Genesis Cycle Four Vayetze

Vayetze

Vayetze

There’s a place where I go to sit and meditate. If you know Ashland Oregon you head down Granite street from town. You keep going. The pavement veers left but you stay straight. Soon, you reach a place called the fairy ponds, small waterfalls feeding into deep snow-melt pools rushing past rocks like liquid muscle. In the fall there are yellow leaves three times the size of my hand. There’s usually five or six visitors at a time…a crowd for the parks in Oregon. I keep driving and park at a large opening called The Quarry.

The Quarry is a place where you dig up rocks. Some as tall as a ladder. Some so solid and smooth they could be my skin. People have dumped stuff there as well. It’s a big open space though and it’s nice to see the sun and get out of the trees. I walk around a fence, hike past blackberry bushes dormant or flowering or in full fruit, up a hill about twenty minutes and past the quarry around a pond.

At the far end, this is where I sit. Since this is a clearing I see north south east and west. Since this is a hill, I don’t see the quarry itself but the higher hills, the masses of pine trees, fog laying in the crevices. In winter it’s stone quiet, snow hitting my eyes like bleach, stars in the snow. In fall it can be the one place in Ashland with sun. In summer it’s hot. In spring frogs appear in the pond dry six months previous.

This place attracts the homeless, people on the run. Ten minutes up the trail you might find a few tents. Being homeless is not taboo in Ashland. They hang out at coffee shops during the day, play chess. They protest sometimes. It gets front page news. One winter day, years ago my four kids and I went to the Co-op and lugged three bags of groceries to them. They were happy.

In any case, this is the place where I remember. If you look down from the pond and squint a bit you see the world rushing, yourself in the rush and on the run, loved ones, dead ones, angels and beings, homeless or with home. If you look up you see the sky.

Jacob one day is between homes and he looks up and suddenly sees more than the sky. God was in this place, he says and I, I didn’t know it. Many rabbis have commented on this statement. My favorite comes from Tiferet Shelomah (by Solomon Rabinowich) a mystical writing from Poland mid 19^th century. There we read…in reference to the repetition of the word “I”…I have obliterated everything that was in me, my sense of self-awareness, any consciousness of ego, any trace of self intention. Everything was now only for the sake of the holy name itself, for the sake of unifying the holiness within all being and its presence.

Not to go on a tangent but an acquaintance of mine who teaches movement once asked: Why do some Jews call themselves JuBus. Or you know, a mix of Jewish and Buddhist? These two religions seem to me to have nothing in common. At that time I laughed. Next time I see her I’ll show her that quote.

If you think though, Jewish or Buddhist, this is not an easy place to get to, this place of self-annihilation. But Jacob does it. And it’s in Torah. So I figure it might be a good idea to follow a few of his steps along the way.

This is the first step. First, he’s on the run. On the run from his brother, heading to Charon, the land that his grandfather Abraham was told to let-go-of to explore inward. The land where people place themselves above sacred energy, where they focus on the appearance of things, the land of drought. Jacob now has to let-go of his home, Beer Sheva…literally well of seven….named by his father Isaac when re-digging family wells plugged up by the Philistines. This motion seems to be a continual process. You gain something and then you…or your son… loses it. You gain then lose again. You rise and fall. You rise and have to struggle to earn your having risen. This is Jacob’s situation. When you run though you gage your experience by how far you get, where you hide, how you meld with your surroundings to survive, how to take-on nature, roll with it, let it move inside of you, support you, speak to you. When we’re on the run, escaping anything, there’s a rhythm and a mind-set, a need to be in the physical realm, to camouflage ourselves in the natural tapestry. Your eyes are sharp, your senses as open as the stream you drink from. Your human form is there with water earth fire and air. You move through all forms carefully, heart beating. You become them. They become you.

I think of sculptures by Rodin I saw at a museum in San Francisco. Sometimes a foot is not defined. It’s in the earth. Or a hand is sort of half-there as it melds onto the seamless black thigh of a lover. This is a beautiful merge.

Sometimes it’s not so beautiful though. That means you have to move through other elements as you run, man-created asphalt and metal, smoke filled offices, exit visas. This is what happened to Ilse Davidsohn. Born in Germany, her father Magnus Davidsohn was a respected Chazzan. Early on, before Krystalnacht, she was freeing victims in concentration camps. In all more than a hundred. She did this by obtaining papers from an acquaintance…a Nazi… who she had known at drama school. This way, by moving through officers and secretaries and forgerers and lawyers, this kind of human muscle, she helped others in the act of running. Then she herself ran. But not without fearing for her life.

