VAYISHLACH
Vayishlach, “And he sent” (32:4-36:42) begins with the impending reunion of Jacob and Esau, and Jacob’s revelatory dream of wrestling with a being and receiving a new, sacred name, Israel, God-wrestler. The parsha continues with the brothers’ reunion and then the confusing story of the “rape” of Dinah and the subsequent slaughter and capture of the Hivite tribe. Rachel dies giving birth to Jacob’s last son, Benjamin, and Isaac dies, 18 grandchildren after he was on his deathbed when Jacob stole his birthright from Esau. Isaac, like Abraham before him, is buried by both supposedly alienated sons (35:28), as Isaac continues to live Abraham’s life. The parsha concludes with an incredibly detailed lineage of Esau, culminating in 11 tribes of the Edomites, the people he (mythically) founded.
I want to discuss four themes:
Jacob’s receiving the mythopoetic identity of Israel, God Wrestler
The “shadow” side of Jacob’s family in his encounter with Esau and the story of the “rape” of Dinah
Sacred Pillars and altars
The next step in Jacob’s spiritual development.
JJacob has his encounter with the “ish” and receives his mythopoetic identity just before he encounters Esau again. He has apparently crossed the ford at Jabbok with his wives, maidservants and children, but seems to cross back to spend the night alone. (32:23-25) (it’s unclear to me if he actually crosses). Why is he committed to spending the night alone? The text does not say. It is easy to speculate that he wanted to talk to the divine as he had earlier in the chapter (32:10-13), but this is just speculation.
It is there, on the original side of the river, where he dreams and wrestles with an “ish.” Ish literally means “man,” but the commentators argue that it is an angel, a reasonable interpretation, given that this being is not simply a human. They wrestle until daybreak when the being apparently needs to leave. Jacob says he will not let him go until he receives a blessing. The being blesses him by giving him the new name Israel, God-wrestler. (32:25-30)
I have argued that Jacob’s dream of angels running up and down a ladder at Bethel was a spiritual awakening. This dream is another step because he is given a special, spiritual name. The vision he has is radically different than, say, the vision Moses has at the burning bush. Moses is given a particular task, but Jacob is given an identity. Israel is what, following Bill Plotkin, I would call a mythopoetic identity.
Mythopoetic identities are who we truly are at the deepest level; an expression in a few words of our true birthright, of the reason we are born into this body at this time. They are not job descriptions and are always ambiguous. They require both interpretation and a commitment to living into them. Some other examples include “Cocoon weaver,” “She who dances the earth and dreams songs to feed the longing,” “Compost bridger of the world.” I think it is also possible to not have a clear name or mythopoetic identity, and still have a clear sense of your true purpose, of why you were born in this time and in this place. If you don’t know your mythopoetic identity or have a clear idea of your true purpose, I’d suggest you do four things:
Take an inventory of what you care most deeply about
Take an inventory of what you are really good at that comes easily to you
Spend a lot of time wandering in the more than human world, praying for a vision of your true purpose
Find someone who has a good sense of why they are here as a mentor.
Plotkin would probably say that what you are really good at comes later when you are working at how to embody and share your true purpose. While I think that is logically true, I think that taking the inventory of what you are really good at can deepen your investigation into what you care most deeply about and why you are here on this planet in this place, at this time.
Do you have a mythopoetic identity? Any idea of your birthright, your true purpose, why you were born into this body at this time? How was this revealed to you?
The shadow side of Jacob’s family is shown in both Jacob’s attitudes and actions towards Esau, and his children’s actions towards the Hivites. Jacob knows that he is about to meet his brother after twenty years, and he is afraid. He says to God “Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, else I fear that he can come and strike me down, mothers and children alike.”(32:12) He has divided his possessions into two parts so that one may escape if Esau attacks (32:9) and he has prepared an extensive plan to propitiate aka bribe Esau into not attacking him. (32:14-22).
Jacob is greatly afraid of Esau, but truly Esau has done nothing to merit this fear. Indeed, Esau’s response to all of material goods with which Jacob seeks to propitiate Esau’s supposed anger is “I have enough, my brother; let what you have remain yours.” (33:9). Further, “Esau took his wives, his sons and daughters, and all the members of his household, his cattle and all his livestock, and all the property that he had acquired in the land of Canaan and went to another land because of his brother Jacob.” (36:6). Esau, the more powerful brother, the older brother, voluntarily gives the birthright of Isaac’s grazing ground to his brother—the very birthright that Jacob conspired with their mother to steal. Given that there is no evidence presented for the idea that Jacob should fear Esau, why does he? I will return to this, after I discuss the “rape” of Dinah.
The story of the “rape” of Dinah is a confusing text. Dinah is the daughter of Leah and Jacob and the text clearly says that Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite who was the chief, had sex with her by force (34:2). But the text also tells us that Shechem is strongly attracted to her and wants her for his wife. He wants her so much that he is willing to pay any bride price, no matter how high (34:12). He is even willing to get circumcised as an adult male and persuades his fellow male adult Hivites to also get circumcised. (34:14-22) Now I don’t know about you, but if I were uncircumcised, I don’t think getting circumcised as an adult would be on my bucket list. Lastly, it seems like Dinah is already living with Shechem since Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob’s sons by Leah, take Dinah from Shechem’s house after they have slaughtered all the males who are still recovering from being circumcised. (34:26). If they weren’t married yet, what on earth was she doing in Shechem’s house? The story concludes with the other sons of Jacob taking all of the wealth of the Hivites, including the women and children as booty, as if the tribes were at war. But it sure seems to me that what Shechem wanted was to marry Dinah and have the tribes live in peace. Here’s what Shechem said to his father “These people are peaceable with us, and they’ll live in the land and go around it…Let’s take their daughters for us as wives and give our daughters to them.” (34:21-22)
So what does Jacob’s misplaced fear of Esau and the horrible story of the “rape” of Dinah where Jacob’s sons slaughter, steal and, in all probability, rape have in common? Why have I linked them? Because they turn on what is unacknowledged. I see no indication in our text that Jacob acknowledges that he conspired with his mother to steal the birthright which he eventually freely receives from Esau. I see no indication that Jacob’s sons considered any possibility other than the Hivites trying to destroy them. Both of these are projections. Neither Jacob nor his sons acknowledge what Jung called their shadow sides, things we don’t like about ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge. Left unaddressed, our shadow sides wind up too often projecting our evil onto others, and then acting as if the other were the evil that lives inside of us. We see this throughout the developed world today where the autocrats claim they are defending democracy while doing everything they can to destroy it.
