Snakeskin sloughed off, sewn into shirts,
Salted with the spray of the spreading seas.
Soaked with the stale sweat of a searching son
I am the signature stamp of stealth,
The source of stained secrecy.
The strained suit of a stalker
Spread across soul-clutching fists,
A sibling’s stark sorrow.
What am I?
* * *
You got it already? I knew you would. It’s the fine-spun tunic endowed to Joseph by his father Jacob as the tangible manifestation of fatherly favoritism.
There is a joke about a driver who received a frantic call from his wife on his commute home from work. “Dave,” she said, “A reporter on the radio just warned that a car on the very highway you are on is driving full speed in the wrong direction — please, be careful!” “Oh,” Dave answered, “it is much worse than that. It’s not one car, but hundreds of them!”
We all make wrong turns. We all make mistakes. And like Dave, it is almost always easier to react by looking outside our windows and saying it is others who are mistaken, rather than turning the mirror on ourselves. A psychological reading of this week’s parsha provides inspiration for changing course after a mistake by courageously driving introspective change.
In Parshat Vayishlach, as Jacob runs away from his uncle, Laban, he prepares to see his brother Esau for the first time since Jacob deceived their father into giving him Esau’s blessing, more than 20 years prior. Jacob then finds himself alone, at night, wrestling with an angel. At daybreak, the angel wounds Jacob in the leg and prevails upon Jacob to let him go.
We don’t always know where we will make our biggest impact, how we will be remembered and what our lasting contributions to this world will be. Often they are not what we expect or predict.
In Parshat Vayetzei, Jacob is forced to flee his home and his brother, Esau, who wants to kill him, and find refuge with his uncle, Laban, in Haran. There, he marries Laban’s two daughters, Rachel and Leah, who, together with Abraham’s wife, Sarah, and Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, are known as the four matriarchs.
Of the four, Rachel is the matriarch most often referred to as the “mother” of the Jewish people. In Jeremiah 31:14, we read that Rachel cries for her children who have been exiled from the land, and she cannot be consoled or comforted once they are gone. Rachel will continue to shed tears for them until they return to the Land of Israel and are once again settled comfortably within its borders.
How do Moses and Isaac connect to academia and barn dancing?
To answer, I’d like to quote my favorite and most oft-cited dvar Torah, which is from this week’s parsha. It starts with a concisely expressed idea by the Hasidic master, Rabbi Mordechai Joseph Leiner of Izhbitz, who writes in vol. 1 of his work Mei Hashiloah:
And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, his eyes were dim so that he could not see (Gen 27:1). The aspect of Isaac our father is the converse of the aspect of Moses our teacher. For Isaac was not permitted to leave the land of Israel, yet the faculty of sight was taken from him; while Moses was not allowed to set foot in Israel, but he was told (Deut 3:27): “And see with your eyes.
I first heard this text taught by poet and teacher Yonadav Kaploun[1] many years ago. As much as the Izhbitzer’s words themselves, it was what Yonadav drew from this brief observation that has stayed with me until now. He explained that the world seems to divide into Isaac types and Moses types. The Isaac types fall under the heading of “being.” They are wholly immersed within whatever experience they are in; they do, they act with tremendous presence. Yet, at the same time, they are oblivious to the larger picture and cannot analyze their actions within a larger frame. In contrast, the Moses types are “seeing” personalities. They are analytical, curious, inquisitive, and discerning. However, along with this they can often be seen standing outside of the experience, observing from a point of distance those who are in it
The parsha opens with the finality of death, with Sarah’s death. “Sarah’s lifetime — the span of Sarah’s life — came to 127 years.”
How does one sum up a life?
Here a life is measured by the years lived, each number a treasure. Rashi shows us how to pull back the numbers to reveal greater symbolic meaning: each number reflects how well Sarah lived, her extraordinary qualities — beautiful, and blameless.
Startling in its simplicity, the verse also breaks from the norm of Sarah’s narrated life. From her debut at the end of Parshat Noah, Sarah’s life is thinly drawn. She is Abraham’s sidekick, a critical partner to his journeying, who bravely sets up home time and time again. She listens in on Abraham’s relationship with God, understands before he does that the promise of progeny must come from them both. She is the elderly mother of Isaac, who fights for him to thrive in her home.
But who is she really, this woman whom God directs Abraham to listen to her voice? What does she think and feel? How does she absorb the multiple twists and turns in her family life? Taken by two kings, kept waiting for a child for too many years, locked in oppressive struggle with her maidservant. Doesn’t it seem that just as the Bible focuses on Sarah’s experience, the moment passes too quickly? The spotlight might shine on her momentarily, but her life is largely kept in the figurative “ohel,” tucked into the interior of the narrative.
What dictates our moral actions? Is the summum bonum of our morality confined to the extrinsic command of a higher authority or do we possess an inner conscience that lends our actions a life of their own? Does religion surrender to an external voice or an inner one? Is our generation — the bearers and interpreters of the Oral Law — “greater” than the generation that stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, listening to the awesome and unambiguous command of God? Is the ideal to supress our moral intuition in favour of submission to a “higher” rabbinic or divine authority? Are we creatures of submission or autonomy, assent or protest, command or conscience?
The narrative of the Akedah exposes us to the dichotomy of religious living and the challenge of literary interpretation:
It needs rigorous unadulterated total analysis. It must be fought and grappled with, challenged, expounded and explicated.
It requires total silence. Not a word said, not an opinion voiced, just pure submission and silence. The only response: “הנני” — I am here.
