Parsha Vayetzei - Delivered 9 Kislev 5779/November 11, 2018 at Congregation Netivot Shalom, in Berkeley, California
Vayetzi is bookended by Jacob’s encounters with G!d’s malachim, G!d’s messenger angels. The two stories have significant parallels, but differ in the nature of the encounter. At the beginning of the parsha, Jacob flees Beersheva to go to Haran, and stops to sleep. And in his dream, he sees a ladder with angels ascending and descending, and hears G!d’s voice. He is frightened, and he names the place Bethel, House of G!d.
I always thought the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder was phenomenally boring. Nearly up there with the census lists. Oh, there’s a dream, and a ladder, and some angels climbing the ladder. Big deal. And also a toy named after it, for unknown reasons. But when I dug into the commentaries on these two moments in the parsha, I realized that they’re fascinating moments in the Torah. And furthermore, despite their obvious parallels, they are radically different encounters with the divine.
So, let’s start at that first encounter. If you want to follow along, this is on page 166 in the Etz Chaim Chumash, although I will be reading Uri Alter’s translation. 1
And Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. And he came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set, and he took one of the stones of the place and put it at his head and lay down in that place, and he dreamed, and, look, a ramp was set against the ground with its top reaching the heavens, and, look, messengers of G!d were going up and coming down it. And, look, the Lord was poised over him and He said, “I, the Lord, am the G!d of Abraham your father and the G!d of Isaac. The land on which you lie, to you I will give it and to your seed. And your seed shall be like the dust of the earth and you shall burst forth to the west and the east and the north and the south, and all the clans of the earth shall be blessed through you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done that which I have spoke to you.” And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Indeed, the Lord is in this place, and I did not know.” And he was afraid and he said, “How fearsome is this place! This can be but the house of G!d, and this is the gate of the heavens. And Jacob arose early in the morning and took the stone he had put at his head, and he set it as a pillar and poured oil over its top. And he called the name of that place Bethel” Rabbi Jordan Schuster writes that Jacob seems not so interested in the heavens that lie at the top of the ladder, but rather “what seems to compel Jacob most is the sheer fact that such a ladder exists, binding the aching complexity of this world to the starlit transcendence of a world beyond.” 2
What is it about this ladder that is so awesome and frightening? What causes Jacob to say that this place is the house of G!d? When we look at commentaries about the ladder, what we find is that it is truly an amazing.
In preparing for this drash, I discovered what is, possibly, one of my favorite pieces of Talmud. In tractate Chullin, the rabbis wonder how big the ladder in Jacob’s dream was. Well, they say, it says angels plural ascending, and plural descending, so that must mean there are two going up, and two going down. Obviously, then, the ladder must be wide enough for all four to pass each other.
Then how wide is an angel? Are they human sized? After all, Abraham fit the malachim in his tent, to feed them. The rabbis cite Daniel “And it is written with regard to an angel: ‘His body was like Tarshish’”3. How big is Tarshish, I wondered? And so did the Rabbis. “And it is learned as a tradition that the city of Tarshish was two thousand parsaot” they answer4. So the ladder must be 8000 parsaot wide, they conclude.
Well, that begs the question of what and how big a parasaot or parasang is. So I did some research, and discovered that a parasah is an ancient unit of distance, used across the middle east in antiquity. One Persian text defines a parasang as the distance at which one cannot tell if a beast of burden is black or white5. Rabbah bar bar Hana says elsewhere in the Talmud that a parasah is 1/10th the distance a human can walk in a day6. Depending on the source, a parasang turns out to be from 3.9-5.9 km. Which means, if you do the math, that an angel ranges in size from about two times the diameter of the planet Mercury to about the diameter of the planet Earth. And thus, the width of the ladder is approximately 1/10th the distance from the Earth to the Moon.7
Stop and take a moment to imagine this. The angels are the size of planets. The ladder so big it could only be a tangent to the earth. A truly celestial scale.
How did Jacob see the ladder? Did he view it from the ground, human size? It would fill the whole sky. Did he view it from far away, from space? What was his conceptions of the heavens? How could he wrap his mind around such a huge ladder? I can’t truly picture a ladder that big in my mind’s eye.
How, then, could he wake up feeling anything other than scared, feeling so tiny and insignificant that an angel could step on him and not notice. That moment of seeing the transcendent divine, the size of G!d’s power in the universe.
Yet, Rashi has another understanding of the ladder. In his explanation of the line “This can be but the house of G!d”, he teaches, based on a teaching of R. Eleazar said in the name of R. José the son of Zimra, in Genesis Rabbah, “a ladder whose foot is in Beersheba and whose top is in Bethel has the middle of its slope reaching opposite Jerusalem.”8 The ladder stretches not from Bethel to the heavens, but instead, from Jacob’s past, from his family in Beersheva, to Bethel, where the Temple will be one day.
He also writes that the angels going up are the angels who protected Jacob in the land of Israel, departing from him, and the arriving angels are different ones who will protect him outside of Israel. 9
And then, at the very end of the parsha, after marrying to two wives and two concubines, after the births of Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, and Dinah and Joseph, after trickery and jealousy and infertility and 20 years of hard work and significant increases in wealth, Jacob encounters angels again, in a story with many parallels. Jacob and his circus of a family are on the road. They have taken leave from Lavan. Again, Jacob encounters angels, and again, he names the place after the encounter. This time, he names the place Machanaim, or two camps.
