Vayishlach: Yaakov’s Shadow

The centrepiece of this week’s sedra (Torah reading) is the scene of Yaakov (Jacob) wrestling with a mysterious figure identified only as “a man”. This occurs as Yaakov prepares to meet his brother Esav (Esau) again after 20 years of separation. Previously, Esav had sworn to kill Yaakov for deceitfully obtaining their father’s blessing. Now, he is marching towards Yaakov with a large host of men and Yaakov has no idea if his intentions are hostile. As such, Yaakov sends tribute to Esav to try to pacify him, prays to God and prepares for battle. Left alone at night, he suddenly encounters a man who wrestles with him until dawn.

Who is this man? There are three possibilities. The later biblical book of Hoshea (Hosea), states that Yaakov struggled with an angel. Later rabbinic tradition would identify this angel with the guardian angel of Esav and the Edomite nation descended from him. According to this point of view, before Yaakov could meet Esav in person, he had to defeat him spiritually, wrestling with his guardian angel. However, this does not explain why the text describes the opponent as a man and not an angel.

The novelist and essayist Dara Horn suggested that the man was Esav himself. Aside from the dramatic need to bring the saga of the brothers’ rivalry to a clearer conclusion than the anti-climactic meeting that follows, this explains why Esav suddenly became conciliatory to Yaakov when they meet. However, it leaves us wondering why Yaakov asks Esav to bless him. Is he asking him to confirm their father’s blessings? Even stranger is that Esav appears to intuit God’s later renaming of him. The significance of the blessing is also unclear, given that it states that Yaakov has fought with God or a divine being (an angel) and man and prevailed. If he fought with Esav himself, why is Yaakov praised for fighting with God or an angel?

Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tzl, saw the struggle as an internal battle that Yaakov waged with himself. Yaakov had spent his whole life trying to be his brother, from his emergence from the womb clutching Esav’s heel to buying the birthright from him and disguising himself as him to gain the blessings. Here the question is why the Torah describes this inner struggle as an externalised one. Here too we can ask why Yaakov is told that he prevailed in the fight with the divine, when, according to this interpretation, he was engaged in an inner struggle.

We can actually combine all three interpretations and imagine that Yaakov was wrestling with his “Shadow.” In the Jungian school of understanding of human psychology, the Shadow represents the repressed parts of the human psyche, the aspects of our personality that we try to ignore. As an angel, the struggle represents Yaakov’s untapped potential, his ability to strive towards an angelic nature. In Haran, Yaakov’s spiritual growth seems to have suffered. He received prophecies, but they seemed almost mundane, teaching him how to avoid being conned by Lavan (Laban) and telling him that it was time to return home.

Rabbi Zvi Grumet, in his book Genesis: From Creation to Covenant, argues that Yaakov was almost lost forever in Haran. In halakhah (Jewish thought), a Jewish slave can only be made to serve for six years; in the seventh, the sabbatical, he must be set free. Yaakov served Lavan as a bonded labourer for two full sets of seven years and then another six years. As doing certain things three times can establish a legal precedent in halakhah, had Yaakov served another year, completing the third set of three years, he could have set a precedent for permanently becoming Lavan’s servant. Even if this is symbolic rather than legally justified, it shows that Yaakov was divorced from his nature as a free man and the bearer of the covenant, which has to be maintained by free people. The struggle with the angel therefore represents Yaakov trying to free himself from the slave mentality.

Esav represents Yaakov’s worst aspects. As we explored last week, Yaakov is crafty, but Esav is a brutal hunter. He represents the savage, untamed aspect of Yaakov’s psyche. Yaakov had repressed this aspect of himself since taking the blessings, with it only coming out a little when he lost his temper with Lavan at the end of last week’s sedra. Now, he has to wrestle with it and try to integrate it, to learn when it is appropriate to be violent and when not.

Experiencing a “dark night of the soul” while waiting for his confrontation with his twin brother, Yaakov wrestles with his untapped potential and the worst aspects of his personality, wrestling with his sese of self. He ends up being wounded, because wrestling with the Shadow is inherently dangerous. The Shadow is unconscious because it contains the aspects of ourselves that we can’t bear to face and coming to terms with them can damage us. Nor can he learn its name, as it is the part of himself that initially is repressed and unmentionable, then integrated into himself. This may be why we are not told of Yaakov releasing his opponent or of him going away. Instead, Yaakov is left alone; alone, but psychologically whole.

After this, he is able to confront Esav. He refers to the gifts he sent Esav as a “blessing,” which Rabbi Sacks sees as Yaakov symbolically returning Esav’s blessing to him. Remember that this was a blessing of material power and prosperity and not the blessing of the covenant, which was never destined for Esav. He no longer wants to be Esav and sets a boundary between them, saying that he will not travel with Esav. Yaakov has achieved a degree of wholeness and completion, reflected in his arrival in Shechem in a state that the Torah calls shalem, whole in body and soul after his wound in the struggle. He buys a plot of land and appears to be ready to settle down, as Rashi states on the start of next week’s sedra. He is putting down roots as a human living in a city, not as an angel and not as a hunter. His life is not over, but from now on, it will be driven by the actions of his children, not by his own decisions.