Jacob also fears for his life. His brother Esau has sworn to kill him. It seems after all, that Jacob stole their father’s blessing from him. Given much talk for centuries though you don’t really know what happened. You get conversation after conversation by wise men of Talmud….our ancestors…the voices in the air we breathe. And they say that Esau wants to kill Jacob and that Esau is a piece of darkness.

How though do we merge this death threat (this darkness) with the clear and exquisite blessing of Isaac?

Let’s look at the blessing. It’s in Gen 27:28…Here Isaac says to Jacob…may God give you of the dew of the heaven and the fat of the land…. The Sfat Emet, a 19^th century mystic points out that this line is interpreted by midrash as…may God give you godliness. The real intent (according to the Sfat Emet) is that the Jew receive godliness from everything that exists in the world.

Now if we look at another one of our sacred teachings…at the final Mishnah of Berakhot…9:5… we read that one is obliged to bless for the evil.

Not too surprising I guess. After all the same blessed river that might overflow and destroy your house keeps the salmon swimming and nurtures the fields. A blessing transmits to radiance. A blessing transmits to darkness. You find both wherever you go. We are obliged to take responsibility for this and bless both…though it might be hard to do. And this to me means that we need to accept both with a certain sense of equanimity…to strengthen the necessary merge.

Therefore Jacob’s act of running with fresh blessing brings a death-threat…in his mind…face to face with the holy radiance. His mind has expanded before he even arrives at the place in question. So once again we’re talking about seeing beyond the sky. And for Jacob this is the first step. He not only accepts in his heart that godliness can and must embrace both darkness and light. He doesn’t fool himself in either direction. He feels the merge even if in an undefined kind of way.

Therefore the next step for Jacob…step number two… has to do with balance and alchemy, bringing this intimate yet amorphous knowledge to the here and now in a safe contained way. Let’s not forget that Jacob is in nature. No Mom and Pop motels in this distant place. And it’s far from any yeshiva where he may have been studying along the way. So he has alighted upon a place with only earth water fire and air...a big change for him. And he’s wise to stop as the sun is setting. Think of how we move through life. We often continue on without stopping for a moment or even to sleep. The fact that he stops to rest and it’s written in Torah (when not every moment is) means we are to experience this with him. And I don’t mind. You have to pause and know your position in this universe to check-in…to get a clear perspective external and internal. If you’re on Mt McKinley for example and look north you’ll see something different then if you look north from Mt Shasta. And I don’t want to lose my way simply because I don’t know the mountain I’m standing on.

Step two therefore is a big step. It shows us how Jacob is adapting to the reality of the natural environment. And Jacob doesn’t come across as the boy scout type…more the intellectual.

Let’s look at how he relates to earth first. First of all there are a lot of babies born in this parsha. Twelve in all to Leah and Rachel and their servants. And if you look at Native American myth as well as Greek and certainly within kabbalah the woman is the power of the earth. So Jacob is certainly about to experience earth big time. Right at the beginning of the parsha the repetition of the word makom or place and the use of the word shaim or there points us to a grounded center within the words. Mind you, it’s not the earth we might imagine. Between Beer sheva and Charan is desert. My guess is there’s shrubs but no trees. And there are hills of red-sand sometimes even purple. Not much like Ashland, that’s for sure. What’s clear though is that Jacob has internalized earth enough to choose a place on it, one where he can sleep and dream. This takes more than logic… like deciding where to put the bed… it takes self-intimacy. And look at the rock he places by his head. Rabbi Isaac of Talmud says that all stones gathered themselves and merged into one. Well, as far as I know, if all stones merged into one then not only is Jacob internalizing earth but earth is coalescing and approaching Jacob.

We’re still in step two by the way but now let’s look at water. How does Jacob learn to embrace and deal with the energy of water? Well this is my take on it. It’s my own Torah interpretation gleaned from others that I’m sure I just haven’t yet found. If Jacob is sleeping with a stone by his head…which he places on purpose… then where is the next place we hear mention of a stone…a new one? On this well. When he meets his future love, Rachel. So Jacob is equated to the well by means of two stones which by the way form one as we’ve just learned. Jacob therefore is the water in the well. And he learns how to place the stone there and to pick it up, roll it on and roll it off. In other words he learns how to guard his personal purification. This is simple stone and water logic.

