by Rabbi Darren Kleinberg
He said, "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and men and you have overcome" (Genesis 32:29).
Mark Twain is often attributed with the phrase, "I am not an American, I am the American." This has been taken to mean that Twain, in his life, truly embodied what it meant to be an American. In a sense, Twain is the archetypical American.
The biblical character of Jacob is just that, too - an archetype of what it means to be a Jew. He was the Jew.
In this week's parsha, the Torah explains to us just what it means to be a Jew.
In the second half of Genesis, Chapter 32, we read of the story of Jacob wrestling with another man. After a closer look, the reader becomes aware that Jacob is, in fact, wrestling with himself.
In the course of the story, we are told that Jacob will inherit a new name - a new identity: Israel.The name is meant to describe the essential characteristic of that which Jacob/Israel represents - the Jewish people. And so we are told that that characteristic is that Jacob has struggled both with God and man.
It is this aspect - that of the struggle - of Jacob's life that makes him most worthy of being the progenitor of 12 sons who ultimately represent the entire Jewish people.
The forces that constantly pull on us to settle for simple answers and truths with an uppercase "T" are numerous and beset us on all sides.
The pull of a secularism that denies the challenge of confronting those moments in life that are truly transrational - birth, death, tragedy, joy - is powerful indeed. On the other side, there is the pull of a type of religiosity that says that all is explicable within categories of "permitted," "prohibited," "pure" and "impure."
The name that Jacob takes on, and the name that ultimately connects us all, is one that challenges us not to accept easy answers. Rather, it commands us from history to contend with the tough questions in life and to struggle with them.
But it is not only the struggle that we learn about but also the outcome of that struggle.
When the verse tells us that Jacob "has overcome," it means not that he has found answers, but that the very struggle itself is the act of overcoming. To truly inhabit the liminal spaces in life is the only real victory we can ever achieve.
To rework a famous saying: God is not in the details, but rather in the nuances. It is only in the struggle that we can actually sense the divine. And so the Torah states that Jacob recognizes that, in his struggle, he is encountering God: "For I have seen the Divine face" (32:31).And so, as Abraham Joshua Heschel has taught us: "The reason graven images are forbidden by the Torah is not that God has no image but because God has just one image: that of every living breathing human being. You may not fashion an image of God in any medium other than that of your entire life - that is the message of the Torah" (Art Green, "Seek my Face").
Only when we are truly ourselves are we truly a representation of the divine. And so, when we are able to see ourselves with true clarity - to see through the looking glass - and realize that we are complex beings with complex emotions and ideas, it is then that we can see the divine. Not outside of us, but within us and within each other.
Ultimately, in confronting himself, Jacob confronts God.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Friday, December 9, 2005
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