Parshah Summary – P’shat
Jacob leaves his hometown of Be’er Sheva and journeys to Haran. On the way, he stops to sleep and dreams of a ladder spanning earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it. In the morning, Jacob raises the stone upon which he laid his head as an altar and monument, pledging that it will one day become a house of God.
In Haran, Jacob lives and works for his uncle Laban, tending Laban’s sheep. Jacob loves Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, and Laban allows them to get married, in return for seven years of work from Jacob. But on the wedding night, Laban switches Rachel with his elder daughter Leah—a deception Jacob only discovers in the morning. A week later, Jacob marries Rachel as well, after agreeing to work for another seven years. Leah gives birth to six sons: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun, as well as a daughter, Dinah, while Rachel remains barren. Rachel gives Jacob her handmaid Bilhah as a wife to bear children in her stead, and two more sons, Dan and Naphtali, are born. Leah does the same with her handmaid, Zilpah, who gives birth to Gad and Asher. Finally, Rachel’s prayers are answered and she gives birth to Joseph. Jacob has now been in Haran for 14 years, and wishes to return home. But Laban persuades him to remain, offering him sheep in return for his labor, and Jacob becomes wealthy by breeding the sheep in a seemingly magical way. After six years, Jacob flees Haran in stealth, fearing that Laban would prevent him from leaving with his family and property. Laban pursues Jacob, but is warned by God in a dream not to harm him. Laban and Jacob make a pact on Mount Gal-Ed with a pile of stones as a witness, and Jacob proceeds back to Canaan, where he is met by angels…
Torah of Awakening
אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יי בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי “Surely the Divine is present in this place and I didn’t even know it!” - Bereisheet (Genesis) 28:16
Once, when Rabbi Hanokh was eating with his hasidim on one of the nine days which precedes Tisha B’Av (the Ninth of Av, the day of lamenting the destruction of the Temple), he said to them: “Formerly when these days came around, everyone was shaken with anguish because, since the Temple was destroyed, we have had no sanctuary in which to make our offerings. But now the hasidim sit and eat their meals as if they were making an offering, and say: "Hashem was, is, and will be; the sanctuary was, is, and will be."
In this remarkable teaching of Rabbi Hanokh, he seems to be declaring a new phase of consciousness. In the past, the “Three Weeks” during which the destruction of the Temple is remembered was a commemoration of loss; the destroyed Beit Hamikdash was the nexus of Divine Presence on earth, and that nexus was now gone. What could be a greater tragedy than losing that structure, and hence losing the earthly connection with the Divine Presence? But in his time, the simple table upon which they ate had become their altar, because Hashem “is, was and will be” – in other words, God is not limited to a special time and place. God is Being Itself, the Ever-Present, and any place can become a sanctuary for those sensitive to this realization. This recognition of God as Being is expressed in our tradition as both a verb and a noun. As a verb, God’s four letter Name is based on the root “to be,” ,היה as in the hymn:
וְהוּא הָיָה וְהוּא הֹוֶה, וְהוּא יִהְיֶה בְּתִפְאָרָה
V’hu hayah, v’hu hoveh, v’hu yiyeh b’Tifarah It was, It is, It will be in Splendor!
This Name of God as the verb to be is not mere theology; it is a practical instruction: we find God by moving from our ordinary mode of doing, and particularly the action of thinking, to the mode of being, and particularly the state of wakefulness, of perceiving. But, God can also be expressed as a noun, “The Place.”
וַיִּפְגַּ֨ע בַּמָּק֜וֹם – He encountered The Place… Jacob does not merely encounter a place; that would be: וַיִּפְגַּע בְּמָּקוֹם – Vayifga bemakom. Rather, he encounters The Place: בַּמָּקוֹם BaMakom. This has a double meaning – on one hand, he is coming to a specific place on his journey, but on the other hand, it is an encounter with the Divine, Who is sometimes called, הַמָּקוֹם HaMakom, “The Place.” Why is God called The Place? לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי – “I didn’t even know it!” The word for knowing, דַעַת Da’at, isn’t the same as the English word for knowing, which implies an intellectual understanding. The Hebrew word is the same word used in the Garden of Eden story: וְהָ֣אָדָ֔ם יָדַ֖ע אֶת־חַוָּ֣ה – And Adam knew Eve… This is the knowing of intimacy and connection, not the mind and thinking. אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יי בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי – “Surely the Divine is present in this Place and I didn’t even know it!” The ordinary way of understanding the verse is that he realizes the Presence of God is there in the place he stopped for the night, but that he didn’t know It was present before. But when we understand דַעַת Da’at as intimate connection, we can also read it as saying, “The Divine is in this Place, but I wasn’t knowing the Place,” meaning, he couldn’t sense the Divine before, because he wasn’t present in the place where he was. After all, he was running away from his brother; the place he stopped was merely a step on his journey from one place to another. This is symbolic as well: “running away from his brother” means running from the past, resisting the truth of his life situation. But now that he has become intimate with the place in which he finds himself, he also finds God – God and the “place” are not two separate things. That is why God is called הַמָּקוֹם HaMakom – “The Place.” This Name of God as a noun is also a practical instruction on how to “find” God. What is the instruction? Know – דע da – that the ultimate unfolding of Reality is right here, right now in this place; taste this moment, do not distract yourself with the currents of mind that sweep you away from this moment, from God’s revelation of Itself as this moment. וַיֵּצֵ֥א יַעֲקֹ֖ב – Jacob went out… Like Jacob, we can “go out” from our ordinary, conditioned relationship with experience, into God – into the miracle of This Place in which we Now find ourselves. This recognition of the Divine as This Place is the meaning of the sefirah of Malkhut, also called Shekhinah, “The Presence” – the perception of the world as the “Kingdom” of God. In this week of Shabbat Vayeitzei, the Sabbath of Going Out, may we remember to frequently “go out” from our ordinary conditioned perception, and to meet the world as Malkhut, as Shekhinah. May we swiftly come to a time when all people recognize the sacred gift of Being; may this world be transformed into a Sanctuary of Presence for all people, so that violence and war evaporate permanently from our species.
Read past teachings on Vayetzei HERE.
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