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Parshat Toldot: Appearances Can Fool Us, But Divine Purpose Never Does
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
Fans of Victorian England may be familiar with the unusual legal drama known as the “Tichborne Case.” It was part mystery, part tragedy, and part social spectacle. The story has all the elements of a potboiler novel: a ship lost at sea, a grieving mother, a missing heir, a large inheritance, and, in the end, an imposter chasing the money.
In 1854, Roger Charles Tichborne, the young heir to an English baronetcy and a vast fortune, boarded a ship in South America called The Bella. The ship vanished off the coast of Brazil on its way to Jamaica, and everybody on board was thought to have died at sea. Everyone believed Roger had drowned — everyone, that is, except his mother, Lady Henriette Tichborne.
Lady Henriette was French, the illegitimate daughter of a British Member of Parliament, Henry Seymour, who had arranged her marriage to his friend, Sir James Tichborne, Roger’s father.
Known for her emotional temperament, Lady Henriette could not accept her son’s death. She and Roger had lived together in Paris before he left to travel the world, and she kept his room untouched, still writing him letters as if he were just away for a while.
When rumors spread that some survivors of The Bella had been rescued and taken to Australia, Lady Henriette placed ads in Australian newspapers, offering a handsome reward for any information about her missing son.
In 1865, she received a letter from New South Wales about a man claiming to be Roger — a butcher from Wagga Wagga named Thomas Castro. Delighted, she arranged for him to come to France.
But when they met, it was immediately apparent that Castro looked nothing like the slim, tall, dark-haired youth who had disappeared eleven years earlier — a fluent French speaker who also spoke the Queen’s English. This man was obese, fair-haired, spoke no French at all — and his English had a pronounced Cockney accent.
Castro could not recall even basic details of Roger’s childhood or the names of close relatives. Still, Lady Henriette insisted he was her son, dismissing all the startling changes as the result of years of hardship and separation.
Intriguingly, her servants and advisers supported her, insisting that this corpulent stranger was Roger. But the rest of the Tichborne family, the press, and the public considered him a complete fraud.
Scotland Yard detective Jack Whicher soon discovered that “the Claimant” was in fact Arthur Orton, the son of a butcher from London’s East End who had emigrated to Australia.
Even so, Lady Henriette’s faith in him remained unshaken. She gave him a generous allowance and defended him fiercely, as only a mother could. Even after she died in 1868, her implausible opinion seemed to haunt the courtroom as “Sir Roger” sued the Tichborne family for his inheritance.
The sensational trials at Westminster became a national obsession. Crowds packed the galleries and newspapers breathlessly reported every detail. Nearly a hundred witnesses swore he was the true heir. The two trials — one civil, one criminal — lasted 291 days, and the closing statements of the second alone took 62 days.
The jury deliberated for just 35 minutes. Orton was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was released a decade later, destitute, and died in poverty in 1898 — having finally confessed that he was indeed Arthur Orton.
But the real mystery lies not in his deception, but in Lady Henriette’s firm conviction that this obvious imposter was her son — a mother so certain of what her heart told her that she became a willing party to Orton’s fraud.
And it is that same strange mixture of blindness and conviction — love triumphing over reason — that we find at the heart of Parshat Toldot. Isaac, old and sightless, summons his older son Esau, whom he loves despite his unrighteous behavior, to receive the family blessing.
But while Esau is out hunting for food to feed Isaac, Rebecca urges her younger son Jacob to disguise himself as Esau, covering his smooth arms with goatskins to imitate Esau’s hairy skin, and to claim the blessing instead.
Jacob hesitates, but obeys his mother. When he enters Isaac’s tent, the scene could almost come from a Victorian melodrama: the blind father reaching out, the reluctant son trembling, the air thick with tension.
Isaac hears the voice of his son and frowns. “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). Then, like Lady Henriette, Isaac allows his emotions to override his doubts. His love for Esau blinds him completely. He blesses Jacob, believing him to be Esau.
But this is where the similarity to the Victorian story ends. The Tichborne claimant was a fraud, but Jacob was not. His act may seem deceitful — pretending to be his brother to get something that isn’t his. But the Torah and its commentators make clear it was not deceit — it was destiny.
Earlier in Toldot, Esau had sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew. That sale was not just symbolic — it was legally binding. Esau did not value the birthright, but Jacob did. The blessing Isaac intended to give was tied to that birthright. Jacob was not stealing — he was taking what he had rightfully acquired.
As for Rebecca, she wasn’t a meddling mother — she was following what God had told her. Before her twins were born, God said (Gen. 25:23): “Two nations are in your womb… and the elder shall serve the younger.” She knew Jacob, not Esau, was meant to continue the path of Abraham’s covenant. Her plan was not for unfair gain, but to fulfill prophecy.
