Jews Don’t Do This

Jacob, the third patriarch of Israel, was endowed with a complex personality. So much so that half of Genesis’s fifty chapters were needed to decipher the man whom the people of Israel would end by carrying his name.

 In the account told in Genesis, Jacob is courageous and clever, but his character also comes across as cunning. Furthermore, as in all trickster tales, there is a lack of regard for authority.

A clear example of the above is Parasha Vayetzei, lesson seven of the yearly Torah curriculum.

As Jacob finds himself at his mother’s brother’s home in Mesopotamia, he falls in love with Rachel, his youngest daughter. Laban, his uncle, promises to give her as his wife, but when the wedding night arrives, he switches Rachel for his oldest daughter, Leah.

And so, we read in Genesis chapter 29, verse 25:

When morning came- it was Leah!

So, he said to Laban, “What have you done to me? … Why did you deceive me?

Jewish tradition hasn’t been kind to Laban, labeling him “the Deceiver,” which is hard to argue against. However, when marrying his oldest daughter first, Laban acts according to his people’s norms.

Aside from his deceit, he acts generously. For example, he still gives Jacob his youngest daughter, Rachel, after he has married Leah together with no small gifts.

Laban is out to teach Jacob two important lessons. The first one is that he who deceives others can expect to be himself deceived by others.

The second one is Laban’s response to Jacob’s complaint:

Giving the younger before the firstborn is not done so in our country.

Jacob, so far, has made little of traditions, ignoring that they enshrine a community’s ethics; they define the people of that community.

The lesson, however, is learned and integrated by Jacob’s descendants:

Tamar- King’s David daughter- reproaches her half-brother Amnon’s moral turpitude with the words:

“such a thing is not done in Israel.”

In fact, for generations, parents have taught what Judaism stands for with the simple: “A Jew does not do this.”

Defining what Judaism is and what it does is not complicated. As the late prominent Jewish-American scholar Arthur Hertzberg said:

“Many Jews remember, as I do, a grandmother who often said about some matters, out of the very depths of her being, that “a Jew doesn’t do this.” This may seem imprecise as a political and social doctrine, but one not alien to the inherited Jewish experience finds this standard both precise and most exquisitely moral.”

If Judaism, in the end, is what Jews have learned from their experiences through history, then the way Jews behave is what is called “Jewish ethics.”

Traditionally, Jews have been highly conscious of their behavior as a group, as “am Israel,” as the people of Israel. Unity and solidarity have been distinctive aspects of that behavior.

If the idea of “Jews don’t do this” doesn’t keep on coming up every time Jews misbehave among themselves and toward others, Erich Fromm’s rumination that we will still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent could become true.