Parshat Vayetze

YOUR DESCENDANTS SHALL BE AS THE DUST OF THE EARTH; YOU SHALL SPREAD OUT TO THE WEST AND TO THE EAST, TO THE NORTH AND TO THE SOUTH. ALL THE FAMILIES OF THE EARTH SHALL BLESS THEMSELVES BY YOU AND YOUR DESCENDANTS.

(Bereishit 28:14)

 

You shall spread out [ufaratzta] to the west... All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.

 

But the word paretz, wherever it is used, signifies the breaching of a fence and passing through, just as: I will break down [p'rotz] the fence thereof (Isaiah 5:5); Why have You broken down [paratzta] her fences? (Psalms 80:13). And in the language of the Rabbis: "Pirtzah [a breach in a wall] calls forth to the thief" (Sotah 26a). Indeed, the Sacred Language uses the term p'rotz when referring to anything that oversteps its boundary: And you shall break forth [ufaratzta] to the west, and to the east (Bereishit 28:14); and the man broke forth [vayifrotz] exceedingly (Bereishit 30:43).

(RaMBaN on Bereishit 38:29, Chavel translation)

 

ufaratzta - [here] it means you shall multiply - and its primary meaning is destruction and shattering, since when things become numerous Scripture compares them to shattering, as if to say that due to their great number, they break through the boundaries, for a bounded area cannot contain them.

(Rabbi Yitzhak Shemuel Reggio on Bereishit 28:14)

 

Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth - our father Abraham had already been blessed that his descendants would be as the dust of the earth, and Jacob obtained Abraham's blessings, making this blessing redundant! Rather, here the comparison to the dust of the earth refers to humility (see Seforno and Breishit Rabbah). In any case, you shall spread out to the west is saying that in exile and humiliation you shall be spread out to every corner of the earth.

Shall bless themselves by you - even in exile all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you in that they will become cognizant of his wondrous existence, that continues thanks solely to Divine Providence of the Lord who attends him, and great is He who shepherds him. This would never have become known if he had remained living peacefully in the land. In that case there would have been room to say that he had a good and powerful astronomical sign. But the signs are not eternal, and that explanation could not be not true of the time he spent under Laban's domination, making it clear that he enjoyed the Lord's providence.

(The NeTziV's Ha'Amek Davar ad loc)

 

 

For my parents, Shaul and Yardena,

May they live long, joyful, and healthy lives.

Jacob - the Lonely Man of Faith

Meir Zilbesky

 

Jacob left Beersheva, and set out for Haran. He came upon a certain place

and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, he placed it under his head and lay down in that place. (Bereishit 28:10)

The Torah describes events succinctly and factually, but not prosaically. The story is carefully fashioned, and readers may flesh-out its account with their imagination, their understanding, and the help of the various commentators.

The word place [hamakom] is repeated three times in the opening sentence of the parasha, and an additional three times in the rest of the passage. What is this place (a known, specific place, hamakom - the place)? The verse emphasizes that Jacob came upon a certain place, that is to say: Jacob did not intend to reach that particular place, he arrived there by coincidence.

Why did he sleep there, and not elsewhere? Because the sun had set - night had fallen. At that (seemingly chance) time and place, Jacob dreams a dream that has implications for his entire life. Although he is unaware of it at the time, the dream is his life's constitutive event.

 

The Dream

In the dream, Jacob sees a ladder with angels ascending and descending upon it. God promises him the land and a multitude of offspring. This is the same blessing that Isaac received. However, Jacob's blessing contains a special addition:

Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you. (Bereishit 28:15)

What is the significance of this addition? Commentators have already written (Benno Jacob, the 19^th century Jewish exegete from Germany expands upon this point) that Jacob's situation was difficult, and one may assume that his emotional state was troubled as well.

Jacob had become no more than a refugee, a man without status or possessions, fleeing his home to escape Esau.

He was also alone, unmarried. Even the force of the blessing he had deviously received - thanks to his mother - from Isaac, seemed doubtful.

Lying on the ground with only a stone for a pillow, he found himself in one of his life's worst predicaments.

