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.

(Bereishit 28:14)

You shall spread out [ufaratzta] to the west… All the families of the earth

shall bless themselves by you.

But the word paretz, wherever it is used, signifies the breaching

of a fence and passing through, just as: I will break down [p'rotz] the fence thereof (Isaiah

5:5);

Why have You broken down [paratzta] her fences? (Psalms 80:13). And in the

language of the Rabbis: "Pirtzah [a

breach in a wall] calls forth to the thief" (Sotah

26a).

Indeed, the Sacred Language uses the term p'rotz

when referring to anything that oversteps its boundary: And you shall break

forth [ufaratzta] to the west, and to the east (Bereishit 28:14); and the man broke forth [vayifrotz] exceedingly (Bereishit

30:43).

(RaMBaN on Bereishit 38:29, Chavel translation)

ufaratzta – [here] it means you shall multiply – and its primary

meaning is destruction and shattering, since when things become numerous

Scripture compares them to shattering, as if to say that due to their great

number, they break through the boundaries, for a bounded area cannot contain

them.

(Rabbi

Yitzhak Shemuel Reggio on Bereishit 28:14)

Your descendants shall be as the dust

of the earth – our father Abraham had already been blessed that his

descendants would be as the dust of the earth, and Jacob obtained Abraham's

blessings, making this blessing redundant! Rather, here the comparison to the

dust of the earth refers to humility (see Seforno and

Breishit Rabbah). In any

case, you shall spread out to the

west is saying that in exile and humiliation you shall be spread out to

every corner of the earth.

Shall bless themselves

by you – even in exile all the families of the earth shall bless

themselves by you in that they will become cognizant of his wondrous existence,

that continues thanks solely to Divine Providence of the Lord who attends him,

and great is He who shepherds him. This would never have become known if he had

remained living peacefully in the land. In that case there would have been room

to say that he had a good and powerful astronomical sign. But the signs are not

eternal, and that explanation could not be not true of the

time he spent under Laban's domination, making

it clear that he enjoyed the Lord's providence.

(The NeTziV's Ha'Amek Davar ad loc)

For my parents, Shaul and Yardena,

May they live long, joyful, and healthy lives.

Jacob – the Lonely Man of Faith

Meir Zilbesky

Jacob left Beersheva,

and set out for Haran. He came upon

a certain place

and stopped there

lay down in that place. (Bereishit 28:10)

The

Torah describes events succinctly and factually, but not prosaically. The story

is carefully fashioned, and readers may flesh-out its account with their

imagination, their understanding, and the help of the various commentators.

The

word place [hamakom] is repeated three

times in the opening sentence of the parasha, and an

additional three times in the rest of the passage. What is this place (a known,

specific place, hamakom

– the place)? The

verse emphasizes that Jacob came upon

a certain place, that is to say: Jacob did not intend to reach that

particular place, he arrived there by coincidence.

Why

did he sleep there, and not elsewhere? Because the sun had set – night

had fallen. At that (seemingly chance) time and place, Jacob dreams a dream

that has implications for his entire life. Although he is unaware of it at the

time, the dream is his life's constitutive event.

The Dream

In

the dream, Jacob sees a ladder with angels ascending and descending upon it. God

promises him the land and a multitude of offspring. This is the same blessing

that Isaac received. However, Jacob's blessing contains a special addition:

Remember, I am with you: I will protect

I have done what I promised you. (Bereishit

28:15)

What

is the significance of this addition? Commentators have already written (Benno Jacob, the 19^th century Jewish exegete

from Germany expands upon

this point) that Jacob's situation was difficult, and one may assume that his

emotional state was troubled as well.

Jacob

had become no more than a refugee, a man without status or possessions, fleeing

his home to escape Esau.

He

was also alone, unmarried. Even the force of the blessing he had deviously

received – thanks to his mother – from Isaac, seemed doubtful.

Lying

on the ground with only a stone for a pillow, he found himself in one of his

life's worst predicaments.

