The Path to Wholeness: Jacob Wrestling

Intro:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.
Franz Kafka in Letters to Friends, Family and Editors

Crossing Rivers

"Since ancient days, crossing a river has been symbolic of overcoming a hazard and going forward to new experience (note such expressions as 'crossing the Rubicon'). In this sense, Jacob passing over the Jabbok to meet Esau crosses the watershed of his life. Everything that has happened to him since he obtained both birthright and parental blessing by doubtful means has been tainted with his own guilt and his brother's enmity..."

- Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary Revised Edition, pg 233

Hevrutah:

• Given what we've studied so far, do you think Jacob is on the Path to Wholeness? Why or why not?
• Read selected commentary below (as much or as little as you want).
• Which commentaries add to your understanding of the story?
• Which add to your understanding of wholeness?
• If you were Jacob's therapist, what insights or interventions might you offer?

Oneness:

“And Jacob remained alone” (Gen 32:24). It is written “There is none like the God

of Jeshurun” (Deut 33:26).

R Berekhiah in the name of R. Simon said: “There is none like God.” And who is like God? Jeshurun! — [That is,] Grandfather Israel.

Just as it is written of the Holy One blessed be He “and the Lord alone shall be

exalted on that day” (Isa 2:11), so too Jacob “And Jacob was left alone” (ibid).

—Genesis Rabbah 77.1

Dust: Earthiness

“Menachem explains: And a man became covered with dust, derived from dust,

for they were raising dust with their feet through their movements.”

“the dust of their feet went up to the Divine Throne” (Chulin 91a).

All Jacob’s gifts came as a result of this “dust.” All the “gifts that Israel would

gain in this world,” “all the success they would have in business,” “all the success

they would have in battles” – all of it is “in the merit of Jacob’s dust”!

Midrash (Shir HaShirim Rabbah)

Rashi And the sun rose for him: This is a common expression: When we arrived at such-and-such a place, the dawn broke for us. This is the simple explanation.

The Midrashic Aggadah (Tanchuma Buber, Vayishlach 10; Gen.Rabbah 68:10) [explains]: And the sun rose for him-to heal his limp, as it is said: (Mal. 3:20): “the sun of mercy, with healing in its wings”; and those hours that it hastened to set for him when he left Beer-sheba, it hastened to rise for him.

ויזרח לו השמש: לשון בני אדם הוא, כשהגענו למקום פלוני האיר לנו השחר, זהו פשוטו. ומדרש אגדה ויזרח לו לצרכו, לרפאות את צלעתו, כמה דתימא (מלאכי ג כ) שמש צדקה ומרפא בכנפיה, ואותן שעות שמיהרה לשקוע בשבילו כשיצא מבאר שבע, מיהרה לזרוח בשבילו

Rashi unless you have blessed me: Acknowledge for me the blessings [with] which my father blessed me, which Esau is contesting.

ברכתני: הודה לי על הברכות שברכני אבי, שעשו מערער עליהם:

no… Jacob: It shall no longer be said that the blessings came to you through trickery (עָקְבָה) and deceit, but with nobility and openness, and ultimately, the Holy One, blessed be He, will reveal Himself to you in Beth-el and change your name, and there He will bless you, and I will be there.“ He then acknowledged them (the blessings) as being his (Jacob’s). This is [the meaning of] what is written (Hos. 12:5) ”He strove with an angel and prevailed over him; he wept and supplicated him,“ [meaning that] the angel wept and supplicated him. With what did he supplicate him? ”In Beth-el he will find Him, and there He will speak with us“ (ibid). Wait for me until He speaks with us there. Jacob, however, did not consent, [to release the angel] and, against his (the angel’s) will, he (the angel) acknowledged them (the blessings) as being his (Jacob’s). This is [the meaning of] ”And he blessed him there," that he entreated him to wait, but he did not wish [to do so]. — [from The Zohar, vol. 3, 45a]

Rachel Barenblatt—The Velveteen Rabbi

When Esau saw him he came running.

They embraced and wept, each grateful

to see the profile he knew better than his own.

You didn't need to send gifts, Esau said

but Jacob introduced his wives and children,

his prosperity, and Esau acquiesced.

For one impossible moment Jacob reached out.

To see your face, he said, is like seeing

the face of God: brother, it is so good!

But when Esau replied, let us journey together

from this day forward as we have never done

and I will proceed at your pace, Jacob demurred.

The children are frail, and the flocks:

you go on ahead, he said, and I will follow

but he did not follow.

