Vayetze 5770; Jacob and Personal Growth

One of the most famous dreams in all of Jewish history is described in this week’s Torah portion. If you remember from last week, Jacob and Esau had a terrible falling out. Jacob tricked his brother out of his father’s birthright and blessing and Jacob just assumed now that Esau wanted to kill him. So Jacob takes off by himself. He is headed towards Haran to take refuge with his mother’s family.

As he approaches the border of Israel, he makes camp. And he lies down presumably to sleep. He has a dream of a ladder with angels of God descending and ascending the ladder and when he wakes up, he is surprised and says, “God is in this place and I did not know it.”

The language of this story has the rabbis of the Midrash perplexed. The text says that Jacob, “v’yishkav b’makom ha hu,” he laid down in that place, and then he dreams the dream. He laid down, but it doesn’t say whether or not he actually fell asleep. Perhaps this dream was more like a vision, a waking dream.

In verse 16, the text says, “v’yikatz yaakov mi’shenato,” that Jacob arose from his slumber” to be astonished by the dream and the holiness of the place. But the Rabbis even challenge this verse as they question how Jacob could have even slepthel at all with all that was happening in his life.

Rabbi Yochanan in the Midrash says “me shenato” does not mean, from his slumber. Because even though the Hebrew word “shana” means sleep, the Aramaic word “shana” means something else. Shana in Aramaic is similar to the word mishna which means to study or to teach. So for Rabbi Yochanan, Jacob was studying Torah all night when he suddenly realized that he was in a holy place and that God was speaking to him directly.

The great Hasidic master, Rav Nachman of Bratzlav played on the words “me shenato” as well by saying that it means an “awakening” as it relates to the heart and soul. Jacob had been asleep spiritually up to that point in his life and suddenly, as he is about to lose his home and family, he wakes up to the presence of God and realizes that God is in this place; that God was with him all along and he simply did not know it.

Jacob is my favorite character in all the Bible because through the stories of the Torah, we watch him grow up. We watch him change over the course of his life. He improves himself; he grows both emotionally and spiritually. It is gradual growth; it is painful growth, but it is a genuine and lasting growth that we can all relate to and learn from.

My colleague Rabbi Michael Graetz makes a wonderful point in his writings. He says that rabbi Yochanan’s statement in the Talmud reveals a profound truth. Jacob was aroused from his studies. He was so immersed in study that he failed to see God’s presence. Even if we assume that he was studying torah, his total immersion in God’s word almost caused him to miss the presence of God Himself.

In the Talmud, we read, “ha omer, ein lie eleh torah, afilu torah ein lo” “the one who says all there is to me is Torah, misses the point of Torah and is a risk of losing the Torah all together” (Yevamot. 109b). The point of Jewish study is to tease out the will of God from sacred texts. If there is no God in one’s study, then one’s study is pointless, an intellectual exercise that bears no fruit.

And I think there is one more point one can make from this. The text says that Jacob was aroused, “mishnato,” which could also be translated that Jacob was aroused from that which he had learned, from all that he had come to believe, from his sense of certainty.
One of the great misconceptions of adulthood is that when a person becomes an adult, he or she should already knows everything there is to know. Adults hate to admit that they are unsure about something, that they have their doubts, that they just don’t know something, for certain.. And the more insecure the adult, the more that person is likely to cling desperately to claims of certainty, to, in fact, claim that he or she knows the truth and will not hear arguments to the contrary.

How many people do we know like this? Perhaps we ourselves are like this. When I started at the Alliance, a member of the congregation came up to me and said, “I have to tell you the truth rabbi. I just don’t believe any of this stuff. I know my own mind and I think Judaism is fine and all, but the religious stuff, I don’t believe in it and that is just who I am and hope you can accept me for who I am.”

I remember feeling a bit surprised by this declaration. The man was in his 40’s. He sounded to me as though he had never changed his mind or learned anything new in 20 years. How could he be so certain about Judaism? How could he be so certain about his own mind? How could he be so certain that he wouldn’t learn something new about his faith and actually change?

Jacob was a crafty fellow as a young man. He had incredible chutzpah and probably thought of himself as very clever. But his cleverness caused his family to break apart and it caused him to flee into exile. And in our parasha this morning, he suddenly wakes up. He learns something new about himself. He learns something new about God and he is astonished. God was in this place and he just never realized it.

We are all Jacob. The young men and women among us and the seniors among us, we are all Jacob. We all have more to learn and understand about God and our relationship to God. We are all asleep to God’s presence in some way. Our eyes are closed. Our minds are made up.

But the Torah knows better. We are human beings and human beings can learn at any age. We can wake up to God’s presence at any time, in any stage of our lives. We often open our eyes to God’s presence at the most astonishing times, the birth of a child, an insight during Torah studies, feeling well again after an illness, our child’s wedding, holding a grandchild for the first time. These are occasions that give us windows into God’s presence. They are times that make us certain of one thing, that we don’t know everything, that life is mysterious and will always continue to surprise us.

This is what Jacob learns as he arises from his slumber. He opens his eyes for the first time and sees God and it changes him forever.

The Torah this morning urges us not to be so sure. Don’t be so certain. There is always more to learn, always more to grow, astonishing things to see, if we would only awaken from our slumber.