Parashat Vayetzei
November 13, 2021, 9 Kislev 5782
Torah: Genesis 28:10-32:3; Triennial 31:17-32:3
Haftarah: Hosea 12:13-14:10 (Ashkenazim);
Sephardim Hosea 11:7-12:12
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In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "A Spiritual Exercise", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "Dual Loyalty" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes about "Mostly Dead is Slightly Alive" in the Haftarah.
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A Spiritual Exercise
Ilana Kurshan
At the start of our parashah, Jacob departs from his childhood home in Beer Sheva and heads toward Haran, at once fleeing his brother’s wrath and searching for a wife, as per his father’s instructions. While he is on his journey, night falls, and he finds himself alone and weary in an unfamiliar place, with only the ground for his bed and some rocks as his pillows. There he has a dream of a ladder reaching to the heavens, with angels ascending and descending. Jacob wakes and declares, “Indeed God is present in this place, and I did not know it” (28:16). What is the nature of Jacob’s realization when he awakens from his dream? According to Talmudic and midrashic sources, Jacob awoke with new insight into the various ways that we can forge a spiritual connection with God – an insight relevant not only for Jacob, but for us today.
The Talmud (Megillah 17a) seeks to determine exactly where Jacob was coming from when he set off for Haran. They point to a discrepancy in the calculation of Jacob’s age throughout the book of Genesis, noting that when Jacob goes down to Egypt, the Torah says that he is 130, whereas all the other calculations suggest that he ought to have been only 116. How to account for the missing fourteen years? The rabbis posit that Jacob first left his father’s home and spent fourteen years studying Torah in the House of Ever, some sort of early beit midrash. Only then did he set out for Haran. This midrash also explains why we are told that Jacob left Beer Sheva twice – once at the end of last week’s parashah (28:5), and once at the start of this week’s parashah (29:1). Presumably he first left home for his fourteen years of study; then, when he left for the second time, he was departing not from home but from the beit midrash.
When Jacob dreams of the ladder of angels, then, he has just spent fourteen years deeply immersed in Torah study. But at Beit El—the site of his dream—he connects to God for the first time not through Torah study, but through prayer. The rabbis (Berakhot 26a) note that the Torah uses an unusual word to describe Jacob’s arrival at Beit El: “He came upon [vayifga] a certain place and stopped there” (29:2). They explain that the term vayifga is a reference to prayer, based on the use of this term in the book of Jeremiah (7:16) as a synonym for prayer. According to the rabbis, each of the patriarchs was responsible for instituting one of the three daily prayer services: Abraham instituted the morning prayer when he prayed for Sodom, Isaac instituted the afternoon prayer when he went out into the field, and Jacob instituted the evening prayer at Beit El. Notably it is only Jacob who prays to God in a moment of actual and existential darkness, alone in the night after leaving his hometown and uncertain of the future ahead.
According to this reading, Jacob’s dream marks the transition from a life of Torah study to a life of prayer, as Avivah Zornberg notes (The Murmuring Deep, p. 278). The midrash in Genesis Rabbah (69:7) offers a creative reading of the verse used to describe Jacob’s awakening. The Torah teaches that Jacob awoke “from his sleep” [mishnato], but Rabbi Yohanan reads this word as mi-mishnato, meaning that Jacob woke up from his Mishnah, that is, from his learning. The nineteenth-century Hasidic commentator on the Torah known as the Ma’or Va-Shemesh (R. Kalonymous Kalman Epstein, on Genesis 28:16) explains that when Jacob awoke, he realized that Torah alone would not bring him to a full awareness of God. He said, “Indeed God is present in this place,” meaning that God can be encountered through prayer as well, “and I did not know it,” meaning that he had not realized the power of prayer until that point.
Jacob has to learn that prayer is an equally powerful, if very different, way of connecting to God. Whereas Torah study is about novelty, prayer is about repetition. When we study Torah, we try to master and synthesize more and more material, and coming up with new insights that cast everything that came before in a whole new light. Prayer, in contrast, is about reciting the same liturgy day after day, knowing exactly what we will read in the prayer book even before we open it. Whereas Torah study is about taking something unfamiliar—a new sugya, a new midrash—and internalizing it until it becomes familiar, prayer is about taking the familiar—the same liturgy we say every day—and infusing it with such deep intentionality that it is as if we are saying these words for the very first time. To study Torah is to move forwards, to plow onwards, to forge ahead, perhaps fleeing one’s brother or seeking out one’s spouse; to pray is to stand still, to press our feet together like angels, to stop in the middle of a journey and lie down upon a stone for a pillow.
As an avid exerciser, I sometimes think that Torah study is like running, whereas prayer is like yoga. When we study Torah, we try to go as far as we can in the text, covering as much ground as possible and keeping track of how far we’ve gone. When we pray, we repeat the same words and the same choreographed body motions over and over; if we pray too quickly to concentrate, we have defeated the purpose. We aspire to feel each word and each stretch, and this requires proceeding slowly and deliberately. Both Torah study and prayer strengthen our spiritual muscles, but in different ways.