God

was the only one with him that night, and He told Jacob that He would remain

with him and not leave him until he returned to his land and home. The

significance of that addition is that a revelation can be a personal one-time

event. Its message need not be of general or national concern (as is the first

part of the revelation); it can be addressed to Jacob as a private individual,

at precisely the moment when he is most in need of hearing it.

The Vow

It would seem

that such a Divine promise would relieve Jacob of all his worries. However, it

appears that he remains unimpressed; upon awakening he is amazed and calls the

place Beit El (House of God) and Sha'ar Shamayim

(Heaven's Gate), but he still makes a vow:

If God remains with me, if He protects

me on this journey that I am making,

and gives me bread

stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God's abode; and of all that You give me, I will set aside a tithe for you. (Bereishit 28:20-22)

What is the condition and what

is the vow? The commentators disagree on this question (RaMBaN

and Seforno vs. Rashi, Saadia Gaon, and Ibn Ezra). The exegetical difficulty stems from a

theological difficulty, namely: can one make one's loyalty to God conditional?

According to the received

division of the verses, it seems that the words the Lord shall be my God

belong to the first part of the passage, i.e., they constitute part of the

condition. The syntax tells otherwise. If the Lord shall be my God were

part of the list of conditions, it should have been followed by this stone,

etc. (without the connecting word and)

or and then this stone, etc.;

formulations which would have marked the division between the list of

conditions and the actual vow.

Yiftah's vow offers an

example of this kind of rhetorical structure:

And

offering." (Judges 11:30-31)

We see that the word then [ve'hayah] signals the beginning of the vow. But

in the Hebrew, the phrase the Lord shall be my God is also introduced by

the word ve'hayah, making it part of the vow.

According to this line of exegesis, it turns out that Jacob sets conditions

upon his loyalty to God; his loyalty depends upon the fulfillment of certain

prerequisites: that God be with him, that God take care of all his needs and

return him safely to his father's house. How are we to understand this

seemingly odd stipulation of conditions?

Was Jacob a Leibowitzian "Servant of God"?

Yeshayahu Leibowitz drew a clear line between the service of God for

its own sake and the service of God for ulterior motives; between values and

needs. If a religious person presents his needs and requests to God, he does

not serve God in the highest sense. In his book, Yahadut,

Am Yehudi, ve'Medinat Yisrael, Leibowitz cites a midrash to contrast Pharaoh to

Jacob:

Pharaoh's religiosity grasps

faith and religion as means, as tools and instruments to satisfy man's needs

and to solve his problems. Whether it relates to the spiritual or material

realms, this is "religiosity for ulterior motives" (it should be

mentioned here that from a religious point of view – as against a certain

anthropological-philosophical view – there is no reason to value a person's

spiritual needs and problems differently from his material needs and problems. From

the stomach and sex to wealth and honor and on to moral self-improvement,

spiritual ascent and the reformation of society – all of these are the needs

and problems of man)… such religiosity replaces concern for man's status

before God with concern for man's status in His world… service of God becomes

a means for fulfilling his own needs…

The religiosity of our father

Jacob was religion for its own sake. It understands worship not as a means for

attaining human ends, but rather as an end in itself. (pg.

312)

Our attempt to understand Jacob's

religiosity according to the plain meaning of Scripture shows otherwise. Jacob's

vow expresses the idea that it is possible to take on an obligation to God, but

God must also assume His own obligations. The point is that if Jacob does not

return from his journey, his purpose and the patriarchal blessings will be

stripped of significance. God will be the God of his fathers Abraham and Isaac, but not his

God. Jacob holds that God cannot dismiss the spiritual and material

existential needs of man. God promised to be with him, to take care of him. Jacob

wants to obligate God to do so with a vow.

The God of Beit El

How did Jacob know that God was

with him? The meeting with Rachel, the multiplication of his

wives and children, the fecundity of his flocks, all of these were signs

that Jacob was being protected. The conditions of the vow were fulfilled. Indeed,

Jacob was supplied with much more than mere food and clothing. Appropriately,

when he returned to Canaan he fulfilled the vow by building an

altar to God.

At the end of his life, Jacob

said:

The

– The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm… (Bereishit 48:15)

Jacob refers to God as his shepherd.

