Vayishlach

Our Parsha today is one of the most significant in all of Torah. THE STORY OF JACOB’S WRESTLING MATCH WITH AN UNNAMED ADVERSARY ALONE AT NIGHT is surely one of the most dramatic of events. With whom was Jacob wrestling? The text itself calls him “a man.” According to the prophet Hosea, it was an angel. For the sages, it was the guardian angel of Esau. Jacob himself had no doubt. It was G-d. He called the place of the encounter Peniel, “because I saw G-d face to face, and yet my life was spared.” The adversary himself implies as much when he gives Jacob the name Israel, “because you have struggled with G-d and with man and have overcome.”

The passage resists easy interpretation, yet it holds the key to understanding Jewish identity. It is not we, the readers, who give it this significance but the Torah itself. For it was then, as dawn was about to break, that Jacob acquired the name that his descendants would bear throughout eternity. The people of the covenant are not the children of Abraham or Isaac but “the children of Israel.”

I discovered a very enlightening thing about this parsha when I studied a teaching from Rabbi Jonathon Sachs (Chief Rabbi of London). According to him, one thing stands out about the first phase in Jacob’s life. He longs to be Esau – more specifically, he desires to occupy Esau’s place. He struggles with him in the womb. He is born holding on to Esau’s heel (this is what gives him the name Jacob , “heel-grasper”). He buys Esau’s birthright. He dresses in Esau’s clothes. He takes Esau’s blessing. When the blind Isaac asks him who he is, he replies, “I am Esau, your firstborn.”

Why? The answer seems clear. Esau is everything Jacob is not. He is the firstborn. He emerges from the womb red and covered in hair (Esau means “fully made”). He is strong, full of energy, a skilled hunter, “a man of the fields.” More importantly, he has his father’s love. Esau is homo naturalis , a man of nature. He knows that homo homini lupus est , “man is wolf to man.” He has the strength and skill to fight and win in the Darwinian struggle to survive and the Hobbesian war of “all against all.” These are his natural battle-grounds and he relishes the contest.

Esau is the archetypal hero of a hundred myths and legends of the ancient world (and of action movies today). He is not without dignity, nor does he lack human feelings. His love for his father Isaac is genuine and touching. The midrash, for sound educational reasons, turned Esau into a bad man. The Torah itself is altogether more subtle and profound. Esau is not a bad man; he is a natural man.

It is not surprising that Jacob’s first desire was to be like him. That is the face he first saw in the mirror of his imagination, the face he presented to the blind Isaac when he came to take the blessing. But the face was not the face of Jacob , any more than were the hands.

Nor was the blessing he took the one that was destined for him. The true blessing was the one he received later when Isaac knew he was blessing Jacob , not thinking him to be Esau.

Jacob’s blessing had nothing to do with wealth or power. It had to do with children and a land – children he would instruct in the ways of the covenant and a land in which his descendants would strive to construct a covenantal society based on justice and compassion, law and love. To receive that blessing Jacob did not have to dress in Esau’s clothes. Instead he had to be himself, not a man of nature but a person whose ears were attuned to a voice beyond nature, the call of the Author of all to be true to that which cannot be bought by wealth or controlled by power, namely, the human spirit as the breath of G-d and human dignity as the image of G-d.

It should now be clear exactly what Jacob was doing when he met Esau twenty-two years later. He was giving back the blessing he had taken all those years before . The herds and flocks he sent to Esau represented wealth (“the dew of heaven and the richness of the earth”). The sevenfold bowing and calling himself “your servant” and Esau “my lord” represented power (“Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you”). Jacob no longer wanted or needed these things (“I have everything” – meaning, “I no longer need either wealth or power to be complete”). He is explicit. He says, “Please take (not just “my gift” but also) “my blessing.” He now knows the blessing he took from Esau was never meant for him, and he is returning it.

It is equally clear what was transacted in the wrestling match the previous night. It was Jacob’s inner battle with existential truth. Who was he? The man who longed to be Esau? Or the man called to a different destiny? “I will not let you go until you bless me,” he says to his adversary. The unnamed stranger responds in a way that defies expectation. He does not give Jacob a conventional blessing (You will be rich, or strong, or safe). Nor does he promise Jacob a life free of conflict. The name Jacob signified struggle; the name Israel also signified struggle. But the terms of the conflict have been reversed.

It is as if the man said to him, “In the past, you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau’s heel. In the future you will hold on to God. You will not let go of Him; He will not let go of You. Now let go of Esau so that you can be free to hold on to God.”

The next day, Jacob did so. He let go of Esau by giving him back his blessing. And though Jacob had now renounced both wealth and power, and though he still limped from encounter the night before, the passage ends with the words, Vayavo Yaakov shalem , “And Jacob emerged complete.” That is the stunning truth at which Jacob finally arrived, and to which the name Israel is testimony. To be complete we do not need Esau’s blessings of wealth and power. Ours is another face, an alternative destiny, a different blessing. The face we bear is the image we see reflected in the face of God when we wrestle with Him and refuse to let go.

Not by accident was this episode the birth of our identity as Israel. At almost every significant juncture in our history we have wrestled with civilizations who worshipped the gods of nature, wealth or power . Israel never knew the wealth of ancient Greece or Rome, Renaissance Italy or aristocratic France. It never knew the power of great empires, their invincible armies and weapons of destruction. When it longed for these things (as in the days of Solomon) it lost its way.
Israel’s strength never lay in itself but in that which was other and greater than itself: the power that transcends all earthly powers, and the wealth that is not physical but spiritual, a matter of mind and heart. Jews have often wished to be someone else, the Esaus of the age.

That is a feeling we must ultimately reject. The Torah does not ask us to think badly of Esau. On the contrary, it commands us: “Do not hate an Edomite [ie, a descendant of Esau], for he is your brother.” It did however ask us to wrestle, as did Jacob, alone, at night, in the depths of our soul, and discover the face, the name and the blessing that is ours. Before Jacob could be at peace with Esau he had to learn that he was not Esau but Israel – he who wrestles with God and never lets go.

Shabbat Shalom.