Once Esau headed out toward Seir

Jacob went the other way, to Shechem, where

his sons would slaughter an entire village.

And again the possibility

of inhabiting a different kind of story

vanished into the unforgiving air.

"Maximus" by D.H. Lawrence

God is older that the sun and moon

and the eye cannot behold him

nor voice describe him.

But a naked man, a stranger, leaned on the gate

with his cloak over his arm, waiting to be asked in.

So I called him: Come in, if you will!

He came in slowly, and sat down by the hearth.

I said to him: And what is your name?

He looked at me without answer, but such a loveliness

entered me, I smiled to myself, saying: He is God!

So he said: Hermes!

God is older than the sun and moon

and the eye cannot behold him

nor the voice describe him:

and still, this is the God Hermes, sitting by my hearth.

… At first, the narrative voice of the text (verse 25) simply calls him ish - a man. However Jacob refers to him as (the) Lord (verse31). In verse 29, the stranger may be referring to himself as both divine and as human when he says to Jacob, ‘you have striven (competed) with divine and with human.’ In other words, instead of seeing this verse as a reference to separate struggles with divine forces and human adversaries in separate unidentified episodes, it is likely - given the two variant descriptions surrounding this verse- that the stranger is at once identifying himself as both divine and human.

Wrestling Jacob, Klitsner pg. 124

…The process of Adam becoming whole is achieved at the cost of his “tzela”. The price Jacob pays for his bifurcation and wrestling with self at Jakob - the injury that will make him whole in the sense of achieving integrity - is his limping away, (tzolea) from the encounter. Wrestling Jacob, Klitsner, Pg 117

In short, there is strong linguistic and contextual support for an unconventional understanding of the outcome of the struggle and the subsequent blessing as empowerment. One might indeed translate or interpret the end of verse 29: “you have struggled with that which is divine and and that which is human and you are enabled.”

The distinction between victory and empowerment is of critical importance. It is difficult to support a reading of “victory” as the struggle seems very clearly to continue, just as the change of name is not final and irrevocable. Jacob continues to be called Jacob as well as Yisrael even after the divine confrontation of the name change in chapter 35. Moreover, in subsequent episodes in Jacob’s life, he does seem to behave in a decidedly “Jacoby” manner. This understanding of the change of name as an evolving identity that does not discard the previous name of identity is essential to a nuanced psychological understanding of the transition at Jabok.

Wrestling Jacob, Klitsner, pg 130-131

In this reading, the angel has come for no hostile purpose but “to save and rescue him.” This angel is called Israel, perhaps because that is the purpose of his mission, to show Jacob, in a therapeutic encounter, how to become Israel. Since angels are named for their mission, this may be the reason for thee angel’s response to Jacob’s question (”What is you name?”) - “Why do you ask my name?” Jacob already knows in himself the purpose of the angel’s coming, for, essentially, he is facing himself, the desire-fear necessity of a new name. He has summoned the angel to save him from the condition of being Jacob.

from Aviva Zornberg, The Beginnings of Desire. pgs 234-235

Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Who, if I cried out, would hear see among the angels’

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed see

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumer

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note

of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to

in our need? Not angels, not humans,

and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in

our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us

some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take

into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street

and the loyalty for a habit so much at ease

when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for - that longed-after,

middle disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart

so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?

But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

Don’t you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms

into the spaces we breathe: perhaps the birds

will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

A Woman and Her Shadow, by Elana Klugman

as with Jacob

who became Yisrael

that is to say all of us,

falling back sometimes

into his old name

like a story that

asks for more,

something forgotten, unseen

waking us up from illness,

a fall, an exile,

a call from the weeping

fields filled with the smoke

of guns and the wasted

bodies of perfect children -

a call to cross the river alone,

even as I want to flee

from what I know

I must face.

She arrives in the night

in my dream where

I can’t hide, cranky and insistent

face to face, panim l’panim

and still all I can do is resist

even though I long to let go.

She is like a pregnancy turned

inside out here on the

wrong side of the river

and I am every mother, holding

on. And so it is

that finally there is nothing to do

but surrender to the body’s

collective wisdom

to push, push and release

into the breaking dawn

and the gifts of a new name

that is the many in one,

a map for when I am lost,

a blessing for when I forget

who I am, who we are -

a leaf on the tree, a filament

of light, a singular voice

in the vast singing

in this land

I once fled and now

calls me home.

https://elanaklugman.com/a-woman-and-her-shadow/