Genesis Cycle Five Vayishlach

 Vayishlach

Sacred Dancing

Life is a dance of coming-to-meet.  Think of your girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, your husband or wife.  We part  to work and join in the evening.  Think  of the inner realms of  shared knowledge,  whether it be of body or mind. Think of a mother nursing her baby. Then the pulling away. 

There’s a rhythm and flow to our connections with those we love, a touching and separating, an intimacy and a distance. There’s a great beauty to it, there with its pain and struggle. Yes even the pain is beautiful.  As John Cage, the percussionist, has said,  if you don’t think something is beautiful you may want to look for reasons it isn’t.  Then if you can’t find a reason you just need to see the beauty.

 

 Why should the pain of struggle not be beautiful if it is leading to the joining? That very pulling away is the essence of birth.  Independence. Freedom.   Breath. Think of Song of Songs, Psalms, the Zohar,  the Prophets.  Think of the whole glorious package of our sacred writings. Whether  man is yearning  for God or for his mate,  two lovers  are almost meeting, always in the almost, always in the struggle.

 Think of yourself personally. We can touch one leaf on the path but very few of us can touch all there is to touch at once, the whole expanse. There are vibrations of touching.   In fact, we read in Tanya that the farther we are from the God-radiance the closer we are to the evil. But even there in Tanya the Alter Rebbe makes it quite clear that no matter how far we have slipped into our animal soul,  we can follow the light back towards the divine soul and move towards that final merge.

This pulsing of back and forth, in and out, closer and farther…this is not relegated to Judaism alone.

 The mystic William Blake begins his poem Tiger Tiger like this:

                                Tiger tiger burning bright

                                In the forest of the night

                                What immortal hand or eye

                                Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Well then, Blake asks in his poem, what is the force that creates this evil? How do these forces join?

 Dylan Thomas expresses the difficulty of this life-long dance in his poem  Do Not Go Gentle:

                                Do not go gentle unto that good night

                                Old age should burn and rave at close of day

                             Rage rage against the dying of the light.

Both poets are celebrating the struggle.  Given the vivid imagery and the time they’ve put into it; given the ecstatic language... the struggle is something we want.  It is holy.  It happens and we reach a new level. And it happens again and we reach a new level.  Perfection is not the issue here. In fact  (as we read in Tanya)we may grasp the bones and get skin to skin with God but there’s always bones within bones and skin within skin. 

Let’s look at the struggle in this week’s parasha.  Yes,  Jacob struggles with the angel. But there’s also, if we zoom way back, a very interesting struggle the seed of which is planted in the title.

The title is Vayishlach.

The root for this word is Sh’lach. It means to send, or propel out.

This root word is also the title for another parashah of Torah: Beshelach. This is a rare time in Torah that any parashah title is repeated so it’s worth noting. How do the two words compare in context?

In the first we translate and he sent out. In the second we translate in the sending out. In the first Jacob is the subject. In the second Pharoah is the subject.  In the first Jacob, a being of light, is sending out what can be seen as tentacles…angels or messengers…to feel out the situation and deliver a message of humility to Esau (seen by the Talmudic rabbis as a being of darkness). In the second Pharoah (also  a being of darkness) is sending out the Israelites from Mitzrayim. 

These are two mirror-image actions reflecting our condition today.   If Torah (as we read in midrash) is beyond time then what we have here is both the force of light reaching to darkness and the force of darkness reaching to light.  Neither reach is ever clinched. For example we  make love but we don’t completely merge.  Our bodies remain distinct.  We pull away and we aren’t separate. Our minds and souls have joined.  In this parashah  Jacob hugs his brother and they don’t fight but then they separate. Jacob also wrestles with the final deep darkness within himself (represented by the angel) but there is never a merge.   

This is what we see: a cycle, a flow, a dance in itself, something that rises beyond the boundaries of time or space, a dance of energies sparked by one Hebrew word.  

Where else do we find struggle? Why, in Talmud!  Think of the hours and hours of word-struggle! Finally, when all is said and done, the rabbis sometimes say enough! As much has been said of this as possible! The objective of the struggle is not to get anywhere or prove anything. The objective is simply to observe the forces  in their ebb and flow. In the seeing we become that which we observe. And the ebb and flow is God.

In other words, we never really vanquish the angel or if we do a new angel  comes. Separation or closeness is not the answer.. Some think we can be with God in full. Some think we can't. What we do know...and many sages agree upon... is that through the struggle we get more and more within. The same holds true in relationships with lovers, friends, enemies, old friends,  stale lovers, stale-mates.   The action of coming-to-meet, taking our physicality and juxtaposing it to the divine essence, this in itself is the action of perfection. And the action (if we are really in it) raises us up above the very dichotomy itself.  Sooner or later in other words God contracts enough and we rise enough so that the struggle defeats itself.  We are neither closer or farther away. We become Israel , One being of beauty and balance.

 We enter God and God enters us.