D'var Torah on Parashat Vayetze, 5766

By Joan Bayliss
December 9, 2005

This is a gorgeously rich Torah portion, filled with the pageantry of our mythic ancestors, their visions, challenges, struggles - and their stories fascinate endlessly. We follow Jacob, our ancestor Yaakov, on a journey that begins with guilt and fear. He is running away from home because he has made his beefy brother very mad - Yaakov had stolen his birthright - and fleeing his brother, he embarks on his own hero's journey, as the Jungians like to call it. Almost immediately he is given the blessing of a divine encounter, a dream that reveals an image that speaks to him of the relationship between heaven and earth.

In his dream he sees a Sulam, variously translated as a ladder, a ramp, or a stairway - a bridge of sorts between the heavenly realms and our earthly world. He dreams that he sees The Eternal God above the ladder and angels moving in both directions upon it. So this connecting link is alive and dynamic with relationship from above to below and from below to above.

He hears the voice of God in his dream. It promises him myriad descendants and that his seed - his essence, down through time - would be a blessing on all the families of the earth. He is promised divine protection and guidance from this point forth. He is invited to have his own relationship with the Eternal One, not only through his grandfather, Abraham, nor his father, Isaac, but his own, unique relationship with the divine. We reflect this each time we daven the opening of the Amidah: Elohey Avraham, Elohey Yitzchak, Elohey Yaakov - God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, and parallel language for the matriarchs as well. In contrast to a static idea of God, the Torah is teaching us that every generation develops its own relationship to the sacred.

When Yaakov wakes in the morning he is filled with the sense of God's presence, and he experiences the power and awe of the place where he has received this vision. If his quest were purely spiritual, he would now have arrived at his goal, just as he has begun his seeking. But Yaakov's quest is more earthy than spiritual. He is to be an ancestor. He needs to learn lessons in survival, so we can profit by his example.

The Torah goes on the tell us about his love for Rachel, his indentured servitude, his marriage by trickery to the elder sister Leah, his eventual marriage to Rachel, and his difficulties in prospering under the control of his father-in-law and uncle, Laban. There's a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, but the parashah ends with Yaakov and Laban concluding a non-aggression pact. So the much longer part of the journey is spent developing his family life and his business life.

Much is made of the issue of fertility in women: Rachel the beloved wife is barren for many years, while her less loved (but equally-often visited) sister Leah gives birth to 6 sons and a daughter and can lay claim to 2 more born to her handmaid, Zilpah.

To fill out the tally of the 12 ancestors of the Tribes of Israel, Rachel eventually has 2 sons, as does her handmaid, Bilchah. Important as those struggles between rival wives and the tale of our ancient lineage may be, I am not going to focus there, except to note one thought. Leah is our Mother. Really. Today's Jews are the inheritors of Leah’s line.

Rachel's descendants, the tribes of Ephraim and Benjamin, were dominant in the time of the judges, but it was two sons of Leah, Levi - the ancestor of Moses and Aaron and Miriam and the whole priestly line - and Judah - the ancestor of David and the one whose name we carry, Yehuda, Judah, Yehudim, Jews - who led and shaped and contributed their vision to the Jewish people as we know ourselves today. We're told over and over that Jacob loved Rachel, but we need to begin to honor our mother Leah and our link to our mythic beginnings as a people.

But I want to return to the very beginning of the parashah, where Jacob dreams of the Sulam, wakes from his dream and feels an over-whelming sense of awe. He says, Ma nora ha makom ha zeh - How awe-filled is this place. God was here, but I knew it not. So we have 2 elements of revelation here: one a visual image, a graphic representation of a relationship, and one a feeling that follows the experience of contact with the Eternal.

Looking first at the image of the Sulam, it is great. It says a lot in one thousand-word symbol. And what's so really wonderful about it is that trying to explain the same stuff in language never works, or at least rarely results in the after awe that Yaakov gets to feel. So it’s an unusually good image, clear and yet open to many angles of exploration.

Some see it as a diagram of our souls: the angels running up and down are our impulses, both good and bad, hurrying about their business. Others see the Sulam as an image of the human spine, the divine connecting rod, the letter Vav, the link between nothingness and being, and all the little angels are the cerebro-spinal fluid and other chemicals and secretions that give us visions and allow us to feel and experience life. Maybe these two interpretations are essentially the same. And what it may mean to you is more important than what anyone else says it means.

Something I find very interesting is the conclusion that Jacob draws that the place itself is holy. In itself. Indeed he says it is the "Gate of Heaven." Yaakov lived in a time when Gods were understood as Gods of Place, having powers restricted to a locality.

Many of us today might feel that God IS the place. One of the Hebrew names for God is Ha Makom, literally, the Place. Ha Makom is the space in which all of life may happen. The Everywhere. What made the place holy that Yaakov names Bethel, the House of God, was what happened inside of Yaakov there. His transformation into one who carries the blessing of God gives him the strength to face his journey to the rest of his life.

Many of us have had moments of insight, a rush of gratitude or appreciation of beauty that topple us into a sense of awe. They are not the stuff of everyday; they are among life’s treats. And they are very hard to talk about, because words seldom do them justice. But some images can help us to get beyond our visual assumptions.

The Sulam is one of these. And in latter days there's a great old woodcut that got very popular in the 60's showing a man walking in a landscape with a tree and flowers, stars and moon, and sun all in the sky, and the man's head has poked right through the sky, as if it were made of paper, and he is gazing at a complex, only partially drawn image of wheels and wheels - the machinery of the universe seen in a moment of breakthrough insight. It is a moment like that in Yaakov’s dream.

But the thing that’s important to remember about that moment of feeling Ma nora ha makom ha zeh, How awe-filled is this place, is that it doesn’t have to be a breakthrough to the mechanics of the universe. Moments of insight come often unbidden, like Yaakov’s dream, but their effects can be nurtured to help us stay in tune with the majesty all around us. It’s important to recognize them for the gifts they bring. I’m sure you’ve all had moments like those.

Here are a couple of my examples - and I beg your indulgence. Words don’t always work to convey these things adequately:

The first was a rainbow in a wide open space of flat countryside. This rainbow was multiple, not merely double, but quadruple and beyond. It was as if the entire sky was a long vault of colored light, and I felt as if the sky must be always filled with light and color, and it is only my limited perspective that blocks me from seeing it except at that magical moment.

The second took place at the Oregon coast, at a point where a little stream emptied onto the sandy shore. It left a beautiful print in the sand to mark its passage, and as I looked at the lines on the sand, I began to see in the patterns left by the flowing water, the same shapes I saw in the branches of trees, or the veins of a leaf, or indeed in the veins of my own body. This sense of repeating patterns of organization in the world of matter was awe-inspiring and also comforting. The apparent chaos around and within me, all the suffering in the world just went away for a second as I got into the complexity and elegance of the elemental world we move through so unconsciously most of the time. Those moments away from the chaos - appreciating the order of things - can be deeply refreshing.

The image of the Sulam does that for Yaakov, changing his internal calibration from fear, guilt and flight, to a state of mind that is ambitious, romantic, optimistic and fully alive. Our hero is blessed with a vision so that he can be strengthened for his journey into his - and our - story.

I pray that we all have these moments of vision - not necessarily when the sky opens or the angels sing, but moments of ordinary power and mystery - the dawn, the wind, living things - whatever it is that we get to experience, I pray that we notice the majesty and the beauty, and we carry a bit of it into our lives and our relationships. Ma nora ha makom ha zeh – how awe-filled is this place, especially when we stop to notice.