Several spiritual thinkers have commented that when we pray, we are speaking to God; when we study Torah, God speaks to us. The image of the ladder, then, is quite an apt one to describe this transitional moment in Jacob’s life: The ascending angels are bearing Jacob’s words to God, whereas the descending angels are bearing God’s words of Torah down to Jacob. As Jacob came to appreciate, prayer and Torah study are two of the fundamental ways in which we forge a connection between the world of human beings and the heavens above. To live our lives in dialogue with God—at once speaking to God and hearing God’s voice—we need to engage in both.
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Dual Loyalty
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Background: Marriage involved certain transactions. The groom gave the bride’s family the bride’s-price, and the bride’s family gave her a dowery as her possessions to bring to the marriage.
Text: Bereshit 31:3-16
3And the Lord said to Jacob, “Return to the land of your fathers and to your place of birth, and I will be with you.” 4And Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah to the field, to his flock, 5and said to them, “I see your father’s countenance, that it is not toward me as before; but the God of my father has been with me. 6And you know that with all my might I have served your father. 7Yet your father has deceived me and changed my wages ten times, but God did not allow him to hurt me… 11…the Angel of God spoke to me in a dream “…Now arise, get out of this land, and return to the land of your birth.”… 14And Rachel and Leah answered and said to him, “Is there still any portion or inheritance for us in our father’s house? 15Are we not considered strangers by him? For he has sold us, and also completely consumed our silver. 16For all the riches which God has set apart from our father are ours and our children’s; now then, whatever God has said to you, do it.”
· Compare what God tells Jacob in v.3 to what Jacob tells Rachel and Leah. Why do you think that he presents the case as he does?
· What might be the reason that Jacob asks Rachel and Leah to come out to the field to hear what he has to say?
· Why do you think that Jacob stresses to Rachel and Leah that he had served their father faithfully?
· Having to choose between loyalty to their birth family or to their marriage, what do Rachel and Leah choose and why? Was there any doubt? Try to find support in the text for your opinion. What might have convinced a woman to remain loyal to her father, or to feel greater loyalty to her husband?
Commentary: Ibn Ezra First Commentary Bereshit 31:15
For he has sold us - It is as if he sold us in that he did not do with us what a father normally does with his daughters. What he did was to say to you, "Guard my flock and take my daughters as your pay."
· What in Lavan’s behavior caused his daughters to feel that they were treated as property rather than as daughters?
· Jacob, Rachel, and Leah choose to leave while Lavan is away. Why do you think that they decide to sneak away without notifying Lavan?
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“Mostly Dead is Slightly Alive”
Bex Stern Rosenblatt
The first time we are introduced to the concept of Sheol is by Jacob. Our once strong character, who outwitted brother and uncle and wrestled with an angel, is undone by the supposed death of his son, Joseph. From that point onward, there is a refrain that repeats for Jacob. No matter what the situation is, he talks of descending, mourning, to Sheol.
Meanwhile, in our haftarah portion, we get one of the most memorable descriptions of what Sheol might be. God speaks, saying in the JPS translation:
“From Sheol itself I will save them,
Redeem them from very Death.
Where, O Death, are your plagues?
Your pestilence where, O Sheol?”
So what is this Sheol, this place Jacob brings up back in Genesis and that God seems to mock many hundreds of years later in the Book of Hosea? Clearly, it is associated with death. In order to understand what this association means, we have to explore what we mean when we talk about death in the Tanakh. Jon Levenson puts forth a very interesting way of how to understand death in a biblical context. He writes, “death in the ancient Near Eastern world was often conceived of as a disease - the most serious disease, to be sure, and seldom if ever, curable - but a disease nonetheless.”
The specter of death hangs over each of the patriarchs in Genesis. Isaac and Jacob both lean into old age and climb onto their deathbeds many decades before they actually die. From a modern perspective, this seems bizarre. Why do they assume they are dying when they have such a long time to live? Yet from a biblical perspective, Isaac and Jacob place themselves on the death-side of the continuum or spectrum from life to death. They view themselves as sick or sad or incapacitated, more dead than alive in an existence without hope. Of course, that didn’t mean they were literally, medically dead as we understand death today. They were just suffering from death, the disease, for decades. Neither of them ever recovered.
Within this framework of death, Sheol is the location at which death is experienced. It is the narrow place, the pit, the prison, the watery deep, the seemingly inescapable underneath where humans feel themselves to be when they are suffering from death, the disease. It is Jacob’s way of expressing his hopelessness and inertia upon losing Joseph. He finds himself in Sheol, in a state of confined existence.
Of course, God is a God of life, a living God. In this way, God is very much located at the opposite end of the spectrum from death. In fact, in many of the Psalms, Sheol is depicted as a place or feeling of being cut off from God. What we see then in the text of the haftarah is God overcoming this separation. God enters the place that is defined as God’s absence and in doing so overcomes death itself. When God chooses to come down into the metaphorical pit with us, the pit loses its power over us to such an extent that the disease of death no longer seems quite so fatal. When hope is returned to us, doom is no longer inevitable. As we read the story of Jacob in the coming weeks, it is worthwhile to pay attention to the interplay between hope and God as the thing that redeems us from various Sheols.
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