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Parashat Vayishlach - Genesis 32:4-36:43
A conversation between Matt Plen and Rachel Adelman Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. He saw that he had not won out against him and he touched his hip-socket, and Jacob's hip-socket was wrenched as he wrestled with him. He said, "Let me go, for dawn is breaking." And he said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." He said to him, "What is your name?" and he said, "Jacob." He said, "No longer shall Jacob be your name, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men and won out." Jacob asked and said, "Tell me your name, pray." And he said, "Why should you ask my name?" and there he blessed him. Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, meaning, "I have seen God face to face and I came out alive." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel and he was limping on his hip. (Genesis 32:24-31, adapted from Robert Alter's translation) RACHEL: In the course of this mysterious wrestling match, Jacob gains a new name and, presumably, a blessing, but walks into the dawn limping. A victory has clearly been earned, for it is "the man" who cannot overcome Jacob, and the patriarch is renamed Israel, in accord with his victory: You have striven with God and men and won out. Jacob himself names the place after his triumph, I have seen God face to face and survived. How can one wrestle with God and win? How does he know "the man" is a stand-in for God? First Jacob asks for a blessing and gets a name, and then he asks for the man's name and gets a blessing! Rashi identifies the man as saro shel Esav - the guardian prince of Esau, Jacob's brother (based on the Midrash Genesis Raba 77:3). Did God send him? And if so, why? With what was Jacob really struggling before confronting his brother after a twenty-year absence? He emerges from the contest a more courageous man, albeit with a limp. In the words of Emily Dickinson, "Light swung the silver fleeces/ "Peniel" Hills beyond,/ and the bewildered Gymnast/ found he had worsted God!" I think, in the course of the struggle, Jacob could not have prevailed had he known that his opponent was an agent of God. "Courage consists in the conviction that they with whom you contend are no more than you. If we believed in the existence of strict individuals, natures, that is, not radically identical but unknown, immeasurable, we should never dare to fight." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Jacob gains his courage from believing that he's in mortal combat with another human being and only later realizes that "the man" was divine. MATT: Which is more reliable, a person's immediate understanding while undergoing an experience or the insight granted by memory, once the experience is over? Rachel, you assume that Jacob's immediate - and inaccurate - intuition that he was struggling with a human being was later displaced by the correct understanding that he had wrestled with God. In this light, your questions about the purpose of struggling with God and God's decision to present Himself as a human being are reasonable. I want to suggest that this passage of Torah is far more ambiguous than you suppose. It does not open with any of the standard introductions to previous episodes of divine revelation: The Lord said to Abram, The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, The Lord appeared to Abram, God called to Hagar. Nor does it take place during a dream, in contrast to Jacob's earlier epiphany at Beit El (Genesis 28:10-15). Here, Jacob meets a man who does not speak (speech is the defining feature of almost every biblical scene of revelation) and wrestles with him. The encounter takes place at night, a time associated with evil and death, the antitheses of the divine presence. The winner of the contest is not who we'd expect if Jacob's opponent really was God, but rather Jacob himself. Moreover, just two chapters later (Genesis 35:9-12), God unambiguously presents Himself to Jacob, changes his name to Israel, and reconfirms the covenant He had made with Abraham and Isaac. If the late-night wrestling match was an authentic instance of divine revelation, then what need was there for the second epiphany? In fact, it is Jacob himself, not his opponent or the biblical narrator, who decides that the man was in fact God. This, on the basis of his refusal to reveal his name (evocative, to be sure, of God's declaration to Moses that I am that which I am) and his ambiguous statement that Jacob had striven with God and men (a biblical phrase meaning "everyone," rather than a specific reference to the God of Abraham - see Judges 9:9, I Samuel 2:26). It seems to me that rather than ask why this encounter with God was so clouded in mystery, it makes more sense to ask why Jacob felt the need to interpret a traumatic - but nonetheless human - encounter as a meeting with God. RACHEL: I'd have to say that hindsight is often more reliable than one's immediate understanding, especially when it comes to encounters with angels. Take, for example, the scene where "three men" visit Abraham and Sarah to relay the message that they will have a child in their old age. Sarah, who is hidden from view inside the tent, sniggers in disbelief (Genesis 18:12) and only after God reports her doubts to Abraham, does she realize that this "man" reads minds and, therefore, must be divine. (See also Judges 13:18 and Joshua 5:13-14.) What is unique in our instance is that we are introduced to "the man" not as "an angel of God" but as a "man" - ish - as baffling to the reader as it was to Jacob, I'm sure. It is only in the act of renaming that Jacob realizes - and here it is "the other", his adversary, who enlightens him - that he has striven with God and men and won out (the Hebrew term for the struggle is sarita, related to the word sar, prince or minister, "the one who rules over"). The ambiguity as to the divine or human nature of the struggle is maintained even by the messenger himself. I think the struggle at that moment, and throughout Jacob's life, has been a struggle with both mortal and immortal spheres - with the burden that he had deceived his father and cheated his brother, Esau, out of a blessing, according to God's plan. That weight on his conscience has to be cleared with man as well as God. How does he earn the right to such a blessing? When he asks "the man" to bless him, Rashi interpolates: "Acknowledge for me the blessings [with] which my father blessed me, which Esau is contesting." God sends the angel, according to Rashi "the guardian prince of Esau," to teach him the ways of a direct, face-to-face (or here, limb-to-limb) encounter. Jacob can thereby earn the right to be a sar, a leader and the father of the Jewish people, instead of being the heel, ekev (Genesis 25:26), and the trickster, as Esau accuses him of being (Genesis 28:36). As Emanuel Levinas wrote, "The epiphany of another person is ipso facto my responsibility towards him; seeing the other is already an obligation towards him." This is the first encounter with Esau, the other, as the shadow who weighs on his conscience, and only after this limb-to-limb struggle can Jacob encounter his brother face-to-face. The question remains: does that encounter really change him in any way? Or does he remain "Yaakov" (Jacob), the man who wheedles behind others (as the Hebrew verb, la'akov, implies)? MATT: I'm troubled by any attempt to interpret a given encounter as an interaction with God. Your theory, Rachel, that Jacob needed his "encounter with God" in order to leave behind his divinely inspired role as "trickster" and begin encountering people face-to-face, has helped me focus on the source of my discomfort. Jacob features in the book of Genesis as a deeply flawed character, a product of a dysfunctional home. To portray the resulting immoral behavior as the consequence of a divine plan does disservice to the idea of God. God is nothing if unconnected to the absolute rule of moral law. Apprehensions of God as anything less than moral can only be the result of human misunderstanding. Michael Lerner expresses this idea in his modern midrash on the story of the binding of Isaac. The voice in Abraham's head commanding him to kill his son must be understood as a delusion - the result of negative human experiences and emotions. The climax of that story is the moment when Abraham finally manages to hear the true voice of God - the one that affirms basic moral values and tells him not to lay a hand on the boy. Moreover, if an encounter with the divine is supposed to have an improving effect on one's character, it's not clear that this happens in Jacob's case. True, he desists from his dishonest, manipulative behavior - although this change could be attributed to the just desserts he receives at the hands of Laban, and the consequent lesson he learns. However, his apathetic, self-interested response to the rape of his daughter, Dina, and the disastrous consequences of his favoritism for Joseph imply that Jacob remains far from fully functional in the field of human relationships. Rachel, you suggest that face-to-face revelation is a necessary precondition for forging successful, honest human relationships. Following Martin Buber, I want to claim the opposite: that authentic, unmediated dialogue between people, motivated by care and compassion and founded on morality is the only arena in which it is possible for us to stand a chance of encountering God. God is to be found not in mystical, nighttime experiences but in the prosaic, day-to-day interactions with the people around us. RACHEL: I concur that dialogue in the human realm can, ultimately, be the arena of our encounter with God. But, as in Jacob's case, sometimes we are blocked. He must overcome the fear of his brother's murderous intentions (see Genesis 27:41-45 and 32:7), and see his opponent as "no more than" himself. On a deeper level, he must overcome the fate of being "the crooked one," as his name implies. In the words of Robert Alter, he leaves Peniel, "bent, permanently lamed, by his nameless adversary in order to be made straight before his reunion with Esau." When he first greets his brother, he moves in front of his whole entourage, bowing to the ground. After the brothers embrace, Jacob evokes the language of his opponent from the wrestling match, ...for have I not seen your face as one might see God's face...? (Genesis 33:10) Finally, in the face-to-face encounter with his brother, he sees the reflection of God. |