God was the only one with him that night, and He told Jacob that He would remain with him and not leave him until he returned to his land and home. The significance of that addition is that a revelation can be a personal one-time event. Its message need not be of general or national concern (as is the first part of the revelation); it can be addressed to Jacob as a private individual, at precisely the moment when he is most in need of hearing it.

 

The Vow

It would seem that such a Divine promise would relieve Jacob of all his worries. However, it appears that he remains unimpressed; upon awakening he is amazed and calls the place Beit El (House of God) and Sha'ar Shamayim (Heaven's Gate), but he still makes a vow:

If God remains with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making,

and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father's house - the Lord shall be my God. And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God's abode; and of all that You give me, I will set aside a tithe for you. (Bereishit 28:20-22)

What is the condition and what is the vow? The commentators disagree on this question (RaMBaN and Seforno vs. Rashi, Saadia Gaon, and Ibn Ezra). The exegetical difficulty stems from a theological difficulty, namely: can one make one's loyalty to God conditional?

According to the received division of the verses, it seems that the words the Lord shall be my God belong to the first part of the passage, i.e., they constitute part of the condition. The syntax tells otherwise. If the Lord shall be my God were part of the list of conditions, it should have been followed by this stone, etc. (without the connecting word and) or and then this stone, etc.; formulations which would have marked the division between the list of conditions and the actual vow.

Yiftah's vow offers an example of this kind of rhetorical structure:

And Yiftah made the following vow to the Lord: "If You deliver the Ammonites into my hands, then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return from the Ammonites shall be the Lord's and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering." (Judges 11:30-31)

We see that the word then [ve'hayah] signals the beginning of the vow. But in the Hebrew, the phrase the Lord shall be my God is also introduced by the word ve'hayah, making it part of the vow. According to this line of exegesis, it turns out that Jacob sets conditions upon his loyalty to God; his loyalty depends upon the fulfillment of certain prerequisites: that God be with him, that God take care of all his needs and return him safely to his father's house. How are we to understand this seemingly odd stipulation of conditions?

 

Was Jacob a Leibowitzian "Servant of God"?

Yeshayahu Leibowitz drew a clear line between the service of God for its own sake and the service of God for ulterior motives; between values and needs. If a religious person presents his needs and requests to God, he does not serve God in the highest sense. In his book, Yahadut, Am Yehudi, ve'Medinat Yisrael, Leibowitz cites a midrash to contrast Pharaoh to Jacob:

Pharaoh's religiosity grasps faith and religion as means, as tools and instruments to satisfy man's needs and to solve his problems. Whether it relates to the spiritual or material realms, this is "religiosity for ulterior motives" (it should be mentioned here that from a religious point of view - as against a certain anthropological-philosophical view - there is no reason to value a person's spiritual needs and problems differently from his material needs and problems. From the stomach and sex to wealth and honor and on to moral self-improvement, spiritual ascent and the reformation of society - all of these are the needs and problems of man)... such religiosity replaces concern for man's status before God with concern for man's status in His world... service of God becomes a means for fulfilling his own needs...

The religiosity of our father Jacob was religion for its own sake. It understands worship not as a means for attaining human ends, but rather as an end in itself. (pg. 312)

Our attempt to understand Jacob's religiosity according to the plain meaning of Scripture shows otherwise. Jacob's vow expresses the idea that it is possible to take on an obligation to God, but God must also assume His own obligations. The point is that if Jacob does not return from his journey, his purpose and the patriarchal blessings will be stripped of significance. God will be the God of his fathers Abraham and Isaac, but not his God. Jacob holds that God cannot dismiss the spiritual and material existential needs of man. God promised to be with him, to take care of him. Jacob wants to obligate God to do so with a vow.

 

The God of Beit El

How did Jacob know that God was with him? The meeting with Rachel, the multiplication of his wives and children, the fecundity of his flocks, all of these were signs that Jacob was being protected. The conditions of the vow were fulfilled. Indeed, Jacob was supplied with much more than mere food and clothing. Appropriately, when he returned to Canaan he fulfilled the vow by building an altar to God.

