On Tuesday morning, a number of Schechter parents gathered at our Upper School Campus to study the Parashat HaShavua with Rabbi Barry Chesler, our Upper School Coordinator of Jewish Studies. At the conclusion of our study together, Rabbi Chesler remarked that Jacob’s complexity as a character is one the reasons why he is Rabbi Chesler’s favorite patriarch. I share this sentiment, and think that the best way to see Jacob’s complexity as a character, and what it might teach us about developing a relationship with God, is seen most clearly in this week’s parasha of Vayishlakh.
Jack Miles writes in his masterful work God: A Biography that the relationship between Jacob and God is not as strong we assume, and we are oftentimes left to wonder what role God plays in the critical events in Jacob’s life, as Torah makes no direct reference to divine intervention in those instances. Miles writes:
“Jacob has acknowledged the Lord God, but the reader cannot fail to recall that at three different turning points, Jacob’s victory has been transparently the result of his own resourcefulness, if not guile. It almost seems that it is Jacob, rather than God, who is showing a degree of steadfast love and faithfulness, attributing to divine assistance happy outcomes that, by the word of the narration, comes from his energies alone. Whether in tricking his father, outwitting his uncle, or appeasing his hostile brother, Jacob acts, to all seeming, on his own” (Jack Miles, God: A Biography, 74).
If the story of the patriarchs describes the emergence of a covenant between God and the Jewish people, we must grapple with the fact that Jacob seems to be the author of his own story, a particularly challenging question in Parashat Vayishlakh.
Prior to his reunion with Esau, Jacob has a strange encounter with an unnamed man, where the Torah states that, “Jacob was left alone, and man wrestled with him until the break of dawn” (Bereishit 32:24). While the entire wrestling episode makes no reference to the identity of this mysterious man, the Torah states that upon leaving, “Jacob called the place Pinei-El, saying, “It is because I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared” (Ibid. 32:30). When we read the name that Jacob gives to this place, Pinei El (The Face of God), this is the first time that God’s name is even mentioned in this episode. Did Jacob somehow know that the nameless man was a messenger of God, or did Jacob simply assume that the man must be the divine presence? Does Jacob merely mention God’s name after this incident to attribute divine significance to a confusing event? Below, I will share two commentaries that respond to Miles' challenge, each of which captures something unique about the nature of the relationship between Jacob and God, and, by extension, all of humanity and God.
In his commentary on Sefer Bereishit, Nahum Sarna writes that we know that Jacob encountered God in this wrestling match because of what Jacob says regarding why he called this place Pinei El:
“Yet my life has been preserved”- The idea behind this statement forms a recurring theme in the biblical narratives. At the burning bush Moses hides his face, “for he was afraid to look at God.” Gideon and Manoah both fear death after experiencing God’s self-manifestation. God explicitly tells Moses, “Man may not see me and live!” This is the biblical way of expressing the intensity of the experience of the individual encounter with the Divine Presence-the utterly overwhelming nature of the mysterious contact with the awesome majesty of the transcendent yet immanent God” (Nahum Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis 228).
According to Sarna, while Jacob did not know that the mysterious man was actually God, the nature of the encounter itself leads Jacob to include that a personal encounter of that intensity must have been a divine encounter. As a result, we can infer from the encounter itself that God was present, even though the text makes no mention of God during the encounter.
Taking an alternative approach, one Hasidic commentator, Ze’ev Wolf of Zhytomir, argues in the Or Ha-Meir that we should look at this episode typologically, and argues that we can infer from the dialogue between Jacob and the mysterious man that this figure must be an emissary of God. The text states:
“...even ordinary conversations between people, as well as whatever happens to you in the course of time, becomes a place where you can find the shining presence, the face of God (Pinei El). This face of the most supreme God, as it is cloaked in the particular place, reveals itself to the tzaddik so that he can raise up from there shekhinah’s limbs, which are called nefesh or “life”” (Ze’ev Wolf of Zhytomir, Or Ha-Meir on Bereishit 32:31).
In the episode from our parasha, Jacob wrestles with this man until morning, and in the morning the man says to Jacob, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome” (Bereishit 32:28). As a result, Jacob concludes that God must have been present in the struggle itself, for why else would the man give Jacob a name with such significance unless the hand of God was present?
In both Sarna’s commentary and the text of the Or Ha-Meir, each commentary answers the challenge raised by Jack Miles by arguing that we do not need to see explicit statements from God in the text of Jacob’s wrestling with the mysterious man in order to conclude that God was present. Reading this passage reminds us that the divine comes into our lives in unexpected way, whether through a moment when the shock and awe of an event compels us to see God’s presence (in the case of Sarna), or through moments where the holiness of an individual encounter reminds us that God is in the details (in the case of the Or Ha-Meir). May we have the merit of learning from Jacob, recognizing that God’s presence comes into our lives whether we hear a direct call or not; the challenge is looking for the clues that will uncover the gifts of God’s presence.
Shabbat Shalom!
No comments:
Post a Comment