Using All Our Senses
Sermon, November 12, 2004
Rabbi Bruce Kadden

You have probably heard it said that “Seeing is believing.”  And certainly our sense of sight is very important.  Think of all the things that you are able to do because you can to see.  Think about all those things that you could not do, or that would be much more difficult to do, if you could not see.

But sight is only one of our senses, and sometimes, it gets in the way of our other senses.  I want to ask you to try something for a minute.  I want you to close your eyes.  (If you are uncomfortable closing your eyes, it is all right, keep them open.)

Now, with your eyes closed and unable to see anything, I want you to imagine that you were alone in a room and someone walked in.  How would you go about determining who this person was?  Take a moment to think about what you would do and what you might say to figure out who had walked into the room.

Now, you can open your eyes.  What might you do?

In this week’s Torah portion, Isaac faces this exact challenge.  He is old, and has lost his vision.  Before he dies, he wants to bless his eldest son, Esau, with the blessing of the firstborn and sends him to go hunting and prepare his favorite dish.

But when he apparently returns, Isaac seems to be suspicious.  Is it really Esau that has come back so quickly?  Or, perhaps it is his brother Jacob?  How is he going to figure out who is in front of him?

Isaac begins the investigation by asking, “Which of my sons are you?”  And the answer comes:  “I am Esau, your first-born.”  Now, in a world where everyone always told the truth, Isaac would know that it was indeed Esau. 

But he is suspicious, and expresses surprise that he was able to return so quickly.  So Isaac says, “Come closer that I may feel you, my son—whether you are really my son Esau or not.” 

Now, you might think that it would be difficult to distinguish Esau from Jacob, based on how they felt, but we know that whereas Jacob was smooth-skinned, Esau was quite hairy.  After touching him, Isaac says:  “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

In other words, it feels like Esau’s hands, all hairy, but it sounds like Jacob’s voice.  What is Isaac to do?  What would you do if you were Isaac?

Well, he continues to investigate, and asks his son to serve him some of the food that he prepared.  Esau often prepared food for his father, so Isaac thought he could tell if this was really something Esau had made or not. 

But after tasting the food he is still not certain, so he asks his son to come close and kiss him.  Why does he do this?  The Torah says that when he approached him “he smelled his clothes and blessed him saying, “the smell of my son is like the smell of the fields that God has blessed.”  It now seems that Isaac has all the information he needs, and so he blesses his son. 

What has always impressed me about this story is Isaac’s determination to overcome his lack of sight.  He uses each of his other senses:  he listens to his son’s voice, he touches he son’s hands, he tastes his son’s dish, and he smells his son’s aroma.

Sometimes, I think that our sense of vision gets in the way of our other senses.  Sometimes, I think that, like Isaac, it might be a good idea to close our eyes and use our other senses.

What do I mean?  Well, sometimes someone serves you a type of food that you haven’t eaten before and you take one look at it and say, “I’m not going to eat that!”  But if you just smelled it or tasted it you would realize that it wasn’t so bad after all.

And sometimes you meet someone and take one look at him or her and say, I do not want to be friends with that person.  But if you sat down and got to know the person, you would find out that he or she is a wonderful person and could be a good friend.

I am not suggesting that we would be better off if we were not able to see.  Rather, we need to realize that sometimes what we see is not all there is and that we should rely more than on our vision. 

Just as Isaac used each of his other senses to try to determine the identity of his son, we should use each of our senses every day to help us explore our world and make decisions.  Blessed is Adonai, our God, who has given us each of our senses and the ability to use them.

[back to list of sermons]

[back to top]