Friday December 6, 2024/5 Kislev 5785
Parashat Vayetze
Hevre/Friends,
When people ask about my experience growing up in the Orthodox community and making my way to the Conservative rabbinate, I often hear myself saying, “I had to leave home in order to come home.”
What takes me ten words to explain - and then invariably a longer conversation - the Torah captures in just two, conveying great depth about a journey I suspect many of us have made.
Parashat Vayetze opens:
וַיֵּצֵ֥א יַעֲקֹ֖ב מִבְּאֵ֣ר שָׁ֑בַע וַיֵּ֖לֶךְ חָרָֽנָה׃ Jacob went out of Beer-sheba, and set out for Haran
Why, wonders the medieval commentator Rashi, does this opening line of our parashah use such a strange expression to tell us that Yaakov went to Haran?
Towards the end of last week’s parashah, Yitzchak and Rivka sense the impending doom between their two sons, Yaakov and Esav, over the incident of the birthright and the stolen blessing, and they urge Yaakov to flee to Haran:
ק֧וּם בְּרַח־לְךָ֛ אֶל־לָבָ֥ן אָחִ֖י חָרָֽנָה Get up and flee to my brother in Haran
ק֥וּם לֵךְ֙ פַּדֶּ֣נָֽה אֲרָ֔ם Get up and go to Padam Aram
So why doesn’t the opening line just say וַיֵּ֖לֶךְ יעקב חָרָֽנָה –Yaakov went to Haran? Or, ויברח יעקב חרנה– Yaakov fled to Haran? Why does it say וַיֵּצֵ֥א יַעֲקֹ֖ב מִבְּאֵ֣ר שָׁ֑בַע - Yaakov went out from Be’er Shava?
Rashi then teaches us something profound about the presence of absence. Referencing a classical Midrash, he explains how when a righteous person leaves a place, their absence is keenly felt by those left behind. This explains the Torah’s emphasis on Jacob’s leaving, וַיֵּצֵ֥א יַעֲקֹ֖ב.
Avivah Zornberg deepens Rashi’s comment to offer an insight into those of us who are not tzadikim (righteous people), but just regular people trying to find our place in the world:
She says, “Rashi speaks of a void left behind Jacob as he begins his journey. But perhaps the void is in Jacob as well. As he ‘goes out’ of his place, a vacuum separates him from his origins, a kind of necessary detachment.” As Zornberg puts it: he doesn’t simply “go”; he “leaves”.
I think about this notion and about my own “necessary detachments'' from many decades ago. I think about all I had to empty myself of in pursuit of the fullness I believed was possible for me: the familiarity of my community and the norms and patterns that connected us; the theological and halakhic boundaries that kept us grounded. I had to let go of these in search of the spiritual and intellectual diversity that I knew was at the heart of my own Jewish calling. I had to leave home to come home.
For my weekly studies, I often look to my grandfather, Rabbi Mendell Lewittes, z”l, for his insights he collected in a book of drashot on Sefer Bereishit (Genesis) called Beyond the Moon. My copy is inscribed to me by my late grandmother, Ethel, z”l. Opening the cover a few years ago, a laminated card fell out. On it was a description of the book written by my son Aaron when he was in 6th grade (he’s now 28) when he submitted a sample of his great-grandfather’s writings for his school’s Jewish heritage project. In it he wrote of how I, his mother, also a rabbi like her grandfather, turn to this book regularly in preparing my own Divrei Torah. Holding that one volume in my hands together with the laminated card, my past and my future came together. But this reunion could not have happened had I not left.
The opening scene in today’s story describes Yaakov “bumping into” what he would come to see as a holy place, וַיִּפְגַּ֨ע בַּמָּק֜וֹם, he “bumped into” God whose name is "makom/place", the same place, the Sages explain, where his own father and grandfather encountered the Divine - Mount Moriah. He lies down and dreams his famous dream of the ladder and the angels and of God blessing him saying: this land will be for you and your children,
וּפָרַצְתָּ֛ יָ֥מָּה וָקֵ֖דְמָה וְצָפֹ֣נָה וָנֶ֑גְבָּה
you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south
Rashi understands וּפָרַצְתָּ֛/you shall spread out to connote strength which Zornberg amplifies to explosive, sometimes even destructive power. God blessed Jacob with the ability to push through limits; with the strength to shatter paradigms.
Zornberg notes the paradox in Yaakov: the quiet, inner-directed tent-dweller becomes the agitator and the boundary-breaker in order to come fully into himself as a husband, a brother, a son, and a builder of his people. To build Beit Yisrael, the house of Israel, he had to break out of his own home. To come closer to the holy One, he had to walk away from his beloved two. וַיֵּצֵ֥א יַעֲקֹ֖ב/And Jacob left.
Zornberg’s analysis of Jacob is profound. It’s also, I imagine, achingly familiar to many of us. Jacob leaves not only his parents and the home he knew, he leaves himself - at least the self who tried to be someone else before embracing who he really was. He had to abandon the masks (or animal skins) he tried on before finally looking in the mirror and liking who he saw.
The poet May Sarton put it sharply:
“Now I become myself.
It’s taken time. Many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces…
As if to underscore how bound up the experience of leaving home can be to coming home once again, the call to Jacob to return appears in our same parshah. After twenty years of love, heartache, children, hard labor, and, finally, the emergence of his independence and his evolved sense of self, Jacob hears the call: Go back to the people and places that formed and shaped you, but go back as you.
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֔ב שׁ֛וּב אֶל־אֶ֥רֶץ אֲבוֹתֶ֖יךָ וּלְמוֹלַדְתֶּ֑ךָ וְאֶֽהְיֶ֖ה עִמָּֽךְ׃
God said to Jacob, “Return to the land of your fathers where you were born, and Ehye - the God who evolves with and within you - will be with you"
In other words, return to your people’s wells of wisdom and values and let their waters slake the thirst that lives deep within you.
Why else would our opening Amidah blessing remind us three times every day that God is the "God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and the God of Sarah, the God of Rivka, the God of Rachel and the God of Leah"? For a sacred text with the ability to say so much with so few words, this formulation feels endless. That is, if it was designed for style. Not so, teach our Sages. It was designed for authenticity. Each of ours.
The Franciscan priest, Richard Rhor, writes in his beautiful book about living a well-considered life, Falling Upwards, that having to leave home in order to find home, journeying away and then returning to your source, is the ultimate human story canonized in every religious tradition. He says, “Home is both the beginning and the end. Home is not a sentimental concept at all, but an inner compass and North Star at the same time. It is a metaphor for the soul.”
Wherever you're going, travel safely. And when you're ready, I'd like to be among those who say to you, "welcome home".
With ongoing prayers for the hostages and their families, the bereaved and the injured, and for a lasting peace in Israel and around the world, I wish you Shabbat Shalom.
Dini
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