When the “I” is Silent This week’s parsha relates a powerful, primal vision of prayer – Jacob, alone and far from home, lies down for the night, with only stones for a pillow, and dreams of a ladder, with angels ascending and descending. This is the initial encounter with the “house of God” that would one day become […]
Out of the Depths What did Jacob add to the Jewish experience? What is it that we find in him that we do not find to the same measure in Abraham and Isaac? Why is it his name – Jacob/Israel – that we carry in our identity? How was it that all his children stayed […]
The Birth of the World’s Oldest Hate “Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob. Pharaoh made his decree only about the males whereas Laban sought to destroy everything.” This passage from the Haggadah on Pesach – evidently based on this week’s parsha – is extraordinarily difficult to understand. […]
How the Light Gets In Why Jacob? That is the question we find ourselves asking repeatedly as we read the narratives of Genesis. Jacob is not what Noah was, righteous, perfect in his generations, one who walked with God. He did not, like Abraham, leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house in response […]
Love Is Not Enough Judaism is supremely a religion of love, three loves. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.” “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And “You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in a strange land.”[1] […]
Light in Dark Times What is it that made Jacob – not Abraham or Isaac or Moses – the true father of the Jewish people? We are the “congregation of Jacob,” “the children of Israel.” Jacob/Israel is the man whose name we bear. Yet Jacob did not begin the Jewish journey; Abraham did. Jacob faced […]
Encountering G-d It is one of the great visions of the Torah. Jacob, alone at night, fleeing from the wrath of Esau, lies down to rest, and sees not a nightmare of fear but an epiphany: He came to a certain place [vayifga bamakom] and stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking […]
The Birth of the World’s Oldest Hate “Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob. A Pharaoh made his decree only about the males whereas Laban sought to destroy everything.” This passage from the Haggadah on Pesach – evidently based on this week’s parsha – is extraordinarily difficult to […]
The Character of Jacob What kind of man was Jacob? This is the question that cries out to us in episode after episode of his life. The first time we hear a description of him he is called ish tam, a simple, quiet, plain, straightforward man. But that is exactly what he seems not to be. We see […]
Jacob’s Ladder and the Structure of Jewish Prayer It is one of the great dreams of the Bible. Jacob, afraid and alone, finds himself in what the anthropologist Victor Turner called liminal space – the space between – between the home he is escaping from and the destination he has not yet reached, between the known […]