At the end of his life, Jacob said:

The God Who has been my shepherd from my birth to this day - The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm... (Bereishit 48:15)

Jacob refers to God as his shepherd. He lived with the feeling that an angel was with him, protecting him. That was the personal angel who was revealed to Jacob at the particular time and place that he was needed. He reveals himself to Jacob using the name El Beit-El [God of Beit El] (Bereishit 31:13), and Jacob himself calls the place El Beit El upon his return from Haran (35:7).

The place emphasizes the connection between Jacob, who was without place, to the land via the angel who watched over him (El Beit El). He would return to that place, a place sanctified in the patriarchal period and described as the site of the Tabernacle in the period of the Judges (Judges 20, 26). Jeroboam built one of his two centers there (I Kings 12).

 

Man with Source-Consciousness

We learned from Jacob that man has the right to ask that God be with him, that He see to man's existential needs, and fulfill His promises. In our day as well, people want to feel that God is with them and that religion offers a response to their distress and problems. I think it is inhuman to require absolute obligation to the Eternal without any reference to man, to his spiritual quest and existential condition. Especially in his most difficult hours, man needs God and calls upon Him.

In his article, "Gaon ve'Anavah" ["Pride and Humility"] Rav Soloveitchik analyzed the religious aspect of humanity in a general and typological fashion. He wrote of two archetypes: man who posses the dynamic, questing, "cosmic consciousness" that belongs to the man of the world who finds his God in the expanses of the cosmos, and in contrast, the man who possesses "source consciousness," who is connected to one place, to a home and homestead to which he always returns and where he feels God's close and intimate presence. The latter type may be compared to Jacob, who always wanted to return to his place, even as he lived abroad. He wanted to return to the God of close and intimate presence. In that same essay Rav Soloveitchik describes the experience he went through during his wife's illness:

The only thing I could do was to pray. But I could not pray in the hospital, because for some reason, I could not find God in its long white corridors, among the doctors and nurses. Still, I needed to pray very much and I could not refrain from meeting that need. The moment I returned home I would hurry to my room and fall into fervent prayer. In those moments, God did not appear in the shape of a glorious king, but rather as a close friend, a brother, a father. God did not distance himself from me in those hours of bleak despair. He dwelled with me in my dark room. I felt His warm hands, so to speak, on my shoulders. I hugged His knees, so to speak. He was there with me in the close quarters of that small room.

Meir Zalbesky is a computer programmer and studies Jewish thought at the Hebrew University.

 

 

And Rachel arrived with the sheep... for she was a shepherdess

Know that each and every shepherd and shepherdess has a particular melody in accordance with the grasses and the place in which they pasture their flocks. For each and every animal has its own special grass that it must eat. And he does not always pasture in the same place. In accordance with the grasses and the place where he pastures, so shall be his melody. For each and every grass has its own song, which it recites, which is the aspect of Pirkei Shira, and the shepherd's melody is made up from the song of the grasses... for as soon as there was a shepherd in the world, there were immediately musical instruments, as mentioned above. That is why King David, peace be upon him, who knew how to play music (I Samuel 16) was a shepherd (ibid), as mentioned above. (We also find that all of the Patriarchs were shepherds). This is the aspect of From the end of the earth we heard singing (Isaiah 24), that is, that the songs and melodies come forth out of the end of the earth, for the melodies are made up from the grasses which grow in the earth...

(Likutei MoHaRaN Tanina 63)

 

God Cares for the Weak

And the Lord saw that Leah was unloved (Bereishit 29:31). As Scripture says: The Lord supports all who stumble (Psalms 145: 14) - The qualities of the Holy One Blessed be He are unlike those of humans. When a human has a wealthy friend he sticks to him and submits to him, and when he sees that he has faltered and become impoverished, he no longer values him, but rather places a stone on him. But when the Holy One Blessed be He sees someone who has been subdued and faltered, he lends him a hand and stands him upright, as it says, The Lord supports all who stumble and makes all who are bent stand straight.

(Aggadat Bereishit, 49)

 

And the first-born is the son of the unloved one - Scripture states this with certainty, in the same manner as it states, and the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, for the Lord sees the broken-hearted so as to support them.

(Or HaHayyim on Devarim 21:15)

 

 

 

 

 

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