Vayishlach - Sat 02 Dec (Kislev 19)
I know some wonderful Jakes and Jacobs, but I’ll be the first to admit— Jacob’s not my favorite character in Torah. From the start, he truly seems to care only for his own well-being. When his twin is hungry, Jacob demands his birthright in exchange for a bowl of red lentil stew. (Which, ok, red lentil stew is delicious, but still.) When his father is blind and nearing death, Jacob and his mother Rebecca collude to steal Esau’s rightful blessing as the firstborn son. When Esau is angry enough with Jacob to try to kill him after the blessing is stolen, Jacob runs away and leaves his mother to handle all of the fallout. And when, after living with his uncle and marrying his cousins, Jacob decides decades later to return to his father’s land, he takes his wives and children away without even letting them say goodbye to the only home they’ve known. Even on the journey home, he puts himself first by putting himself last, which is where we pick up this week.
At the start of VaYishlach, Jacob sends emissaries ahead to his brother Esau, each bearing gifts. And he sends along with them his family, crossing his wives and children over the Jabbock ford to Esau’s side, while he alone remains on the far side.
It’s not the first time that Jacob has spent a night alone, but it may be the first time in 20 years. (It’s tough, I imagine, to get a night alone when you have 2 wives, 2 concubines, 11 sons and a daughter.) But back before all of that, when Jacob left home fleeing from Esau 20 years earlier, things were different.
Jacob was young and, based on the rock he used as a pillow in Genesis 28:11, horribly unprepared. He was, after all, known as the opposite of an outdoorsman. While Esau spent his childhood hunting, delighting his father, Jacob spent his at his mother’s side sitting in the tent. But that first night alone under the stars, with no parent to watch out for him, Jacob met God. He watched angels moving up and down on a sulam, a ladder, from heaven to earth, and he heard the Divine voice promising him protection, and his life was changed. He woke and said:
“יֵ֣שׁ ה׳ בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי” God is in this place and I didn’t know it.
In this moment, Jacob became fully aware of God, aware of God’s presence not only in his father’s life but in his own. And it was with God’s promise of presence that Jacob made his way to Laban.
Now, a few chapters and decades later, Jacob has a different experience. In Genesis 32:25, a man, an ish, wrestles with Jacob all night.
There’s a great deal of commentary on whom Jacob was wrestling. Who was this ish? Rashi suggests, based on an early midrash Bereishit Rabbah, that the man was no man at all but Esau’s guardian angel come to keep Jacob from causing him harm. Radak, another medieval commentator, suggests that the ish was the archangel Gavriel sent to increase Jacob’s courage. Other commentators have suggested that Jacob was wrestling God, Esau, or even his own inner demons.
Many years, I’d recommend that we take this story as an invitation to look inward, to consider the ways that we challenge and even injure ourselves as Jacob is injured. I’d talk about epigenetical trauma and the wounds we carry whether they were inflicted on our bodies or minds or our ancestors’. But this year, I want to take the idea of an opposing force— both connected to and external to us, in some way— a little more literally. And lest you think I’m taking us somewhere else I want to be clear: I’m talking not about the division between Israel and Gaza but rather division within the Jewish community.
Since October 7, I have seen statements from friends, family and colleagues that have shocked me in their polarization. People I think of as being reasonably aligned on most issues of import in our society are advocating for nearly opposite approaches when it comes to the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Jewish leaders who for years have advocated for pluralism and careful listening are drawing hard lines in the sand that put many Jews on the far side. Some Jews on the far left are minimizing and at times excusing the antisemitic terror of Hamas because they support Palestinian freedom. Some Jews on the right are saying that Jews who call for a permanent ceasefire aren’t Jewish, or at least aren’t welcome in Jewish communities. In this time of intense rise in antisemitism, and the expected parallel rise of islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, to see these divisions within our tiny tribe is its own horror.
And so I want to bring us back to Jacob, the patriarch for whom our people is named. And, strangely enough, I want to set to the side the eternal question of his wrestling partner. No matter whom his opponent, what I’m most interested in here is Jacob’s response when the fight is done.
