Yoel's Lemonade Stand

Good evening. This week's Torah portion contains what may be the earliest recorded example of terrible marketing strategy.

Esau comes in from the field, exhausted and hungry. Jacob is cooking lentil stew. Esau says, "Pour some of that red stuff down my throat, for I am famished."

Jacob says, "Sell me your birthright first."

And Esau (demonstrating the kind of short-term thinking that would make him a perfect fit for most modern marketing departments) says, "What good is a birthright to me if I'm dying anyway?"

He trades his inheritance for a bowl of soup.

Now, before we get too smug about Esau's foolishness, let me ask you this: How many of you have done exactly the same thing with your brand?

Not literally, of course. You probably haven't traded your company's birthright for lentil stew. But you may have traded it for something equally perishable: clicks, impressions, viral moments, algorithm-friendly content, or whatever metric your marketing platform is currently optimizing for this quarter.

Let me be specific about what I mean.

Your brand's birthright (the thing that actually gives you the right to speak to an audience and have them listen) consists of several things:

Your reputation, your audience’s trust, your unique position in their minds, and the permission they've granted you to communicate with them.

This is not an abstract concept. This is about real value, built over time, compounding with each interaction. It's generative. It creates conditions for future success. And yet every day, I see businesses trading this birthright for soup.

Here's what that soup looks like in marketing terms:

It's the desperate promotional email with the subject line "FINAL CHANCE!!!" that you send three times a week until your open rates look like a flatline on an EKG.

It's the social media post designed not to communicate anything meaningful but to trigger engagement metrics. You know the ones: "Tag someone who needs to see this!" or "Only real fans will get this!"

It's the blog post written not for human readers but for search engine robots, stuffed with keywords until it reads like a ransom note assembled from magazine clippings.

It's the pop-up that appears before I've read a single word of your article, demanding my email address in exchange for nothing I actually want.

It's the retargeting ad that follows me around the internet like a desperate suitor who can't take a hint.

All of this is soup. And if you are depending on them to make money, then you're selling your birthright for it.

Now, the defense I usually hear goes something like this: "But we need those clicks! We need that traffic! We need to hit our numbers this quarter! If we don't perform now, there won't be a future to worry about!"

This is Esau's argument, word for word. "I'm dying anyway, so what good is a birthright?"

And it's almost always false.

Esau wasn't dying. He was uncomfortable. There's a difference.

I think that if you are really being financially honest with yourself, you’d admit that you weren’t facing actual existential crises when you made these trades. You may have been facing pressure (from boards, from investors, from quarterly targets, from competitors who seem to be "winning" by metrics that don't actually measure anything important.

So you panic. And in your panic, you trade away the one thing that would actually ensure your survival: your audience's trust and attention.

Let me tell you what happens after Esau sells his birthright.

The very next section tells us about Isaac dealing with the Philistines.

The Philistines stop up all the wells that Abraham had dug. They fill them with earth, making them useless. So Isaac moves on and digs new wells.

The Torah is quite specific about this. He digs a well. The Philistines contest it. He moves on. He digs another well. They contest that one too. He moves on. He digs a third well, and finally they leave him alone.

He names the wells: Esek (contention), Sitnah (hostility), and Rehoboth (spaciousness). Because now," he says, "the Lord has granted us ample space."

See what Issac didn’t do? He didn't fight over the stopped-up wells. He didn't complain about how unfair it was that the Philistines kept sabotaging him. He didn't try to game their system or trick them or force his way back to the old wells.

He just kept digging new ones.

This is what successful marketing actually looks like.

"

Your channels will dry up. The algorithm will change. The platform you built your entire strategy around will become the next MySpace. The media landscape will shift. Attention will move elsewhere.

The question is: Are you Isaac or are you Esau?

Esau looks at one bowl of soup and thinks: This is all there is. If I don't eat this now, I die.

Isaac looks at stopped-up wells and thinks: Fine. I'll dig new ones.

Don't be Esau.

The clicks are never worth it.

Shabbat Shalom.