our eyes and see that the Moshiach has already arrived!”

The dance against the Cossack is over and all we really have to do is remove the garments and see that …. Behold, the redemption is here!
All it takes is just one more good deed, word or even thought to tilt the scales so all mankind  will see…….
Moshiach NOW!!

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