VA YETZE
This parsha (28:10-32:3) begins with Jacob’s fleeing to his uncle Laban and concludes with a territorial agreement with his uncle. Thus it covers the large bulk of their interactions, two people whose lives have a common theme of deception. Indeed, deception is a theme in this parsha, as Laban deceives Jacob into working for him longer by giving him Leah to marry instead of the promised Rachel, Rachel deceives Laban and Jacob in stealing the teraphim, as we’ll discuss below, and Jacob is only in Paddan Aram because he has deceived his father in claiming the family birthright.
This rich and consequential parsha also includes Jacob’s first important dream and encounter with YHVH. He then meets Rachel at the well continuing our association of women, water and love, and Jacob’s subsequent marriages to Rachel and Leah. We have the birth of 12 of his 13 children (all except Benjamin) including the use of handmaidens to bear children who belong to the lineage of the wives.
I will discuss the following themes.
Jacob’s ladder dream and the questions raised about local deities, spiritual awakening
Jacob’s dream, sacred geography and modern alienation from the world
The association of women with life giving water which is the limiting factor in Canaanite geography.
The agency of women seen in the naming of the sons, the stories of the teraphim and the mandrakes. .
Jacob flees from his home and one night he dreams of a ladder (sulam) with angels ascending and descending and YHVH was beside him. YHVH reiterates the promise that he made to Abraham and Isaac about making his descendants a great nation. Jacob awakes, in amazement and says “Surely YHVH is present in this place and I did not know it.” (28:16). After this revelation of the presence of YHVH he actually engages in a kind of bargain, saying that if YHVH stays with him throughout his journey and returns him home safely, then YHVH shall be his God (28:20-21).
I can think of two ways of interpreting this text that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. One way is that Jacob has viewed YHVH as a purely local to Hevron deity, a kind of household or place based deity. The limitations of deities to a given locale is actually a common belief amongst indigenous people. If you are in Pennsylvania, as I am, praying to a God who has influence in California would strike an indigenous person as stupid if not impossible to conceive, because what possible efficacy could a California God have if I need the sun to come out and have it stop raining so I can plant corn in the spring? (something that you don’t do in California)
Another possible interpretation is that Jacob, like a lot of us, had learned the community’s lessons about the sacred as a child growing up, but it had never really penetrated. So he knows who YHVH is, but YHVH really isn’t a particularly important character in his life. Then he has this dream, which might be termed as a spiritual awakening dream and goes something like “holy crap, there really is this God YHVH”
Holy crap, there really is this God YHVH is a really important step in Jacob’s becoming Yisrael, God wrestler, in the next parsha. His bargaining with YHVH indicates a beginning level of spiritual development because he is still thinking in terms of what he can gain from the relationship. For Jacob, at this point, it is absolutely a transactional relationship. “If God will be with me and watch over me in this way that I’m going and give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I come back in peace to my father’s house, then YHVH will become my God and this stone that I set as a pillar will be God’s house, and everything you’ll give me I’ll tithe to you.” (28:20-22) Even though YHVH has shown him the same promise he made to Abraham and Isaac (which presumably was discussed in the family), he still is just not ready to be committed to this vision, not ready yet to claim his place as a patriarch of his people.
Spiritual awakening experiences are really important in the history of religion. In the west, we might think of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, or Moses awakening in the wilderness with the burning bush. Bill Plotkin talks about something he calls ecoawakening, when you have some kind of experience that makes your realize deep in your body that your first commitment is to the more than human world, rather than just towards the human world. I remember vividly my ecoawakening on top of a grain silo in Israel, for example.
To what extent is how you experience the divine influenced by where you are? To what extent are you still bargaining in your belief in the divine? What kind, if any, experiences have you had that might be termed spiritual awakening experiences?
Jacob’s dream is a window into the concept of sacred geography amongst oral, indigenous people. Warning—philosophy ahead. In the story, Jacob calls the place Bethel, the house of God, while the text reminds us that it was formerly called Luz (28:19). Then the parsha ends with Jacob encountering angels and thus naming the place where he was “Mahanaim” meaning two camps, a foreshadowing of Jacob dividing his people into two at the beginning of the next parsha. David Abram in his wonderful book, The Spell of the Sensuous, has a long and fascinating discussion on the common occurrence of place names in stories of oral, indigenous people, These tales of Jacob and the Hebrew Bible in all likelihood started as oral tales. So what can we therefore say about the purpose of the stories behind the place names?
Place names, following Abram, both orient a person as they travel, and create sacred geography. The stories serve to recreate the landscape as the work of the divine, to give expression to the divine being in this place. In Abram’s telling, the retelling of the places in these stories makes the places partake in a kind of eternal present, a re-creation of the sacred times in which the places originally gained their names. That is, when I come to Bethel, the house of God, and I recollect the story that I have been told around the fire, I am recreating the story and making it present in my generation, as it was present for Jacob. I am recreating Jacob’s experience of discovering the divine in this place, the house of God. I am testifying to the presence of the divine in this place.
