I am tempted to end here and leave Jacob with this moment of triumph, but I would be remiss if I did not note that next week’s parashah tells of Jacob’s struggle with an angel and subsequent renaming. Jacob, now Israel, discovers that even a stable sense of self is subject to change and that the work of becoming who we are is always a work in progress. Having successfully become Jacob, God sees that he is ready to become Israel. Having found himself, Jacob is called to found a nation. Jacob’s story is a reminder to us to not only recognize our successes, but also celebrate the new challenges that arise from those successes. The reward for a job well done, after all, is another job. May we merit success in the works of our lives and use those achievements to inspire us to even greater heights.
Parker Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring “Active Life as Blessing and Curse,” pages 9-11
…But for me, and for many people that I know, these ordinary activities [work, creativity, caring] contain an extraordinary mix of blessing and curse. The blessing is obvious, especially when we lose the chance or the capacity to do these ordinary things: the active life makes it possible for us to discover ourselves and our world, to rest and extend our powers, to connect with other beings, to co-create a common reality. The joys of action are known to everyone who has done a job well, made something of beauty, given time and energy to a just cause. Take away the opportunity to work, to create, or to care – as our society does to too many people – and you have deprived someone of a chance to feel fully human.
…But the active life also carries a curse. Many of us know what it is to live lives not of action but of frenzy, to go from day to day exhausted and unfulfilled by our attempts to work, create, and care. Many of us know the violence of active life, a violence we sometimes inflict on ourselves and sometimes inflict on our world. In action, we project our spirits outside ourselves. Sometimes we project shadows which do damage to others, and sometimes we project light that others want to extinguish. Action poses some of our deepest spiritual crises as well as some of our most heartfelt joys.
We see towards the end of the creation story, God says “it is not good for man to be alone.” What does this statement of “not good” mean? The Gemara in Yevamot (62b- 63a) gives two different ideas. One is that “not good”, means that a person has no joy or happiness in life if they are alone (ie. not married). The other idea brought is that it is just difficult physically to be alone. There is a lot to do in the world, and there is no way to actually accomplish EVERYTHING without some help, be that from a partner, friends or family. It is Seforno, a 15th Century Italian Biblical commentator, who teaches that if we only had time or energy to devote to ourselves, we would not be able to live up to “being in His likeness and image.” That somehow, even though God in alone in the “upper world”, in order for us in the “lower world” to maintain that holiness, we need to be with others. Not only do we need other people to help us, but we need to be helping others so that they too can achieve goodness.