He lived with the feeling that an angel

was with him, protecting him. That was the personal angel who was revealed

to Jacob at the particular time and place that he was needed. He reveals

himself to Jacob using the name El Beit-El [God

of Beit El] (Bereishit

31:13),

and Jacob himself calls the place El Beit El upon his

return from Haran (35:7).

The

place

emphasizes the connection between Jacob, who was without place, to the land via

the angel who watched over him (El Beit El). He would

return to that place, a place sanctified in the patriarchal period and

described as the site of the Tabernacle in the period of the Judges (Judges

20, 26).

Jeroboam built one of his two centers there (I Kings 12).

Man with

Source-Consciousness

We learned from Jacob that man

has the right to ask that God be with him, that He see

to man's existential needs, and fulfill His promises. In our day as well,

people want to feel that God is with them and that religion offers a response

to their distress and problems. I think it is inhuman to require absolute

obligation to the Eternal without any reference to man, to his spiritual quest

and existential condition. Especially in his most difficult hours, man needs

God and calls upon Him.

In his article, "Gaon ve'Anavah"

general and typological fashion. He wrote of two archetypes: man who posses the

dynamic, questing, "cosmic consciousness" that belongs to the man of

the world who finds his God in the expanses of the cosmos, and in contrast, the

man who possesses "source consciousness," who is connected to one

place, to a home and homestead to which he always returns and where he feels

God's close and intimate presence. The latter type may be compared to Jacob,

who always wanted to return to his place, even as he lived abroad. He wanted to

return to the God of close and intimate presence. In that same essay Rav Soloveitchik describes the

experience he went through during his wife's illness:

The only thing I could do was to

pray. But I could not pray in the hospital, because for some reason, I could

not find God in its long white corridors, among the doctors and nurses. Still,

I needed to pray very much and I could not refrain from meeting that need. The

moment I returned home I would hurry to my room and fall into fervent prayer. In

those moments, God did not appear in the shape of a glorious king, but rather

as a close friend, a brother, a father. God did not distance himself from me in

those hours of bleak despair. He dwelled with me in my dark room. I felt His

warm hands, so to speak, on my shoulders. I hugged His knees, so to speak. He

was there with me in the close quarters of that small room.

Meir Zalbesky is a computer

programmer and studies Jewish thought at the Hebrew University.

And Rachel

arrived with the sheep… for she was a shepherdess

Know that each and every shepherd and shepherdess

has a particular melody in accordance with the grasses and the place in which

they pasture their flocks. For each and every animal has its

own special grass that it must eat. And he does not always pasture in

the same place. In accordance with the grasses and the place where he pastures,

so shall be his melody. For each and every grass has its own song, which it

recites, which is the aspect of Pirkei Shira, and the shepherd's melody is made up from the

song of the grasses… for as soon as there was a shepherd in the world, there

were immediately musical instruments, as mentioned above. That is why King

David, peace be upon him, who knew how to play

music (I Samuel 16) was a shepherd (ibid), as mentioned above. (We also find that all of the

Patriarchs were shepherds). This is the aspect of From

the end of the earth we heard singing (Isaiah 24),

that is, that the songs and melodies come forth out of the end of the earth,

for the melodies are made up from the grasses which grow in the earth…

(Likutei

MoHaRaN Tanina 63)

God Cares for

the Weak

And the Lord saw that Leah was unloved (Bereishit 29:31). As Scripture says: The

Lord supports all who stumble (Psalms 145: 14) –

The qualities of the Holy One Blessed be He are unlike

those of humans. When a human has a wealthy friend he sticks to him and submits

to him, and when he sees that he has faltered and become impoverished, he no

longer values him, but rather places a stone on him. But when the Holy One

Blessed be He sees someone who has been subdued and

faltered, he lends him a hand and stands him upright, as it says, The Lord

supports all who stumble and makes all who are bent stand straight.

(Aggadat

Bereishit, 49)

And the first-born is the son of the unloved one – Scripture

states this with certainty, in the same manner as it states, and the Lord

saw that Leah was unloved, for the Lord sees the broken-hearted so as to

support them.

(Or HaHayyim on Devarim 21:15)

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