We’re still in step two but now let’s look at air. How does Jacob learn to move with air-energy? Well, dreams are clearly made of air. We can’t hold them, touch them, smell or taste them. Jacob’s dream is this. And here is a ladder that is standing netzavim on the ground reaching towards heaven. And here are God’s angels going up and down it. And here’s God who is also netzav standing . What happens next? God repeats the covenant. What covenant? Well a covenant is more than a promise. It’s a gut-vow like you make when you get married. It’s actually something God says a lot in Torah to the patriarchs but each time it’s slightly tempered for the one listening and the situation. Sort of like a piece of music. You can pick up a tune on the banjo but you know what? You’ll never play it twice the same way. You just won’t. Depends where you are and whose listening. This time God says the land will be Jacobs. There will be as many descendants as dust on the earth. We don’t have anything about the stars in the sky so I guess that was for Abraham. But God does say I am with you. I will bring you back to this soil. And that’s what Jacob needs to hear.

In the world of dreams we never know what’s real. Richard Brautigan, author of Trout Fishing in America, says it’s real if you think it is. That’s one way to look at it. In a film I saw recently a protagonist has sleeping dreams that start protruding into waking life. The way Jacob deals with his dream is to embrace it like he must embrace air to breathe. This is important. If air is real then dreams are real.

Let’s look at the ladder in Jacob’s dream. A sage once said that the width is 8,000 parsangs. I can’t tell you how big a parsang is but it sounds like a lot. It reminds me of some of Rabbi Akiva’s descriptions of God if you might make Him into human. The arms length is thousands of parsangs for example. To push this a bit further, the same verb for to stand is used for both God and the ladder. Netzavim. So we could argue that the ladder is a part of God. And we could also remember that a ladder, if you look at one real well, has a lot of space between those rungs. You learn this real quick when you’re washing windows on a three story house. In fact, if you think about it, there’s more space between the rungs then there is solid matter. This makes a ladder a way to go up but sort of dangerous. You think it’s a material thing but it’s mostly the white space in between. This is the way I see Torah. Mostly white space. Infinite white space. And that infinite white space of the ladder gets infused into Jacob’s consciousness.

A bit more on air. In Talmud we read that (in Jacob’s dream) God is like a man who is fanning his son…to protect him. He’s moving the air around him, keeping it in flow.

Finally, let’s look at fire. In Talmud we read that this spot…this place… is where Abraham was sent to sacrifice Isaac and where the First Temple was built. If this is true then we don’t need to go far to see the sacred flames. Jacob calls upon fire when he erects an altar from the stone by his head.

Right after the dream… Jacob says God was in this place but I, I didn’t know it. Then he erects that altar from the stone and in this way merges fire of sacrifice to the stone of the earth to the water beneath the stone to air of his dream. And all of this is now within him. In this way he manifests the merge of all four elements, shows his inner growth. In the future, this understanding will enable him to embrace at a deep spiritual level of God’s creation…including sheep…and from this understanding he will profit greatly. But you get the feeling that it doesn’t help him recover from Rachel’s death. She died on me, he says. He says it twice.

As for this place where I sit, one day in summer this man was walking by. Carefree. Old clothes. No doubt. Homeless.

“Hi” he said.

He woke me up.

“Hi”.

“It’s so nice to see someone go inward.”

“Thank you.”

“My name is Magic.”

Magic was the name of my late husband’s theater.

“Great name.”

“Can you help me change this band-aid?”

I stood up. He showed me. It was on his back. I changed it for him. He thanked me and continued down the hill. A few days later on my husband’s yartzeit I found this little model castle there, the size of my hand, the kind you might find in fantasy shops. Dream like. Fantastical. I decided it was a gift from Magic or maybe through Magic. It was made of metal, something that could pass through fire, and solid to bring together all the elements, to even merge directions of space and time. One day, like Jacob, I might see beyond the sky. If you focus long enough on anything, no doubt, your soul recycles itself with that new vision.

That day, I went back down the hill and into my car, leaving the angels and beings in the setting sun, drove back into town where people had long since eaten dinner, where the festival plays were in full swing, where there’s color and people on the run and infinite space to allow the merging of all things and the kiss of the covenant to be felt on my heart. I held this little castle in my hand because I like pondering on the inter-connections within nature and beyond. One thing I was beginning to see… one day..in this life or the next… I might become that pause and see a great infinite beauty. And know what it is to not know but one thing: That God is Home.