Limping Towards the Promised Land
SERMON VAYISHLACH December 13 2024
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai, South Burlington, Vermont
This week’s portion is a powerful one, and one that is central in understanding how we see ourselves as a people. Jacob, having worked many years for his conniving father in-law, Laban, is now returning home to the Negev desert, the place he fled because he had done something so underhanded and mean that his brother was planning to kill him. He had tricked his father and taken advantage of his brother to steal the birthright and the blessing, all under the guidance of his mother, Rebecca. He left alone and in a hurry, hunted, and now is returning with a huge family and considerable wealth.
When he left, he had a mysterious sleep and dream, in which a ladder reached to heaven and messengers from God climbed up and down it, and then he sees God standing at his head as he sleeps and God blesses him, saying:
“I am יהוה, the God of your father Abraham’s [house] and the God of Isaac’s [house]: the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your offspring. Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants.
Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
Now, having himself been tricked and taken advantage of, he now readies himself to cross back over the boundary between being in exile and coming home. Then he hears his brother is approaching, marching with an army of 400 people.
Jacob knows he can’t win against that army, so he quickly divides his people into two camps, saying this way at least half of them can get away and live. He sends messengers to his brother with generous gifts and obsequious greetings. Then, all alone to face his brother, Jacob again has a mysterious sleep on the banks of the Yabbok river.
A mysterious being appears, and wrestles with him until it is almost dawn. Whether this is an angel, or an anxiety attack is difficult to know, and we’ve all had nights like that, but Jacob was scrappy, and the powerful being couldn’t pin Jacob down but he did tear the muscles and tendons of his hip socket. Still, down but not out, Jacob grabbed this being and held on as the sun came up. The being said, “I have to go for the sun is rising” but Jacob, in some ways returning to the very things that caused his exile in the first place says, “I won’t let you go until you give me a blessing.”
The angel then offers him these words, which I’m still not sure is exactly a blessing:
“Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.”
Jacob rises, and now hobbling with a bad limp because of his injured hip, he approaches his brother not knowing if he will live or die, but ready. And then we are told,
That is why the children of Israel to this day do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the socket of the hip, since Jacob’s hip socket was wrenched at the thigh muscle.
Think of that! This odd rule of being kosher, that we can’t eat the part of the thigh that the sciatic nerve runs through, called in Hebrew the Gid haNasheh, is to remind us of this very moment in our national story, the moment when Jacob, not knowing whether to flee or fight, whether he would be forgiven or killed, wrestles with the Divine, or with his own conscience, or anxiety, or as some scholar suggest, with the guardian angels or demons that guard the entrance to the Holy Land, or to Esau’s land, and here he rises, barely able to walk, with a new name, Israel. It reminds us of a moment when we have no idea if we are about to live or die, if we will be attacked or embraced, but we know who we are and the demons we have fought.
That is a powerful, but odd, cultural choice. It is not a moment of triumph. It is a moment of tremendous uncertainty and risk.
And as Rabbi Tali Adler at Hadar teaches, now, even if he wants to flee, he can’t. He has no choice to face whatever is coming.
Sometimes, even bruised and weakened, injured, having wrestled with angels or demons or ourselves, we have no option but to face what is coming with both a sense of who we are, a sense of accomplishment and blessing, but also with a sense of profound humility and humanity.
Jacob – Israel – has received every blessing he could imagine and has reason to be proud of what he has done and how he has survived. But he also has to face whatever is coming and to do with humility and faith.
Jacob bows low seven times as he finally approached his brother. It’s a strategy but also a demonstration of humility.
As Jews, as the children of Israel, we often feel like this. Proud of who we are, aware of our past, sometimes tired and injured, but still wrestling with God and still moving forward with both pride and humility at whatever we are facing. We, as a people, have gone through the worst that humanity can throw at you, and yes we were hurt, but we refused to give in and just disappear.
Instead we wrestled with our sense of betrayal, and then got up and kept moving forward. We haven’t let our past dictate our future. We believe in hope, and even though the odds are not in our favor, we will find a way.
Game-creator and liberal trans and feminist activist Brianna Wu believes that this is a lesson that many in the marginalized communities could learn from. She said that right now, the paradigm is “I’m oppressed and I’m hurt. Therefore, I don’t have to take agency in my life for my own choices,” and what I’ve always respected about the Jewish people is that “your fate is in your hands. You’ve got to make it happen. Suck it up. And I think that is a lesson that could probably get us past some of these toxic identity politics in the United States.” (State of a Nation with Eylon Levy, podcast, Dec 2, 2024)
In one way, modern Israel is a manifestation of this refusal to be a victim. Israel has the army that Jacob wished he had when facing Esau. To be sure, October 7 injured that sense of strength, wounded the ego, and so much of what has followed is rooted in the need to reassert that we are stronger than people think.
Recent victories against Hezbollah, Iran and most recently Assad’s fall in Syria, has the danger of feeding Israel’s ego and pride, a pride and sense of invincibility that was part of what allowed October 7 to happen in the first place. Pride in who we are, and what we have accomplished is health, but pride can famously go before a fall. I think the nation of Israel’s namesake has a lesson for us in this portion: be humble even when God is blessing you.
The lesson of Jacob, now Israel, is that we must find a way to make a partnership out of pride and humility, to hold both at the same time, and that is much harder than it seems, for us as individuals, and for us as a people.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim of P’shischa famously advised us to keep two pieces of paper in our pockets at all times. One that reads, “the world was created for me,” and the other that reads, “ I am but dust and ashes.” It is a lesson that Jacob learned that night, wrestling with an angel.
Shabbat shalom,
David
