We have a problem with words. When we disagree, we say, “They are wrong,” instead of, “I prefer a different approach.” When someone holds different values, we say, “I hate theirs,” rather than, “I love mine more.” We’ve lost the language of nuance.
This week’s parsha offers a corrective.
When speaking to Israel through the prophet Malachi, God declares: “I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated.” Commenting on this verse, Rabbi Sacks highlights the Hebrew word senu’ah, often translated as “hated.” In biblical Hebrew, he explains, when contrasted with “to love,” senu’ah means “loved less intensely, less intimately.” We see this with Leah, who is “less loved” than Rachel, and again in Deuteronomy regarding a man with two wives. The meaning is consistent—“less loved,” not the opposite of love, but a comparison within love.
This is not semantic cleverness. It’s the difference between a world where disagreement means enmity and one where it reflects different degrees of love.
Consider the implications for Toldot, which notes that “Isaac loved Esau… while Rebecca loved Jacob” (Genesis 25:28). We often read this as partisanship—each choosing sides in a family conflict. But when we read the words more carefully, we see something more subtle. Isaac loved Esau more—but that does not mean he did not love Jacob. Rebecca loved Jacob more—but that does not mean she rejected Esau. The text never says Isaac hated Jacob. This is preference, not contempt.
Rabbi Sacks notes that Isaac’s love for Esau was real, deep, and unconditional, even as Esau’s choices diverged from the covenant’s path. This is not blindness. It is the difficult work of loving someone whose values you do not share, whose approach to life you would not choose, yet whose humanity you refuse to deny.
What destroys the family is not that Isaac and Rebecca loved differently—it is that they failed to communicate. Rebecca receives a prophecy—“the elder [Esau] will serve the younger [Jacob]” (25:23)—and keeps it to herself. When Isaac prepares to bless Esau, she does not say, “Let me tell you what God told me.” Instead, she tells Jacob to deceive his father, saying, “Let your curse be upon me” (27:13).
This failure to speak ripples through generations. Jacob flees. Esau is heartbroken. The family fractures not because they disagreed, but because they could not find words for disagreement that would keep them in relationship.
Yet the Torah insists we notice this too: the brothers reconcile. When Jacob returns after years of exile, terrified that Esau will kill him, something else unfolds: “Esau ran toward him, embraced him, fell on his neck, kissed him, and they wept” (Genesis 33:4).
They do not become the same person, nor do they adopt each other’s values. After their reunion, they part ways. But they embrace. They weep. They find a way to love each other even as they walk different paths.
This is not a fairy-tale ending where differences disappear. It is a model of what is possible when we refuse to let disagreement become hatred—when we maintain the distinction between “I prefer my approach” and “I reject your humanity.”
The contemporary application is urgent. We live in an age of neat binaries: good and evil, us and them. Political discourse has become a contest of moral absolutes, where to disagree is to be not just incorrect but monstrous. We say, “Your approach is hateful,” instead of, “I love my approach more.” We say, “Your values are evil,” instead of, “I hold these values with greater intensity.”
This is senu’ah misunderstood. We have taken the vocabulary of preference and turned it into the vocabulary of contempt. We have lost the capacity to say, “I disagree profoundly while recognizing the human concerns that drive you.”
Rabbi Sacks was acutely aware of this danger. He insisted that we must maintain relationship across genuine disagreement—not by pretending we agree, but by refusing to deny the other’s humanity.
Isaac models this. He loves Esau even as Esau marries Hittite women, even as Esau treats the birthright with contempt, even as Esau’s path diverges from Isaac’s hopes. Isaac’s love does not mean approval. It means refusing to reduce Esau to his choices, refusing to let disagreement sever the bond.
Rebecca’s failure is instructive. She is not wrong about the prophecy. But she chooses secrecy over conversation, acting as though disagreement with Isaac is impossible. The cost is devastating. What would have happened if she had said, “Let me tell you what God told me”? We cannot know. But we know what happened when she did not—a family torn apart, decades of separation.
Parshat Toldot teaches that we need language for loving people whose paths we do not choose. We need the capacity to say, “I prefer deeply, passionately, a different approach; and I recognize you as fully human—someone deserving of dignity, someone whose concerns I can understand even when I reject your conclusions.”
This is hard. It is far easier to sort the world into heroes and villains, to feel righteous in our contempt, to believe that those who disagree with us are not just wrong but wicked. The Torah asks us to resist this ease. It asks us to maintain the distinction between preference and hatred—between loving our way more and rejecting theirs entirely.
Jacob and Esau show us it is possible. They disagree fundamentally. They live differently. Yet they embrace. They weep together. They go separate ways.
In our age of polarization, the Torah does not ask us to pretend we agree or to mute our convictions. It asks us to check our language—to ask whether we are using the vocabulary of preference or of hatred, to ask whether we have made disagreement into enmity when it might remain, painful as it is, a difference within love.
Isaac loved Esau. Rebecca loved Jacob more. Both were true. Both can be true in our lives too, if we can recover the language for it.
Today’s email was written by Rabbi Matt Marks as part of our collaboration with the Sacks Scholars. Rabbi Matt Marks is Executive Head of Tribe UK, the youth arm of the United Synagogue, and a PhD researcher specialising in the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.