THE MOST IMPORTANT PARSHA IN THE TORAH (MY FATHER WAS RIGHT)

They say that “the devil is in the details,” and nowhere has that been more evident than in the corruption scandal currently shaking Ukraine — even as the deadly war with Russia continues to rage.

Over the past couple of weeks, Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators have been drip-feeding the world with information: wiretaps, redacted court testimony, and sordid specifics of a bribery saga that has shocked even the most weathered journalists and talking heads.

This is no less than a $100 million kickback scheme allegedly run out of Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear energy company, Energoatom. The cast of villains includes prominent businessmen and contractors pressured for hefty “commissions,” high-ranking ministers abruptly resigning as laundered cash is shuttled through Kyiv, and one of President Zelensky’s former business partners fleeing the country just hours before the police raided his home.

And perhaps the most galling detail of all: the entire scheme exploited a wartime loophole — a rule under martial law preventing contractors from collecting debts in court from companies providing essential services. Energoatom fits that definition perfectly, as it supplies more than half of Ukraine’s electricity.

It’s the sort of story that makes you roll your eyes and mutter to yourself: of course there were kickbacks; of course there were shell companies; of course someone quietly slipped across the border with a suitcase full of cash.

But more fascinating than the scandal itself is the sheer level of detail — the way this scheme evolved from small to big to overwhelming, unfolding slowly, piece by piece, person by person, until you finally step back and see the broad contours of the entire sprawling disaster.

At first, the story feels excruciatingly granular, almost too much information. But then it hits you: the minute details are exactly the point. Corruption doesn’t erupt in grand, cinematic moments — it flourishes in the margins, in the shadows, in the fine print, in the late-night phone calls, the coded messages, the clandestine meetings, the secret handshakes — each calibrated with just the right amount of plausible deniability.

And oddly enough, all of this brings me straight into the heart of Parshat Vayeitzei, which was my late father’s bar mitzvah parsha. He would always say — with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye — that Vayeitzei was “the most important parsha in the Torah.” We’d nod and smile, convinced he was just having a laugh.

I mean, yes — Vayeitzei certainly has its blockbuster moments: Jacob’s ladder stretching toward heaven, the extraordinary promises God makes to him, his first encounter with Rachel at the well — one of the great love stories in Jewish history — followed by his marriages and the birth of eleven children who would become the founders of the tribes that became the Jewish people. All of these events are unquestionably consequential, to say the least.

But then you hit the middle of the parsha — the part everyone secretly hopes the baal koreh will speed through. It’s long, it’s intricate, and it’s bewilderingly detailed: the astonishing saga of Jacob’s business dealings with Lavan.

Wage agreements — and disagreements. Livestock negotiations. Contract revisions. Endless sheep rearing. Sheep with spots, sheep without spots, sheep with speckles, stripes, dark patches — every possible permutation of sheep coloration you can imagine. It’s the Torah’s version of a regulatory audit: too many technical notes, too many procedural details, and far too much information.

Most of us, understandably, wonder what all this sheep drama is doing in a sacred text. Why did the Torah — normally so concise — zoom in on this business relationship from hell? Why give us this level of detail? And whatever the answer might be, surely this story doesn’t belong in “the most important parsha in the Torah.”

But my father always insisted that Vayeitzei’s business section wasn’t a pointless, transitional interruption in the narrative — it was the narrative. And perhaps, as the daily revelations from Kyiv remind us, the line between spiritual greatness and moral disaster is drawn not in grand theological enterprises like ladders reaching heavenward or celestial dream sequences, but in the slow, grinding, unglamorous world of day-to-day commerce: negotiations, promises, deals, and the quiet ethical temptations that shadow every decision we make.

If you think about it, this strange middle section of Vayeitzei is the Torah’s earliest and most elaborate case study in business ethics — or, more accurately, business un-ethics. Lavan is the biblical version of a man who smiles broadly to your face while his hand is quietly stealing your wallet.

He is charming, generous-sounding, and utterly unscrupulous. He cheats at negotiations. He alters contracts retroactively. He weaponizes hospitality. He manipulates family loyalty. If there were a biblical Consumer Protection Bureau, Lavan would be its full-time subject of interest.

And Jacob — the bookish, scholarly son of Isaac — finds himself thrown into a years-long masterclass with one of the greatest Machiavellian businessmen of the ancient Near East. The holy patriarch of the Jewish nation, the spiritual heir to Abraham and Isaac, sitting across the table from a crook arguing over sheep markings.

But that’s precisely the point. Spirituality is easy when you live a monastic life of solitude and separation. Show me how spiritual you are when you need to negotiate with a scoundrel — that’s when your character is truly revealed.

Judaism doesn’t believe in the mystique of the cloister. Our greatest spiritual heroes aren’t monks; they’re shepherds, merchants, craftsmen, farmers — even warriors and kings. Jacob’s true greatness emerges in the trenches of real life, in the dense and morally dangerous world where money, power, opportunity, resentment, and desperation mingle with our aspirations to become the people God wants us to be.

What Vayeitzei shows, in deliberately excruciating detail, is that Jacob absolutely refuses to become Lavan. Yes, he negotiates, he strategizes, he outsmarts. But he does not become Lavan. He maintains his integrity.

And here’s the deeper insight — the one my father, with his mischievous grin, seemed instinctively to understand: the Jewish mission from the very outset was never to escape the world; it was to elevate it — from the inside out.

If Jacob had spent twenty years in a desert cave meditating on the divine, he might have produced beautiful insights — but there would have been no tribes, no family, no nation, and no legacy. Instead, Jacob becomes the spiritual father of Israel the nation even as he ran a household, raised children, and navigated a business partnership with a morally bankrupt relative.

And that is precisely why the Torah dwells on the sheep. Because the sheep are not a distraction — they are the arena. They are the battlefield where Jacob’s greatness is forged. They are the proof that holiness is not found in what we avoid, but in how we behave when we can’t avoid what we would much prefer to have nothing to do with.

And as it turns out, in the final analysis Jacob was not transformed by his dream of angels — he was transformed by his years in business with Lavan. What we learn from Jacob and the sheep is that building a family, maintaining integrity in business, and dealing with difficult people are not obstacles to spiritual growth; they are spiritual growth.

Which only goes to prove that my father’s twinkling assertion wasn’t a joke at all. He understood something the rest of us tend to overlook. Maybe Vayeitzei really is the most important parsha in the Torah — not despite the details, but because of them.