The Rebellious Man of Faith
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
The patriarch Jacob, my namesake (Jacob Shmuel) of whom we have read the past few weeks in the Bible, is the most maligned of all the patriarchs. He is the one whom non-Jews can do without. The Christians claim to have been grafted onto the seed of Abraham and the Muslims make equal claim to the father of Monotheism as the Jews. But Jacob, with his seeming deception of his blind father to gain the firstborn blessing from Esau and his commercial manipulations of his father-in-law Laban, most of whose flock he eventually owned, is treated by anti-Semites as the prototype of the wily, cunning, dishonest Jew who will do anything to profit.
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