Some commentators, like the Ramban, even suggest that Isaac may have suspected the truth. The Torah hints at this, quoting Isaac as saying: “See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field blessed by God” (Gen. 27:27). This is why Isaac’s blessing focused on spiritual destiny, not on hunting or power as it might have for Esau.
Arthur Orton’s fraudulent identity hid a lie and caused years of pain and suffering. Lady Henriette’s refusal to accept her son’s death blinded her to reality, and her embrace of Orton brought her family needless grief.
Isaac’s love blinded him too — but through that blindness, God’s plan came into focus: a wrong was righted, and a precious legacy was preserved. Jacob’s disguise did not conceal a lie — on the contrary, it revealed the truth. Esau’s disregard for the covenant made him unfit to inherit it. Jacob’s deception was not a betrayal of destiny but its fulfillment.
The Tichborne Case ended in shame and imprisonment. The Jacob Case ended in a nation of faith, and an enduring covenant with God. Jacob’s blessing shows us that sometimes destiny is hidden in confusion. What seems like a mistake may be God’s way of making sure a blessing goes where it truly belongs.
Maybe that is the real lesson: appearances can fool us, but divine purpose never does. The voice may sound like Jacob and the hands may feel like Esau, but Heaven knows the truth, and in time, so will we.
The author is a writer and rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why
I walked into Jerusalem Chicken restaurant because someone told me it served the best maqluba this side of Jerusalem — all within a few minutes of LAX.
Outside, the well-lit sign said, “Palestinian Chicken Eatery,” which, because I’d seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm “Palestinian Chicken” episode about a dozen times, already had me smiling. Then I stepped inside.
Across from a deli counter filled with platters of rice and roasted vegetables was a cardboard sign: “End US Funding of Israel. Defend Palestine. End the Cycle of Genocide.”
This was 2022. Genocide seemed like an especially scurrilous charge, but it was their restaurant. I could yell, scream, protest, vandalize the place or call for a boycott. The young man behind the counter served me a leg and a thigh roasted dark, fragrant with sumac, clove and cinnamon. I ate.
Call me crazy but that’s what I demand of restaurants: Good food, clean kitchens and kind service. But, it seems, when it comes to Israeli restaurants, a different standard applies.
Somewhere toward the end of her long New York magazine feature on Middle Eastern food in New York City, Madeleine Leung Coleman points out that Israeli restaurants are increasingly labeling themselves as Middle Eastern or Levantine rather than Israeli.
“There could be many reasons why,” she writes. “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted. Or they’re second-guessing if they should call their food ‘Israeli’ at all.”
I’m going to offer a third choice: Perhaps it’s because of articles like hers.
The disappearing ‘Israeli’ restaurant
Coleman understates the actual violence against Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants (and, oddly, against Palestinian restaurants). She implies that Israeli restaurants serve food that is somehow stolen from Arab cultures. She blurs the distinction between Israeli restaurateurs and the actions of a government 7,000 miles away. In short, she reinforces the stigma she purports to describe. It’s a case study in journalism-as-activism, for which innocent restaurateurs and diners will pay the bill.
Her piece, “When Eating Out Is Political,” charts the evolution of Middle Eastern food in the city from turn-of-the-century market stalls, falafel stands and halal carts to its current incarnation in high-end, often Michelin-starred chef-driven restaurants.
The core argument is that Israeli restaurants became trendy by appropriating Palestinian, Mizrachi and North African dishes while Arab, Iranian and North African restaurants languished as cheap, “outer-borough” places, and especially post-9/11 hid their identities behind a vague “Mediterranean” label.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, and growing protest against Israel, the stigma has reversed. Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian restaurants have flourished with cheffy food, and owning their particularist labels, while Israeli restaurants have had to hide their identity.
It’s true that Middle Eastern cuisines are having their moment in New York, and Coleman’s descriptions of the “delicate, hand-shaped beef dumplings” at the Syrian restaurant Huda or the wild mallow “topped with twists of fried onion and salty black olives” at the Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen in Brooklyn make it clear that these chefs, whether Palestinian, Syrian or Iranian, should be celebrated.
But the celebration is tainted with bias and ignorance when it comes to all things Israeli.
From Moshe’s Falafel to Solomonov
First, the history. By Coleman’s recounting, Israeli restaurants swooped in to success and instant “It” status sometime in the early aughts.
“We were told this was the flavor profile of this young country,” she writes, “which was so richly funded and supported by our own.”