All of us have shadow side; our spiritual task is to acknowledge that we have a shadow and work to bring it to light so the evil within us is not running the show.
Recognizing your shadow is a really difficult task—if it were easy, by definition it wouldn’t be your shadow. In my limited experience, it’s a thunderbolt like a spiritual awakening only accompanied by an urge to puke. I remember when I realized that I was arrogant as a compensation for the fact that I actually thought I was stupid (to be clear, the shadow side here is the arrogance). Oh boy, did I feel sick.
The great news about recognizing the shadow is that it allows us some freedom. I remember someone telling me some time later than one of my virtues as a leader is that I didn’t feel like I had to be the smartest person in the room or the center of attention. But before my recognition of this shadow side of myself, I did need to be the smartest person in the room and it showed up as arrogance.
What do you struggle to acknowledge about yourself?
Jacob sets up sacred pillars and altars, both in this parsha and the last parsha.
Jacob sets up a stone pillar and poured oil on it in our last parsha after he has the ladder dream (28:8). In our parsha, he sets up an altar in a field he purchases from Hamor, the father of Shechem, the same people who will be killed in the aftermath of the “rape” of Dinah in Chapter 34. He calls this place “El, God of Israel” (33:20) The altar from the last parsha is in Bethel, literally, the house of God. God says to Jacob to build an altar there in 35:1. I think this is more like a proper altar, since what he did in the last parsha was just take the stone on which he had slept and anointed it with oil (28:18). He sets up a “pillar” and pours a libation on it and spills oil. (35:14)
Interestingly, there’s no defined rules about the pillars. This reticence isn’t true of other buildings or practices in the Hebrew Bible. Think about the description of the mishkan, the portable dwelling house of God in Exodus, the seemingly endless details of how to conduct sacrifices in Leviticus, even the building instructions for Noah’s ark. Pillars and altars can be built and used in an informal testimony to our connection to the divine. Building altars, in this sense, is a physical counterpart to the spontaneous prayer of Jacob’s in this parsha when he prays for deliverance from Esau, a deliverance that he does not actually need. (32:10-13).
Pillars, it must also be noted, are often associated with the worship of other deities, such as the poles of Asherah discussed in Kings. Thus they became problematic for the version of Judaism that became dominant, that I have, after many scholars, called YHVH only. The centralization of altars and sacrifices in Judaism is a later development that marks a big change from local sacrificial spots.
Post the destruction of the second Temple, Judaism of course has become radically decentralized, so we don’t easily see this conflict between the human impulse to sacralize particular space and the priestly/prophetic desire to centralize all worship in Jerusalem. But this tension is a driving force behind the text of the Hebrew Bible. Further, if we are to reinhabit the places in which we find ourselves, I think it is imperative that we find the presence of the divine in the very landscape in which we dwell. We need to build the equivalent of pillars and altars to honor the divine. Building our own altars and pillars is part of our inheritance. Pouring out libations and oil on them is a part of our inheritance.
How might we give physical form to our experience of the divine? Do you have experience with giving physical form to your experiences of the divine?
Jacob has gained a name, Israel. What’s next? “And God said to Jacob, “Get up and go to Beth El and live there and make an alter there to God, who appeared to you when you were fleeing from Esau, your brother. And Jacob said to his house and to everyone who was with him, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you and be purified and change your clothes and let’s get up and go to Beth-El and I’ll make an altar there to God who answered me in a day of my trouble.” (35:1-3).
This is the beginning, for me, of a profoundly disappointing rest of his life. I’m not sure if the problem lies with Jacob or our authors, who seem to lose interest in him as they turn to Joseph starting in the next parsha. Jacob has gained a great blessing, won by his own spiritual courage. But does he wrestle with the divine? The man who had the fortitude to stand up to the divine now calmly acquiesces to the demand of worshipping only YHVH and suppressing other deities. (the foreign Gods). When Rachel, his beloved Rachel, dies in childbirth, does he blame himself because he said that whoever stole Laban’s teraphim should die?
Now, if I were writing midrash, I could write an alternate Jacob who rages about the death of his beloved Rachel, who speaks to YHVH about his talented but arrogant son Joseph, and perhaps even how he persists after the Ketonit Passim, the coat of many colors, is brought back to him covered in blood. (37:32:35). Or I could write midrash about Rachel’s response to the demand to give up the “foreign gods” who are her ancestral deities. But that’s not the text we have.
What do you imagine Jacob’s next action should be in his spiritual development after he has returned to Canaan?
QUESTIONS
Do you have a mythopoetic identity? Any idea of your birthright, your true purpose, why you were born into this body at this time? How was this revealed to you?
What do you struggle to acknowledge about yourself?
How might we give physical form to our experience of the divine? Do you have experience with giving physical form to your experiences of the divine?
What do you imagine Jacob’s next action should be in his spiritual development after he has returned to Canaan?