We tend to think of creation as something that happened and is over and done with. In the beginning, goes the mistranslation, God created the heavens and the earth. But in telling these stories, God, we humans and the more than human world that is present at the fire, are together creating the place of the house of God, right now. Right now, we are co-creating the world.
If you are like me, you’ve lost this sense of being a co-creator of the world. Instead, it feels much more like the world happens to us, like we are thrown into the world, to use Heidegger’s phrase, and we’re desperately trying to learn to navigate this thing that exists outside and apart from us.
How can we reclaim this sense of being a co-creator of the world? I can think of two things as a partial answer to this question. The first is to take responsibility for our lives, for good or ill. If we believe we have agency, we might still be unhappy with the results, but we won’t be victims, we won’t feel like why is this thing I don’t want happening to me. Taking responsibility actually increases our ability to respond, increases our sense of freedom. The most thorough example I know of someone who simply refused to get stuck in being a victim is Viktor Frankl who held to a doctrine of personal freedom of choice and responsibility in the Nazi concentration camps in which he was interred.
Another answer for me is to work with the earth in a productive way. I feel like less of a victim, less powerless when I can go harvest carrots and bok choi from the garden, when I could go and get meat I had raised from the freezer, when I can get the tomatoes I canned from the shelf. I imagine it would be the same for hunting or wild edible foraging or building my own house or cooking from scratch (actually, I do this—I feel empowered making pancakes from scratch rather than from a mix)
How can you reclaim this sense of being a co-creator of the world?
Water is the limiting factor in Canaanite agriculture. Water is the limiting factor in a semi arid, drought prone climate as was and is Canaan. It is unlike Egypt which features an agriculture based on irrigation; it is a land of hills and valleys that “drinks water by the skies’ showers” (Deuteronomy 11:10-11). Jacob’s meeting of Rachel at the well is the second of three stories where the core protagonists of the 5 books of Moses meet their wives at a well. Abraham’s servant meets Rebecca at the well and Moses meets Tzipporah at a well as well (Exodus 2:15-22). Additionally, Miriam has long been viewed in the Jewish imagination as the source of water for our ancestors as they wandered in the desert. So an association of water with women is an association of women with the very essence of life—at least that doesn’t seem too far fetched an interpretation to me.
The women at the wells were all watering their livestock. It’s the perfect example of nurturing and partnering with animals. These animals worked for their livings in a mutually beneficial relationship with humans. Nowadays most of us, if we have any relationship with animals, its as pets who have no economic role in our lives and are rather like little kids who never grow up. We love them to death, they are members of the family, and we expect to spend resources on them without any contribution on their part.
We’ve lost that sense of partnering with animals in an economic relationship. I have plenty of land to have a few chickens—only I have a homeowners agreement that says no animals. Even apartment complexes usually have enough lawn that someone could build a chicken house and run.
When we think of limiting factors in our lives, we don’t usually think of ecological answers such as water, length of growing season, quality of salmon runs for the indigenous inhabitants of Northwest US etc, We think instead of things like money, job opportunities, like minded people, people of the same tribe. I’m not saying that they aren’t limiting things—I believe they are. But to the extent that we don’t answer this with some kind of ecological answer, that’s the extent to which we are disconnected from the land and water which are the basis of our physical lives.
What are the limiting ecological factors of your life? What are the limiting factors in your life as you experience them? Is there any overlap?
Women have a lot of agency in this parsha. Let’s take a look at this through three facets of the story. The women name their sons, they are clearly running Jacob’s domestic life and Rachel’s taking of the teraphim.
The wives name all the sons, with the sons of Jacob and the given wife’s handmaid belonging to the wives, rather than Jacob. Leah bears her first four sons and names them. (29:32-35). Rachel is jealous but still barren, and figures like Sarah, that the solution is to give Jacob her handmaid but claim the sons as her own lineage. Bilhah has two sons who seem to belong to Rachel who names them (30:3-8). This irks Leah (sibling rivalry much?) and she gives her handmaid Zilpah to Jacob. Zilpah has two more sons who Leah names (30:9-13). For those keeping score at home, that’s Leah 6 and Rachel 2. Leah has two more sons after the mandrake story, and Rachel finally has a biological child Joseph (30:24) and then another one when she dies in childbirth in the next parsha. So a total of 8 to 4.
I would expect in a patriarchal society that the father would be naming his sons, but Jacob seems to have absolutely no role in their naming. This power of the women is consistent with Teubal’s thesis that we are in a period of transition from a more matriarchal society to a patriarchal one.
The story of the mandrakes illuminates how the women are running Jacob’s domestic life. Jacob has at least four women with whom he is having sex (a wonderful male adolescent fantasy and adult nightmare). As the story of the mandrakes tells, it sure seems like it is the women who are deciding with whom he is sleeping. Here’s the mandrake or dudaim story (30:14-16).
