Parashat Toldot Is a Mess and So Are We | Intergenerational Trauma in Genesis and Beyond
Parashat Toldot is one of the most difficult portions of the entire Torah. Not because the story is morally shocking, but because it’s emotionally true and rings true for the ages. It’s messy, uncomfortable, tense and painfully familiar. It’s a story of a family trying to live under the weight of wounds that were never healed and scripts that were never questioned. It’s the portrait of a household where every person is traumatised, every person is trying their hardest, and every person is hurting the others in the process.
Parashat Toldot is not a morality tale. It’s not a celebration of Jacob’s cleverness or a condemnation of Esau’s impulsivity. It’s also not a neat endorsement of divine election. It’s the Torah holding up a mirror to the way trauma moves through a family and the way unhealed wounds become the inheritance no one asks for.
If Parashat Lech Lecha showed us revelation without integration, and Parashat Chayei Sarah showed us revelation slowly learning to root itself in consent, then this week is about what happens when none of that was enough. The family has not healed. They have not processed their grief or fear. They have not resolved the trauma that shaped them and now the consequences arrive all at once. The parasha opens with longing for children, but the tension is already there, humming beneath the surface. When the twins Esau and Jacob struggle in Rebecca’s womb, the Torah tells us she goes to inquire of the Divine, and the Divine answers her directly. It is one of the few moments in Genesis where a woman receives revelation in her own name. That alone matters. She is seen, spoken to, and acknowledged as someone whose pain requires attention. But the revelation she receives is not comforting. It is a prophecy of conflict, division and rupture. Even in the womb, these children are formed within tension. Even before they are born, they inherit a story of struggle that has nothing to do with them.
Isaac, meanwhile, is living inside a trauma he never recovered from. The Akedah is not just a story about Abraham nearly sacrificing his son. It’s the defining moment of Isaac’s life. He walks down that mountain and never speaks to his father again. He disappears from Abraham’s narrative completely. When the Torah shows him next, he is living near Be’er Lachai Roi, the well where Hagar and Ishmael once survived their own trauma. Isaac gravitates toward the geography of survivors because he is one. His bodymind carries the memory of the knife raised over him, of the silence of his father, of the terror of being bound. Trauma does not disappear simply because the story moves on. Biblical figures are no different than us. They’re human. Isaac carries that moment in his nervous system for the rest of his life. He becomes passive, withdrawn, conflict-avoidant. He is gentle, kind, contemplative, but he is also still stuck in freeze mode. His survival strategy becomes his personality, and that personality shapes the entire family.
This becomes tragically clear in Genesis 26. When the people of Gerar ask about Rebecca, Isaac tells them she is his sister in order to protect himself. It is the exact same lie Abraham told about Sarah, twice. Isaac is not being cunning, but it is a calculation. He is traumatised. His nervous system defaults to the script he inherited. His fear overwhelms him, and he re-enacts a pattern taken by his father. He abandons Rebecca in the way Abraham once abandoned Sarah, using her as currency. This is what trauma repetition looks like. It is not intentional. It’s instinctive. And it doesn’t excuse it. It’s the body’s memory speaking faster than the mind. But the consequences are real. Rebecca becomes the one in danger, the one exposed, the one who must endure the fallout of Isaac’s fear. Her husband’s trauma becomes her trauma.
