This week’s parsha relates a powerful, primal vision of prayer. It is one of the great images of the Torah: Jacob, alone and far from home, lies down for the night, with only stones for a pillow. He dreams of a ladder set on earth but reaching heaven, with angels ascending and descending. This is the initial encounter with the…
It is one of the most enigmatic episodes in the Torah, but also one of the most important, because it was the moment that gave the Jewish people its name: Israel, one who “wrestles with God and with men and prevails” (Gen. 32:29). Jacob, hearing that his brother Esau is coming to meet him with a force of four hundred…
We sometimes forget that the phrase Keriat Ha-Torah does not simply mean “reading the Torah.” In biblical Hebrew the verb likro means not “to read” but “to call.” The phrase mikra’ei kodesh, “festivals,” literally means “holy convocations,” days on which the people were called or summoned together. Every seven years – in the command known as hakhel – the king…
The Parsha in a Nutshell In this week’s parsha,Yaakov ran away from home, because his brother Esav had promised to kill him for sneakily getting the Firstborn’s blessing from his father. On his way to his Uncle Lavan’s home in Charan, he stopped for the night on Mount Moriah. While asleep, he dreamed of angels climbing up and down a…
“Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob. Pharaoh made his decree only about the males whereas Laban sought to destroy everything.” This passage from the Haggadah on Pesach – evidently based on this week’s parsha – is extraordinarily difficult to understand. First, it is a commentary on the phrase in Deuteronomy, Arami oved…
It is one of the great dreams of the Bible. Jacob, afraid and alone, finds himself in what the anthropologist Victor Turner called liminal space – the space between – between the home he is escaping from and the destination he has not yet reached, between the known danger of his brother Esau from whom he is in flight, and the…
It is one of the great visions of the Torah. Jacob, alone at night, fleeing from the wrath of Esau, lies down to rest, and sees not a nightmare of fear but an epiphany: He came to a certain place [vayifga bamakom] and stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he…
…To survive tragedy and trauma, first build the future. Only then, remember the past. TOLDOT: You are as great as your ideals. If you truly believe in something beyond yourself, you will achieve beyond yourself. VAYETSE: The deepest crises of your life can turn out to be the moments when you encounter the deepest truths and acquire your greatest strengths….
…Shul this morning about the birth of her children in Parshat Vayetse. And I weep when I read this: she calls her first child Reuven, saying, “Now my husband will notice me.” But clearly he doesn’t, because she calls the second one Shimon, “Maybe my husband will listen to me.” But clearly he doesn’t, because she calls her third one Levi, saying, “Now my husband…
…heroes seem heroic and the many setbacks they faced reveal themselves as stepping-stones on the road to victory. In our discussion of parshat Vayetse, we saw that in every field – high or low, sacred or secular – leaders are tested not by their successes but by their failures. It can sometimes be easy to succeed. The conditions may be…