Leah’s oldest son, Reuben, finds some mandrakes that Rachel really wants. The text doesn’t tell us why she wants them. The mandrakes, from what I can tell, might be something that was thought to increase sexual interest, but also might be hallucinogens. Dudaim is from the same root as beloved, like the song from Song of Songs, Dodi Li. The commentators have no idea what the dudaim are. As the Artscroll edition, a highly traditional commentary, says “The incident of the dudaim is most puzzling. What were they? Why were they so important to Rachel, Leah and Reuben? Why does the Torah relate this puzzling episode?” Rachel wants them so much that she trades a night of Jacob sleeping with Leah for the mandrakes—so clearly she has the power to make that kind of deal for Jacob’s sexual favors.
You might think that she wants them to help her get pregnant, which is suggested in some of the commentaries. However, Leah conceives from the night she obtains in trade for the mandrakes and has her fifth son. Then Leah had a sixth son and Jacob’s only daughter, Dinah, before Rachel became pregnant with Joseph. That’s a lot of time to pass for the mandrakes to be about fertility.
So what could be so important about the mandrakes? Why is this story preserved? It is time to engage in the ancient Jewish practice of midrash, of telling a story to explain a mysterious bit of text. What is your midrash for why Rachel wanted the mandrakes?
Let’s look at the teraphim. These are some kind of household deities. To me, this seems like the kind you would put on a household altar and offer them something—incense, food, prayers. Ancestor deities are a way of being rooted in a community that goes beyond just the living generations, a community that stretches both backwards and forward to the day when we too, will be ancestors of our descendants. Ancestor deities are highly common in indigenous societies. There’s also some speculation that they were used for divination.
The core question is to whom do these teraphim belong? Laban clearly thinks they are his. In a patriarchal society with patrilineal descent, they would belong to a male and Rachel is indeed stealing them. Jacob actually agrees with Laban. He says “let the one with whom you’ll find the Gods not live.” (31:32), thereby ironically putting his beloved Rachel’s life at risk. Laban goes through the tents desperately searching for them, but Rachel has put them in the camel’s saddle bags and is sitting on them. She refuses to move, saying that she has her period, and this tactic, not surprisingly, works. Laban’s search is futile. (31:33-35).
If these are some kind of ancestor deities, why would Rachel steal them to move to her new home? What makes the most sense to me is that she believes that these teraphim rightly belong to the female line of the family, rather than the male line. She’s moving, which she would not do in a matrifocal society, but she still thinks they should go with her. So I think, as with the issues we raised in Chayyei Sarah, that we are seeing in these texts a kind of tug of war between a matrilineal society and a patriarchal one.
The teraphim are also a problem for the strict monotheists or “Yahweh only” religious ideologues who wrote the Bible. Our ancestors simply were not so strictly monotheistic as we learned in Hebrew school. This comes out even more clearly if one reads Kings or some of the prophets such as Jeremiah, where our various authors rail against “pagan” practice of the populace. Our ancestors believed in and practiced some kind of polytheism. I would further argue that these Gods were not so much disbelieved in as much as relabeled angels. Asherah becomes Shekhinah, the consort of YHVH becomes the feminine aspect of the divine. Mot, the god of death, becomes Malach Hamavet, the angel of death. The divine, it seems to me, takes many forms even within a given community. “YHVH only” isn’t the only legitimate Hebrew response to the divine. This knowledge that our ancestors worshipped the divine in many different forms encourages me in my reimagination of a Hebrew conception of the divine; I don’t have to pledge allegiance to the Rabbinic tradition as the only possible path.
So my questions here can take one of two directions, either focusing on the transition between matriarchy and patriarchy, or on either altar or ancestral practices. For the transition question, I’m reposting the questions from Chayyei Sarah.
Where are we, in your view, in this transition between systems? What are some of the opportunities and some of the dangers? Our ancestors moved from a position of at least more equality to a system of male dominance. How do we balance between male and female energies?
For the altar or ancestral practice, my questions are:
Do you have any kind of altar or ancestral connection practice? Would you define ancestors only by blood? How would either practice possibly contribute to your spiritual development?
QUESTIONS
To what extent is how you experience the divine influenced by where you are? To what extent are you still bargaining in your belief in the divine? What kind, if any, experiences have you had that might be termed spiritual awakening experiences?
How can you reclaim this sense of being a co-creator of the world?
What are the limiting ecological factors of your life? What are the limiting factors in your life as you experience them? Is there any overlap?
What could be so important about the mandrakes? Why is this story preserved? What is your midrash for why Rachel wanted the mandrakes?
If you have a personal altar, what’s on it? If you don’t and you were to create one, what would be on the altar? Would there be a representation of your ancestors? Do you define ancestors merely by blood, by community or by some other criteria?
Where are we, in your view, in this transition between systems? What are some of the opportunities and some of the dangers? Our ancestors moved from a position of at least more equality to a system of male dominance. How do we balance between male and female energies?
