A Hot Meal At The End Of The Day
D’var Torah for Parashat Vayeitzei
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
November 16, 2018
When my children were young, we loved reading books together. One of our favorites was Where The Wild Things Are, by the wonderful author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. When we got to the page where Max commands, “Let the rumpus start!” we would let loose with a five-minute cacophony of jungle calls and cries. Only then, exhilarated and completely out of breath, would we go on and read the rest of the story. Somehow that brief jungle interlude made the ending even more satisfying, as Max returns into “His very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.”
Sendak’s book is wonderful fantasy, one that enables children to experience escape, adventure and safe return, all in context of a story line that begins with rebellion and ends happily with reconciliation.
As such, Where The Wild Things Are shares much in common with this week’s Torah portion, Vayeitzei (“And Jacob left,” Genesis 28:10—32:3). This portion begins with Jacob packing up hurriedly and leaving the safety of home after tricking his twin brother, Esau, out of the blessing of the firstborn. Fearing Esau’s violent rage, yet braced by the blessing of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, whom the Torah describes as “a dweller in tents,” faces his first night away from home.
That night, sleeping alone on a barren mountain, with the cold earth as his bed and a rock replacing his soft feather pillow, Jacob has his famous dream of the ladder with its top in the heavens. He sees angels going up and down the ladder and has a vision of God, who promises always to be there for Jacob, to protect him and see to his safe return home. Jacob awakens with awe in his heart, but he is only partially reassured by God’s promise. Jacob does not yet know the power of dreams, nor is his faith fully formed yet.
Yet, as Jacob is about to face the uncertainties and dangers of reality, all that is about to change.
Life, as they say, is the best school of all, and Jacob is a fast learner. He almost immediately falls in love, and soon finds himself at the head of a bustling household. Jacob becomes a successful entrepreneur, but along with success he also encounters treachery, jealousy and hatred. His father-in-law and brothers-in-law accuse Jacob of unfair business practices and of taking more than his share of the family wealth. Jacob’s reaction, two decades after his first flight from danger, is to flee once again. Taking all his possessions and his family—now consisting of two wives, two concubines and twelve children—Jacob sets out on his return journey, back to his family home in Canaan.
In light of the future history of his descendants, it isn’t hard to recognize the seeds of anti-Semitism in the accusations that Laban and his sons direct at Jacob.
Anti-Semitism has always been intricately interwoven with societal change. Invariably, throughout Jewish history, economic and political upheaval resulted in massacres and expulsions. However, along with pain and misery, each disaster also brought about reflection and evaluation. Each new conquest, each revolution and pogrom caused Jews to examine and redefine our relationship with God. The Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple resulted in the writing of the Torah; the second destruction, by the Romans, brought about the Bible and the Talmud. The Zohar, the most important work of Jewish mysticism, came about following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Though we now have statistics by which to measure these seismic convulsions, we really cannot call the latest anti-Semitic episodes—including the murders in Pittsburgh—new or unexpected. That, however, does not diminish their effect, the horror and shock that they evoke within us. The Jewish world is small and closely connected, and many of us feel personally affected by each and every attack, whether it be in Tel Aviv, at a kosher supermarket in France, on the streets of New York, or on a college campus just about anywhere in the United States.
The mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue elicited warm support from the larger non-Jewish community. The countless messages of love and sympathy that many of us received provided comfort—but little consolation. The Jewish People are too familiar with the long and painful history of the hatred directed at us. To our dismay, what we have now come to understand is that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.
What did surprise me, however, was the number of people who, following the Pittsburgh tragedy, have approached me for spiritual guidance. It was mostly, though not exclusively, young people, college students or recent graduates, for whom this was the first, and most disturbing, example of a phenomenon they had never witnessed before. Swastikas scratched on bathroom walls is one thing. Jewish blood, shed during Sabbath prayer in a synagogue, is another matter altogether.
Maybe, in the relative calm that followed the Holocaust, we have grown too comfortable; maybe the protection promised us by the ADL and other watchdog organizations made us feel too safe. Sadly, we grew accustomed to hearing about violence in Israel; but instead of seeing it as another form of the global war waged against the Jews, we came to accept the terror and the wars as no more than a regional conflict. Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were also distant from us. Europe, after all, was “the old world.” America was different.
Or so we thought.
What I have perceived in the many questions that were addressed to me is the shock of awakening to a new-old reality. Young or old, many of us have come to realize the hard truth that Jews in America are not isolated from the rest of our people anywhere else in the world. We are one people. We are not privileged witnesses of the dawning of some new, miraculous age of love and tolerance. The Messiah is in fact still a long way off.
The truth is that we have been deceiving ourselves all along. And it was all so easy to do.
Young men and women have approached me in tears, anger and disbelief. Not unexpectedly, they are wondering about their future and deliberating their choices. They are questioning their faith and pondering their relationship to God and the Jewish People. Like Jacob in Haran, they are wondering if the time has come to go back home to Israel—the national, historic home of the Jewish People.
Reexamining our Judaism and pondering our path forward is nothing new for our people. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Vayeitzei—the story of Jacob’s many travails and close escapes—is the story of the entire People of Israel. Each new chapter, each murder, pogrom or street beating brings about questions about what it means to be Jewish. Some of us inevitably will try to hide or reject their identity. Others, on the other hand, will turn to tradition and explore ways to combine new and old, looking for new meaning in the ancient customs and rituals of our people.
Jacob’s journey toward God and faith is an evolving and unending process. At every step, after each tragedy in his life, he questions God’s purpose—and finds new answers, new meaning to life and faith. So too, do we, Jacob’s descendants. Jacob’s journey is our journey; his story is our story. It is our history.
Hopefully, like Max in Where The Wild Things Are, we too will find our way back to our room, where we will find our supper waiting for us, and, like Max’s it too will still be hot.
© 2018 by Boaz D. Heilman