This time, Jacob is awake. This time, the angels appear as humans.
Jacob went on his way, and angels of God encountered him. When he saw them, Jacob said, ‘This is God’s camp.’ So he named that place Mahanaim.10 This only gets interesting when we look a the first line of next week’s parsha next to it.
Jacob sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau in the land of Seir, the country of Edom, to tell Esau the abbreviated story of his journey, and to ask for Esau’s favor.
But look what happens when we look at the Hebrew.
וְיַעֲקֹ֖ב הָלַ֣ךְ לְדַרְכּ֑וֹ וַיִּפְגְּעוּ־ב֖וֹ מַלְאֲכֵ֥י אֱלֹהִֽים׃ וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יַעֲקֹב֙ כַּאֲשֶׁ֣ר רָאָ֔ם מַחֲנֵ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים זֶ֑ה וַיִּקְרָ֛א שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא מַֽחֲנָֽיִם׃ וַיִּשְׁלַ֨ח יַעֲקֹ֤ב מַלְאָכִים֙ לְפָנָ֔יו אֶל־עֵשָׂ֖ו אָחִ֑יו אַ֥רְצָה שֵׂעִ֖יר שְׂדֵ֥ה אֱדֽוֹם׃ Jacob went on his way, and messengers of G!d encountered him. When he saw them, Jacob said, This is G!d’s camp, so he named that place two camps. Jacob sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau.
Are these the same messengers? Rashi writes that they were the angels of G!d assigned to protect him in Israel, even though he has not yet reached Israel, and indeed, that the messengers Jacob sends to his brother are also angels11. The Or HaChaim makes clear in his commentary that Jacob is sending the same messenger angels that he just met as his messengers to Esau12. So, this is a moment of deeply personal connection with the divine.
Jacob’s first encounter with the messenger angels is a moment of transcendence, of yirah (fear/awe), of recognizing his own smallness in the universe. After the dream, he makes a conditional vow to G!d: IF G!d protects me, IF G!d is with me, IF I return safely, IF G!d does all the things G!d just promised to do for me, only then will G!d be my G!d. It’s as if, having recognized his own smallness, Jacob can’t trust that such a huge G!d can really care about him personally.
The second encounter is different. It’s personal, it’s intimate. Jacob can see what’s happening without the need for dreams as an intermediary. There’s no missing the personal care from G!d, who sends G!d’s messengers to be Jacob’s messengers. Maybe, after 20 years in Lavan’s house of deceitfulness, Jacob has learned to open his eyes more, to see under the surface of things for a hidden truth.
Or maybe, this ebb and flow, sometimes experiencing the divine as huge and transcendent, sometimes as intimate and personally caring, is a part of life. Perhaps the message is that both of these types of encounter with the divine are an important part of a healthy spiritual life.
How do we open our eyes, to see both the transcendent, how small we are, and the personal, that G!d cares about us, that, in the words of Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Pzhysha, it is true both that ‘For my sake was the world created,’ also that ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ 13
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses “Genesis Chapter 28:10-19.” W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. ↩
Schuster, Rabbi Jordan. Vertical Ladders of Sky, Horizontal Ladders of Earth. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/seventyfacesoftorah/2018/11/vertical-ladders-of-sky-horizontal-ladders-of-earth/. Published Nov. 14, 2018. ↩
Chullin 91b, Talmud Bavli. Translation from Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, in the The William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud. 2018. ↩
Chullin 91b. ↩
The Bundahishn, a Zorastrian text from the 9th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasang cites Henning, Walter Bruno (1942b), “An astronomical chapter of the Bundahishn”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3: 229–248, doi:10.2307/i25221861 ↩
Pesachim 93b, Talmud Bavli. Steinsaltz translation from the William Davidson edition. ↩
Estimates of a parasang range from about 3.9 km (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasang citing Mason, Kenneth (1920), “Notes on the Canal System and Ancient Sites of Babylonia in the Time of Xenophon”, The Geographical Journal, 56 (6): 468–481, doi:10.2307/1780469, JSTOR 1780469.) to 6 km (“parasang, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, July 2018. Web. 25 November 2018.). If we take the distance to be 3.9 km, then an angel would be 7800 km wide, and the ladder would be 31,200 km across. Were a parasang to be 6 km, then the angel would be 12,000 km wide, and the ladder would be 48,000 km. The diameter of the planet Mercury is 4,878 km, or a bit under half of our smallest angel-width calculation. The diameter of the planet Earth is 12,755 km, or just a tad wider than our largest ange-width calculation. The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 385,000 km. 1/10th of this distance, then is 38,500 km, smack in the middle of our smallest and largest estimates of the width of the ladder. ↩
Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 28:17 ↩
Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 28:12 ↩
1985 JPS translation of Genesis 32:2-4. ↩
Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 32:2. ↩
Or HaChaim’s commentary on Genesis 32:4. ↩
Buber, Martin (1948). Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters. Schocken Books. pp. 249–250. ↩