Jacob’s Angels: Vayeitzeh.21

 Jacob’s Angels: D’var Torah for Parashat Vayeitzeh

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

November 12, 2021

Jacob was a young lad when he left the safety of his father’s and mother’s home. He hadn’t ventured out much prior to the events that led to this moment. Unlike his brother, Esau, Jacob is described by the Torah as a “dweller of tents” who preferred vegan cooking to hunting in the fields. He has much yet to learn about life.

But still waters run deep, and Jacob, also described by the Torah as “guileless,” is not as simple as he might first appear.

More than his father Isaac or his grandfather Abraham, Jacob knows that sometimes a person has to make a deal in order to survive or get ahead. A bit of give and take, with the hope that in the end the transaction will come out advantageous, or at least even. 

But the price we have to pay for such deals sometimes includes hidden costs—losses we don’t anticipate, a sullied reputation, conflict and strife within one’s family.

In this respect Jacob is more like us, ordinary people, than are either Abraham or Isaac. Abraham takes extra care to make all of his deals above board, public, and untainted with any semblance of cheating. Isaac prefers to ignore conflicts and just “go with the flow” until confronted with the consequences of his indecisiveness.

Somewhere there, for any number of reasons, Jacob has learned to watch out for himself. Perhaps he sees his father’s acquiescence as a sign of weakness. Perhaps it’s part of being a twin (especially Esau’s twin, a man Jacob sees as reckless and maybe even dangerous). Or it could be his keen perception of how the household is run—the cunning of his mother, the blindness of his father. 

Along with Jacob’s inclination to take care of himself first, however, comes an even more risky tendency—lack of faith and trust. There is a certain haughtiness that this engenders in Jacob. He is super confident in the outcome of his endeavors, regardless of the ethics involved.

Jacob has tough lessons to learn. And even in this, he is more like us—everyday folks trying to make it in a world where rules seem to change all the time, where people’s conduct is more frequently marked by indifference and avarice than by compassion and generosity.

If the Torah were only about perfect people, however, it would leave nothing for us to learn, nothing to imagine, no vision of how things could be made better. There would be no hopes and no dreams. The best that any of us could wish for would be to somehow emulate behavior we know is impossible—a surefire path to failure.

Jacob’s first lesson in life then comes early in his journey to self-awareness. No sooner has he left his home than he reaches a “certain place” (Genesis 28:11), where nightfall comes upon him. It is here that he has his famous dream of a ladder reaching up to the heavens, with angels busily ascending and descending. It is Jacob’s first encounter with God—his first lesson in trust and faith.

Jacob doesn’t pass this test as definitively as either Abraham or Isaac. Responding to God’s promise to be with him and protect him along his journey, Jacob responds with a resounding “if.” “IF God will be with me and guard me… and give me bread to eat and garment to wear; and IF I return in peace to my father house, THEN Adonai will be my God” (Gen. 28:20-21). He doesn’t reject God’s promise outright, but neither does he accept it wholeheartedly either.

Up until this time, Jacob’s understanding of God was typical of the way people thought of gods in those early days: as geo-theological powers: every land, every political entity, every state, had its own ruling divine beings whose powers stopped at the border. As Jacob awakens the next morning, however, he realizes a far-reaching, perhaps even revolutionary, truth—that God is not confined to any one place. Jacob had first learned about God in his father’s and mother’s home in Beersheba. It was a limited perspective, one he never thought to question. Now, however, he sees that this “certain place” where he has had his strange dream, is also God’s abode.

Baby steps perhaps, but a good start nonetheless.

But what of those angels that he also saw in his dream? Angels ascending and descending, busily engaged in some mysterious work?

The Torah doesn’t tell us what Jacob thought of when he saw the angels. Again, he doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t inquire what their task was. What he fails to understand is the unfinished nature of God’s work in this world, the ongoing interaction between God and God’s creation.

What Jacob will come to realize is that God’s work is eternal. Creation is not a done deal. It’s a process in which we are no less intertwined than the angels in Jacob’s dream. 

Like those angels, we too ascend to heights previously undreamed of. From these peaks we gain perspective and understanding. Yet what we see at such moments is not perfection, but rather the road that stretches ahead of us. We learn that what we dream can only be achieved when we awaken, when we find ourselves once again not in “God’s abode,” but in the middle of nowhere, on hard and cold ground, with a stone as our pillow. It’s an ongoing process. As often as we rise to our best, so do we also fall—and must climb up again. Perfection isn’t the goal; progress is. This, for me, is the big lesson of this week’s portion, Jacob’s—and our—first lesson about God’s intended role for us in an unfinished world.

© 2021 by Boaz D. Heilman