I’m not sure what American aid to Israel has to do with the efforts of early chefs like Einat Admony and Michael Solomonov, but that sentence shows how Coleman condemns talented individual chefs for somehow being complicit in … foreign aid decisions?
She’s also wrong on the timeline. Israeli food came to America the same way Arab food did, with immigrant sweat and no guarantees of success. Moshe Mizrachi, an Israeli of Syrian origin, opened his falafel restaurant in Manhattan in 1981. It failed. He reincarnated it as a cart, and four decades later it’s an institution.
The food these Israelis brought with them wasn’t, as Coleman writes, Arab dishes or food their grandmothers made — her attempt to dismiss Israeli food as either stolen or copied.
She might have mentioned that over half of Israel’s population has origins in the greater Middle East and North Africa. Falafel, hummus, stuffed vegetables, shakshouka and all the glorious ingredients that go into them were part of their traditions too. What was a Jewish chef from Iraq supposed to cook, lox and cream cheese?
From shattah to schnitzel
Israelis also ate what Palestinians ate, and learned to cook it. This is how every culture’s foodways evolve — including that of Palestinians.
In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus brought chile peppers back from the Americas, after wreaking havoc on the native populations. Those chiles give Palestinian shattah sauce its heart and heat. The “most traditional Palestinian dish,” according to cookbook author Reem Kassis, is maftool, a pebbly couscous that likely arrived via the Berbers, whose own history of subjugation, rebellion and assimilation with the Muslim invaders is, to say the least, fraught. Schnitzel is now a popular Palestinian dish, likely adopted from Ashkenazi immigrants.
Cultures exchange food, like they do music, fashion and language. None of this is to say Israelis haven’t ignored or downplayed the Palestinian contribution to their cuisine, or used food as a political or economic weapon — most unconscionably in Gaza itself. But the Israeli chefs most associated with the New Israel Cuisine are usually the first to point all that out.
“I don’t think there’s enough understanding how deeply rooted Israeli food, as it’s cooked at the moment and seen all over the world, is actually based on Palestinian cooking,” the chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi told me in a 2022 interview.
Credit where credit is due. But the only reason to question an Israeli cook’s right to do what cooks throughout history have done is if you question Israel’s existence itself.
‘The land mass currently called Israel’
And Coleman clues us in that she leans that way.
She repeatedly refers to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide. Many genocide experts and international bodies have concluded it is. Many others, including the International Court of Justice, have not, something a fair journalist would point out.
And then there is the strange way she describes an image on the menu of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat as “a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’”
Even the progressive watchdog site Mediaite called that “bizarre.” Just as bizarre is her explanation for why chefs are less likely to publicize their connection to Israel.
“In the last few years,” she writes, “some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government’s project. This may be one reason why some are staying silent.”
Here’s a better reason:
- In February 2022, vandals sprayed “F– Jews” on the wall of Miriam’s restaurant in Brooklyn.
- In December 2023 anti-Israel protesters surrounded Goldie’s, Michael Solomonov’s falafel restaurant in Philadelphia, vandalizing it and chanting, “Long live the intifada!”
- In February 2024 a masked man took a baseball bat to the windows of Rothschild TLV on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
- In July 2025, intruders broke into a Melbourne, Australia Israeli restaurant, threw chairs and shattered windows while people were eating.
- In August 2025, intruders ransacked Manny’s restaurant in San Francisco and spray-painted “F- Manny’s” and “Die Zionist” on the walls.
There’s more, but you get the idea. It isn’t a few kids with spray cans: it’s open season on Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants. At least three Palestinian restaurants have been vandalized as well, as well as Kanaan in Berlin, which is owned by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian. If every Israeli restaurant is complicit in the worst behaviors of the Israeli government, is Jerusalem Chicken collaborating with Hamas?
Israeli restaurants aren’t Med-washing their names because they’re reckoning or apologetic. They’re hiding because the violence against them is getting worse, for patently absurd reasons. Coleman could have written that story, not one where victims did something to deserve it.
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Trump just used journalists as human shields — Jewish ethics has thoughts about that
Everyone has been talking about The Odyssey this summer. So much so that, apparently, the president of the United States felt the need to act out a famous piece of Greek mythology, namely the story of the Trojan horse. When an Iranian assassination threat in July seemed credible enough, the Secret Service spirited Trump off of Air Force One in a catering truck after a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
The plane then took off as usual, loaded with top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as the usual cast of aides and journalists who often accompany the president. Most believed they were on the plane with Trump, and weren’t aware of any threat. And had Iran actually attacked, and Air Force One been shot out of the sky, they would have gone down in the president’s place.
