This was my D’var Torah for Parashat Toldot on November 6, 2021 (5782). I reference one episode of “The Good Place” that we discuss on an episode of our podcast Tov!, about Judaism and Jewish ideas.
How do you get the power of blessing another person? What even is that power?
Since the start of Elul I have been engaged in a weekly study of teshuvah, through the story of a fictional woman named Eleanor Shellstrop, who is the focus of a TV series called “The Good Place.” Also Maimonides and the Talmud, which have a few teachings on the subject too.
Eleanor Shellstrop finds herself in the afterlife, in a heavenly neighborhood of pastel colors and frozen yogurt shops, because the impact of all her acts on earth, big and small, has put her in a kind of spiritual 1%, the uber-good. Except — she is not supposed to be there. In real life Eleanor was a terrible person. The recurring description of her on the show is “Arizona trash bag”. Eleanor’s death occured right after she was rude to a supermarket cashier and dissed an environmental organizer. Her job at the time involved selling fake medicine to elderly pepole over the phone, which she did with complete gusto. Eleanor’s orientation to other people is entirely instrumental for her own immediate wants.
In the afterlife, Eleanor is paired with a soulmate for eternity, a Senegalese professor of ethical philosophy named Chidi Anagonye, whom she traps into promising to help her not get kicked out and sent to the Bad Place. So he begins to teach her by instructing her to try to do some good things for other people, one of them being their neighbor Tahani al-Jamil. On earth Tahani was a Pakastani-English philanthropist, beautiful and sophisticated and as tall as Eleanor is short. Tahani’s name literally means “congratulations beautful” — so Eleanor is convinced Tahani must be a fraud and sets out to expose her. Eleanor spends a day going around the neighborhood with Tahani, who is trying to spread good cheer throughout the Good Place; and also breaking into Tahani’s mansion and stealing her diary. Eleanor figures there must be something self-incriminating in it, even though the forward to the diary was written by Malala.
Eleanor arrives back at her own house with the diary, and Chidi tries to talk her out of reading it. But as they argue, two things happen to Eleanor. The first is that she realizes that throughout her life, good people around her did not inspire her, but just the opposite — they just made her feel worse about herself and her defense mechanism was to double down on acting like a jerk. And then Eleanor sees that Chidi is down, and he explains that it’s because he feels his life’s work as a philosopher didn’t amount to anything.
Eleanor finds just the right word of appreciation and encouragement — genuine to him and gently mocking to herself. She decides to go to Tahani’s house and put the diary back, and she hears Tahani crying in another room, because for all her outward good works she is lonely. And Eleanor takes a breath, rolls her eyes at what she is about to say — and finds once again words of encouragement and appreciation — genuine to Tahani and to herself.
In the arc of the show these two conversations represent the beginning of Eleanor’s teshuvah, her slow emergence into becoming a better person. I recorded a whole episode of my new podcast about the story I’ve recounted and linked it to the Talmud. But I didn’t realize until I was studying the parasha this week that what starts to turn Eleanor around, is when she discovers the power of blessing another person.
Blessing has something to do with encouragement and appreciation, recognizing the deep good that’s in another person and reflecting it back to them. Along with some statement hat such good deserves to be rewarded with contentment. Blessing is not a tangible gift usable right now, but something stabilizing in the moment and hopeful for the future.
The power of blessing is not just that I care about you and I see you. The power of blessing is conveying: this is not just my judgment but the judgement of the universe, the judgment of the divine. That’s why blessing is not just appreciation and encouragement. That’s why blessing is a power. Blessing is when we borrow a power we don’t have, we borrow it from the divine and challenge the divine to follow through.
I’ve rewatched this particular episode of “The Good Place” a few times recently and one of the truest parts is this eye-roll right before Eleanor blesses Tahani, and delivers what are absolutely words of cliche: “I may not know exactly what you are feeling but I do understand. And you deserve to be happy because you are an impressive, thoughtful and special person.” What follow are smiles and tears and hugs, again cliche perhaps but sincere. And the start of what becomes a friendship, which is no cliche. Eleanor probably has no real idea what her words mean, other than that she’s heard about other people saying them. In that moment she is at once herself, the Arizona trashbag, and a spokesperson for the universe. And that’s the power of blessing.
Blessing is our teshuvah, and a gift of hope to another person, wrapped together.