The ish, unable to win, wrenches Jacob’s hip and says: ” שַׁלְּחֵ֔נִי כִּ֥י עָלָ֖ה הַשָּׁ֑חַר- release me, because it’s dawn!”
Jacob, who must have been exhausted and covered in sand and sweat by this point, refuses to release the wrestler. Instead he says words many of us know: “ לֹ֣א אֲשַֽׁלֵּחֲךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־בֵּרַכְתָּֽנִי. I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
Bless me? How is that something Jacob would want? After a night-long brawl, wouldn’t Jacob want either victory or release? Wouldn’t he want to put the night behind him? But instead he asks for a blessing. And in that moment, as it did 20 years earlier with the sulam— the angelic ladder— Jacob’s life changes.
“What’s your name?” the ish asks.
“Ya’akov,” Jacob replies, offering the name given him because he entered the world grasping his brother’s heel.
“No more will your name be Ya’akov,” the ish says, “But Yisrael, כִּ֖י אִם־יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל כִּֽי־שָׂרִ֧יתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִ֛ים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁ֖ים וַתּוּכָֽל׃, because you have contended with God and with people and you have endured.”
Rashi says that in this moment Jacob goes from being a figure who succeeds through deceit and supplantation to succeeding through noble conduct. Yisrael becomes what Ya’akov was incapable of being— a person who knows God and knows himself. The little brother has stopped clutching at heels and stands on his own two feet.
Indeed, perhaps for the first time in his life, he puts himself last by putting himself first. The next morning, Yisrael crosses over the Jabbock. He divides the children among Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah, putting them in the order he most wants to protect, with Rachel and Joseph behind all the rest. But, then, instead of hanging back with Rachel and Joseph, Yisrael עָבַ֣ר לִפְנֵיהֶ֑ם — crosses in front of them, the same language as crossing the form, and bows low to the ground seven times until he’s near his brother.
Rabbi Avital Hochberg of the Shalom Hartman institute speaks to this moment in a sermon she gave a few years ago. She wrote that in this moment of wrestling Yisrael is not spared future conflict but rather “blessed to have the fight move inward, to be a person who wrestles with himself, with his God, face-to-face. A move from a battle in which there are winners and losers, blessed and unblessed, to above all being someone who is able. A person who survives and thrives despite his life's tensions. He is aware of them and is constantly trying to conquer them, not out of a fear of losing, but out of a recognition of their value and his own ability to prevail.”
Yisrael is a man who knows he’ll be ok, that he will make it through, even if there is conflict. Even if there is rather intense conflict. And this is what we must remember as Am Yisrael.
We have always been a people with a multiplicity of views. I could name any number of issues, poll this kahal, and in all likelihood, as the joke goes, get more opinions than congregants in the room. And yet we continue to bless one another— with our presence, with our commitment to Jewish life, with our shared learning.
How can we, like Yisrael, wrestle, and then love our opponents enough to seek blessing from them? How can we, in this moment of deep division, remember our ancestor— and our people’s namesake’s— ability to hold conflict and love together? Perhaps Tur HaAroch, a 14th century commentator, has the answer. He suggests that Ya’akov and the ish were not wrestling so much as hugging, stating: ”and an ish wrestled with him וַיֵּאָבֵ֥ק אִישׁ֙ עִמּ֔וֹ, The word ויאבק describes an activity similar to ויחבק, “he embraced him,” presumably in a kind of bear hug.”
In this time, this time of sorrow and heartache, of fear and frustration, of hopelessness, I invite us to think about what it would mean to turn our wrestling to collective embrace. What would it mean to come together, to face one another across our differences, and ask for blessing, each of us from the next? What would it mean to do as we are commanded, to Sh’ma, to listen to our wrestling partners, with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole being? It is not easy, but I have faith. As Reconstructionists, we may disagree on whether or not God is in this place. But we can agree that we, Am Yisrael, are in this place. Let us commit to staying in community. Shabbat Shalom.
