In this week’s reading, Esav marries two Chiti (Hittite) women, “and they were a source of spiritual bitterness to Yitzchak and to Rivka” [26:35]. The Chitim were, of course, one of the Canaanite nations that had moved into the land promised to Avraham.

Why were Esav’s parents so distressed?

Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki) explains that Esav’s wives served idols, and blames the smoke of their idol worship as one reason for Yitzchak losing his eyesight [27:1]. Rivka expressed her alarm with regards to Yaakov: “If Jacob takes a wife from the daughters of Ches like these, to what benefit is my life?” [27:46]. Thus Yitzchak tells Yaakov: “do not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan,” but instead to go to “the house of Besuel, your mother’s father, and take for yourself a wife from there” [28:1-2].

Similarly, when Avraham sent his servant to find a wife for Yitzchak, he made him swear an oath: “that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanite, in whose midst I dwell” [24:3]. Rather than find a match nearby, Avraham sent his servant all the way back to his family in Aram Naharayim, and now Yitzchak told Yaakov to travel there for the same reason.

The behavior of Esav’s wives wasn’t just an individual choice, but described the society that raised them. Hashem commands the Bnei Yisrael: “Like the practice of the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you, you shall not do” [Vayikra 18:3], followed by a list of the immoral relationships that were common there. The Canaanites served idols, practiced sorcery, and even burned their own children in the fire as offerings. The culture was so corrupt that “the land vomited out its inhabitants” [18:25]. Avraham kept Yitzchak away from this, as Yitzchak did for Yaakov, and he and Rivka found it very painful that Esav had brought such practices into his home.

Esav noticed. The Torah says, “Esav saw that the daughters of Canaan were evil in the eyes of Yitzchak his father, and Esav went to Yishmael, and took Machalas the daughter of Yishmael, the son of Avraham… in addition to his wives” [28:8-9].

At first, that sounds like a step in the right direction. He saw that his marriages hurt his parents, and so he married a granddaughter of Avraham. But Rashi focuses on those last words: “in addition to his wives.” Esav added “wickedness upon his wickedness,” says Rashi, because he did not divorce the first ones.

What Esav saw was only that the Canaanite women were evil “in the eyes of Yitzchak his father.” Esav wasn’t troubled by their witchcraft, their immorality, or their penchant for killing their own children as offerings to idols. He was only bothered by how it looked to his father. So he did something his father would see, and changed nothing else.

This was Esav’s pattern from the beginning. When he first married, Rashi tells us, our Sages compare Esav to a pig stretching out its split hooves, as if to show off its external sign of a kosher animal. For forty years Esav lived an immoral life, even taking other men’s wives. Then he said to himself, “My father married at forty, and so will I,” as if this somehow made him appear kosher.

Real teshuvah, returning to Hashem, is entirely different. The Rambam (Maimonides) writes that teshuvah means abandoning the bad practice, resolving in one’s heart never to do it again, regretting it, and confessing it before Hashem [Hilchos Teshuvah 2:2]. For Esav, that would have meant insisting that his wives abandon their idols, or separating from them. Instead, he kept everything as it was, and added one more wife for his father to see.

It is easy to fix how things look. How often do we see people try to make matters look better? They might offer a donation, or a public apology. But what matters is not what other people see; what matters is what Hashem sees, and what we actually change.

When we fall short, we should not be satisfied with looking better. We must take upon ourselves the much harder work of becoming better.