The challenge of being a child of Israel and Jacob
D’VAR TORAH
Parshat VaYetze
Over the course of my life, I have “left home” multiple times. Fortunately for me, each time I have left a place I called home it has been a positive choice. Like Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12, I have been blessed in each move I have made to “Lech Lecha,” to go forth, to a positive new chapter in my life. I have never experienced being a refugee, fleeing persecution or fear.
Parsha Vayetze begins with Jacob leaving home. However, unlike my personal experiences, or the experience of his grandparents, Jacob is running away from home in our Torah reading this week. He is the first biblical refugee. He is described to us as being both afraid and exhausted.
Jacob is beginning a journey into homelessness that will last for 22 years. Our patriarch goes to sleep and has a dream in which he envisions a ladder connecting earth to heaven. One simple message of the story for Jacob, and us, is that what we do here on earth reaches up to heaven. It means that we can affect/impact many worlds and our actions have effects on many different levels. Too many of us, like the Jacob we read about in last week’s parsha, believe that what we do affects only ourselves. Jacob’s ladder comes to teach us how we are all interconnected and related. At the end of this dream, Jacob awakes and says to himself: “God is in this place and I did not know it.” He also establishes the concept of tithing, of giving 10 percent of our income to tzedaka, as a means of expressing gratitude to God for our blessings and committing ourselves to be God’s hand in the world.
How often do we forget this teaching? How often do we act only from our own narrow place, our own narcissistic place, and forget or not care about the impact our actions and inaction have on others and on all levels of existence, on earth and in heaven?
A second lesson that our sages see in this dream narrative is the significance of God’s angels, the malachim, who go up and down the ladder.
How often do we forget to be grateful for the angels that help us? How many times have we been in need of an angel and felt forgotten and/or betrayed just because we did not look around us and notice the angels that are with us? How many times have we refused to recognize that each of us can be “aalach Adonai,” a messenger of God? As we reflect upon our Thanksgiving experiences of this week, I suggest that we all remember that the real messengers of God do not come down from heaven and speak to us in a deep resonating voice, but rather, as Martin Buber taught in his seminal work, “I and Thou,” a century ago, they are the people next to us, and across the table from us; the ones in whom we see the Divine, and who in turn see the Divine within each other.
When Jacob awakes from his dream, he begins a process of teshuvah.
Jacob, whose name, Yaacov, is derived from the Hebrew term for heel, will, over the course of the 22 years he is in exile, living under the roof of his uncle/ father-in-law, Laben, be humbled, and often suffer the indignities of being a refugee in some else’s land. But Jacob does not allow himself to be humiliated.
In next week’s parsha, as he returns to his family home, Jacob has a second dream as he fearfully awaits an encounter with his twin brother Esau. In this dream, in response to his request for a blessing, he is given the name Israel, a name that means God Wrestler. The Being, referred to as an Ish, with whom he wrestled in that dream, explains the new name as a blessing Jacob has earned, because he has “wrestled with the Human and the Divine and persevered.”
A third lesson I find in this story is for us to recognize that each of us is both a ben or bat Ya’akov and a ben or bat Yisrael. As b’nai Ya’akov we have to struggle continually with the real-life challenges of survival as individuals and a people living in a sometimes hostile world. We who call ourselves b’nai Yisrael are simultaneously challenged to wrestle with the Human and the Divine.
As we stand at the quarter mark of the 21st century, we are living in a moment when we fear confrontation with others, both individually and communally. As American Jews we are stressed by the fears and conflicts we face with both our fellow Americans and our fellow Jews. Balancing particularism and universalism seems harder and harder. We are confronted simultaneously with antisemitism from both the political left and the political right. Acculturation, which remains, for many of us, including me, the preferred alternative to both assimilation and self-ghettoization, seems more difficult to define and even more challenging to attain.
On this post-Thanksgiving Shabbat, as we approach Chanukah, the festival of re-dedication, which was the Maccabees’ festival of Thanksgiving, we realize that the Maccabees are a model of a Jewish community that faced similar issues. I pray that our American Jewish community and each of us can use the Chanukah story as an inspiration to rededicate ourselves to humbly but assertively be malachai Adonai, messengers of God, and also to be avdai Adonai, servants of God.
Through our words and our actions, may we, like our ancestor Jacob, not only give thanks to God for our many blessings, but also commit ourselves to be God’s voice and hands in the creation of a better world, for ourselves and all humanity.
