Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed includes a case study of teaching the skills of grit and resilience at the Riverdale Country School, an elite private school in New York City, and how teachers struggled with the challenge of helping their students learn how to overcome adversity. When asked why teaching grit and resilience must be an educational priority, Karen Fierst, one of the leaders of the project, states,
“Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens” (Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, 84).
According to Fierst, if you do not allow yourself to experience adversity, you will never experience the satisfaction that comes from overcoming adversity, for that process of overcoming provides the richest opportunity for meaningful learning and discovery. At any school, there is an inherent tension between encouragement and reality, between allowing each child to shine and allowing “real learning” to take place through struggle, a vision echoed in commentaries on this week’s parasha.
In his recent biography of Jacob, the Israeli bible scholar Yair Zakovitch asks us to imagine what was going through Jacob’s mind as he left home as a young man. He writes:
“People can flee their pursuers while never breaking free of their conscience and past. Jacob escaped his brother’s wrath but he left behind an elderly, blind father and a loving and worried mother without knowing whether he would see them ever again. If he did turn to glance back, he caught a parting glimpse of his country, the wide fields in which he had shepherded his flocks and, stretched out above them, open sky. Who can know his thoughts in those moments? Did he reflect on his behavior toward his twin brother? Did he feel regret? The uncertainty of his present journey into an unknown fate must have weighed heavily on him” (Yair Zakovitch, Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch, 46).
According to Zakovitch, when Jacob leaves home, he is completely unaware of the future that awaits him, and can reasonably assume that his relationship with his family will be forever severed. At the same time, Zakovitch also acknowledges that Jacob’s journey becomes more than a journey to safety and find a suitable wife; Jacob’s journey is a journey for a young man to encounter what he could be, a point not lost upon our commentators.
Rashi’s commentary on the statement “And Jacob departed” contains what is known as a “double-Rashi,” where Rashi offers two potential meanings for a single verse, leaving the reader to decide which one appears to be the stronger interpretation. The first interpretation Rashi offers considers Jacob’s journey in its textual context:
“And Jacob departed”: Due to the fact that the daughters of Canaan were evil in the eyes of Isaac his father, Esau went to Ishmael [to take a wife], [Scripture] interrupted the subject of the episode of Jacob, and wrote, “And Esau saw that Isaac had blessed, etc..” And once it completed, it went back to the original topic” (Rashi on Genesis 28:10).
In this first commentary, Rashi argues that Jacob departed so that he might find a suitable wife, not making the same mistake as Esau, whose marriage to two Hittite women was a source of great pain for his parents (Genesis 26:34-35). However, Rashi offers a second commentary on this verse suggesting that the journey itself was meaningful because of who Jacob was:
“And Jacob departed”: It need only have written “And Jacob went to Haran.” Why does it mention his departure? But it tells us that the departure of a righteous person from a place makes an impression, for at the time that a righteous person is in a city, he is its magnificence, he is its splendor, he is its grandeur. Once he has departed from there, its magnificence has gone away, its splendor has gone away, its grandeur has gone away” (Rashi Ibid.).
This second commentary, which takes a spiritual, rather than contextual, approach, argues that the Torah mentions Jacob’s departure because Jacob’s absence in his homeland affects the spiritual power of the land itself, decreasing in his departure from Canaan, and increasing in his arrival to Haran.
However, Rashi’s commentary fails to address the rhetorical questions of Zakovitch, who wonders what Jacob’s departure can tell us about Jacob’s journey as a young boy who will eventually become Israel and father a larger nation than either his father or grandfather. In a Hasidic Commentary on this question, the Meor Enaiyim, a commentary written by Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, considers Jacob’s journey to Haran the opportunity for Jacob to develop a meaningful relationship to God and God’s Torah. He writes:
“Thus “Jacob left Beersheba.” He went from that place of Torah’s hiding to bring it out into the open. He did this by means of the purification he performed in Haran, the place of the “shells,” within which Torah had been hidden. All this was to prepare the coming generations, so that they might attain in a revealed way what had formerly been in hiding...Everything he did with Laban, all that is told in the Scriptures, was for the sake of Torah and God’s service, to bring Torah forth from the depths beneath which it had been buried in Haran, rejoining it to the Torah above” (Meor Eniayim on Genesis 28:10).
While this commentary largely ignores the textual context of Jacob’s journey, it does reflect the fact that Jacob’s journey from home will mark a new chapter in his life where he comes into adulthood, confronts his relationship with God, and is challenged to ask whether or not he will become a person worthy of God’s covenant. In this sense, Jacob’s journey towards Torah, as the Meor Enaiyim tells it, is a journey of struggle that all of us confront.
Like Jacob, sometimes we need to leave a place of comfort in order to stretch our minds in a way that might unlock the richest and most special pieces of ourselves. Whether we are attempting to solve a difficult equation, going away from home for a Shabbaton or class trip, or reaching out to make a new friend, departing from a place of comfort might be scary, yet that departure is what opens us up for the benefits of learning that take place when we face a challenge and overcome it. May we teach our children to be like Jacob, letting go at appropriate times so that they might leave a place of comfort, succeed in their journey, and be enriched for the experience.
Shabbat Shalom!
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