It is not unheard of for presidents to change plans suddenly for safety reasons, or otherwise use some amount of subterfuge to obscure their location; when Bill Clinton flew to Pakistan, for example, there were several decoy planes. But it is highly unusual for the plan to involve risking numerous other people, including civilians. Several journalists have accused Trump, who has long picked fights with the press, of using the media as an expendable human shield.
Much has been made, particularly in the Jewish world, of the idea of human shields, particularly because Hamas is often accused of the practice. Human shields can refer to putting civilians in harm’s way as part of a military strategy, or using them as decoys or to protect soldiers. (Hamas purportedly has used civilian sites such as hospitals or schools to protect their weapons stores and headquarters.)
There are numerous stories in Jewish texts in which innocent lives are sacrificed for ulterior motives, and the perpetrators are roundly condemned. King David sends his general Uriah to the frontlines so he will die and never realize that David had slept with his wife; God sends the prophet Nathan to rebuke David for his selfishness and Batsheva loses the pregnancy as punishment. When Simon and Levi destroy Shechem in retribution for the rape of their sister Dina, the patriarch Jacob censures their actions.
Though there is plenty of warfare in the Bible, and God at times orders the destruction of entire cities or groups, most Jewish sages interpret this to only apply to combatants because other commandments, such as to leave the gates of a besieged city open to allow people to flee, instruct that innocent civilians must be protected.
Beyond general ethics, the laws of war laid out in the Geneva Convention protect civilians and forbid the destruction of pivotal resources such as hospitals. But the strategy is, in many ways, a successful one precisely because it is so contemptible; everyone agrees that killing civilians not involved in war is morally wrong, which means that there is an international uproar if combatants do kill civilians to get to an enemy stronghold.
The U.S. and Israel both hold themselves apart operating uniquely moral armies — ones that follow the laws of war and protect civilians. Both nations publicly boast of fighting only necessary, noble wars. Reality, however, often differs. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, tens of thousands of American soldiers were discharged for misconduct. And after Oct. 7, Israel also began using human shields, forcing Palestinian civilians to go ahead of Israeli soldiers to check for traps or mines.
When Trump landed, the White House press pool asked him, on the tarmac, what the threat was, and whether the journalists and aides on board the original plane were in danger. Trump responded that he simply did what the Secret Service told him to; “I get a lot of threats,” he said, and said he believed that the plane he actually flew on — a plane no one knew he was on — was in more danger than Air Force One.
But it’s clear to everyone else — including many members of the media who were on the plane — that the civilians left on the plane targeted by the Iranian threat were human shields. Trump may have long defamed the media, but putting them knowingly in harm’s way is still a bad look. Such a bad look that, after The New York Times reported on Trump’s planes, FBI agents went to the journalists’ homes to subpoena them for their reporting.
Thankfully, neither plane was shot down. But that doesn’t make Trump’s decision to protect himself any more moral.
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Apple pays $150k to settle federal antisemitism lawsuit
(JTA) — Apple has agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that the company failed to accommodate a Jewish employee’s observance of Shabbat, and later fired him after he complained of religious discrimination.
The lawsuit, which was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in September 2025, accused Apple of discriminating against Tyler Steele, a longtime employee of one of its stores in Reston, Virginia.
Steele converted to Judaism in the spring of 2023, and while his manager initially approved his request not to be scheduled on Fridays and Saturdays due to his observance of Shabbat, another manager that replaced the previous one later rescinded the accommodation.
According to the complaint, Steele’s new manager, Anthony Dosch, denied his requests to have the days off in September 2023, allegedly telling him that month that he “could become a rules Nazi with regards to our policies.”
Days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Dosch also warned Steele not to get into politics or debates about the conflict at work, and a month later issued him a misconduct warning claiming that Steele had body odor that violated the store’s policies.
The EEOC alleged that Steele later complained to Apple officials in November 2023 about antisemitic behavior and the denial of his religious accommodation. Steele was fired from the store in January 2024, after reminding Dosch that he could not work on a Friday the following month for religious reasons.
“Employees should not have to violate their religious beliefs to keep their jobs or live in fear of retribution because they requested an accommodation,” EEOC Philadelphia Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence said in a statement at the time the lawsuit was filed.
In its lawsuit, the EEOC accused Apple of religious discrimination and retaliation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Apple and the EEOC unveiled the settlement in an Aug. 7 filing in federal court in Virginia, nearly a year after the initial complaint.
Apple denied the allegations and did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which required the company to award Steele $80,000 in back pay and $70,000 in compensatory damages and interest.
Under the settlement, the company will also be required to update its religious accommodation policies and conduct trainings with some employees in its Virginia operations within 90 days.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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