In our parasha, Yitzchak wants to bless someone. Much of it is problematic — why only one, and why apparently Esav and not Yaakov, and why all the theatrics. I want to see Yitzchak, though, as a person who wants to find his own power of blessing. Yitzchak unlike Eleanor has love for others, but not blessing. Many midrashim describe Yitzchak as someone who sees himself as either not blessed — his father sort of tried to sacrifice him because of a divine voice — or only partially blesssed. Even the blessings he got from God and from the Philistines didn’t reach him, didn’t penetrate. But Yitzchak even so, like Eleanor Shellstrop, is pulled toward finding that power. He thinks he could have the power of blessing even though he’s never done it before.
When Yitzchak realized his own eyes were clouding his look at his sons, he waited until he was blind, so he wouldn’t be misled by superficial things about them. Knowing how tormented he himself was when he thought of the divine, Yitzchak asked for his favorite meal, so the smells and tastes would soothe his soul and uplift him. He asked that his son bring him a gift, to set up a generous atmosphere. Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav says that the most intense recognition of the goodness of other people is experienced as the sense of taste.
So in total Yitzchak was working to overcome his own qualities of non-blessing. Unlike Eleanor, he was not surprised at all by the moment for giving a blessing — but he wasn’t familiar with it so he willed the moment.
I’d like to think that Yitzchak was in fact orchestrating two blessings, one for each of his children, and that he was making it clear that these blessings were not superficial. That he had something to say to each of his sons, after each of them brought the gifts that only each one of them could.
And I’d like to think that Yitzchak knew how hard it is to accept a blessing, especially for the first time, to believe that you are blessed even when someone tells you that you are, and that’s why the story reads with such pain as well. Rabbi Don Yitzchak Abravanel teaches that unlike a blessing from God, the most that a blessing from another person can do is to help us believe that we are worthy of divine blessing. That’s why we have the priestly blessing, y’varech’cha, said in traditional morning services and said by parents to children on Erev Shabbat. So much of life tells us that we are not profoundly blessed, that we are rather judged by other people’s eyes, and even a good judgment of that kind can leave us empty and questioning.
Where do we get the power to bless someone else? As Yitzchak says, it is from the soul, the nefesh, and not the mouth. It’s not the words alone. It comes with our own teshuvah, as we look back on our own story and realize the blessing this other person is to me, or gave me when I needed to hear it. The power of blessing comes when I realize how I depend on you specifically and how much I owe you for the growth of my own soul. Blessings are powered by my teshuvah, and my gratitude for the role you’ve played. Yitzchak, again I like to think, realized that it wasn’t just nice food he appreciated in Esav, but his devotion and the energetic giving. And Yaakov, who Yitzchak wasn’t as close to, was a man of grounding and steadiness and Torah, and planning for the future of this family, and Yitzchak was slow to see what Yaakov had meant to him, but as his eyesight dimmed his realization grew, and better late than never. Yitzchak’s own teshuvah was the source of his power to bless Yaakov.
So think about when you’ve been blessed, or when you’ve needed to grow. Some time you were not just encouraged but felt that you were seen and steered in a big way, and one person helped you believe that. That will show you how you can bless, and who you can bless, where you’re own power is.
Praising someone can be hollow, somethings we do say cliches and they are not taken as blessings. I can’t give you the recipe for a perfect blessing. Sometimes a moment comes, like for Eleanor Shellstrop, and sometimes we need to make a moment like Yitzchak Avinu. Some blessings in a moment seem to linger for a long time, and others we have to repeat again and again.
So we should study stories of blessing, backstories like Yitzchak and even Eleanor Shellstrop. And our rituals of blessing other people like the misheberachs are helpful – they aren’t the same kind of blessing but they remind us to look for people where we might have the power to bless. Someone who needs healing, because not being whole is when we doubt we are blessed. Someone who is a healer, because the weariness of caring for someone or many people makes us think we are tired more than we are good. And even our leaders and fellow citizens need blessing, because civic work so often feels judged in harsh or instrumental ways, even when the judgment is positive.
On Friday nights, when I bring my hands to my children’s heads, I think of some specific blessing I want the divine to grant each of my kids, that I can perceive and help arrive. Or I think of some blessing I have seen in the past week and I try to give it a Handi-wrap seal with my hands so it doesn’t leave them. I guess I should try to say these specific blessings out loud to them, and not only the words in the siddur.
We each have a power to bless. Moments when we are the one who can speak encouragement and hope and recognition on behalf of the universe. If you think you have a blessing for someone, give it to them — even if you think the words are wrong, even if inside you’re rolling your eyes at yourself. We have the power to bless others. We all do — the Arizona trashbag, the blind patriarch, and you.
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