Parashat Vaietzé - English

Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik

Kol Shearith Israel Congregation

Panama City, Panama.

When our yearned-for wish to become parents was on the point of becoming a reality, my wife Ruthy and I wrote down a list of possible names for our son/daughter, which included at least 5 options per gender.

A few days later, when we returned home after meeting a beautiful baby with dark skin and huge black eyes, with whom we had already fallen in love, we couldn’t find that list anywhere.  However, it no longer mattered.  I don’t remember who suggested it, but the name had quickly been agreed upon.

Two days later, the secretary of our dear friend, Dr. Alfredo Henriquez, “forced” us to make public that choice.  What to her was just a simple routine procedure, asking the name of the baby coming for the first time to the doctor’s office, represented for us the moment when we endowed that tiny baby with a new identity.  “Dan, Dan Kraselnik.  That is our child’s name.”

Although the proper noun Dan appears in the Torah for the first time in reference to the final place where Abraham pursued Lot’s abductors (Gen. 14:14), it is in Parashat Va-yetzei where we find it referred to a person (in fact, 60 out of the 70 times that the name Dan appears in the Bible it refers to the tribe or city of Dan).  Dan is the fifth son of the patriarch Jacob, and the first from Rachel’s side, although he was the son of her maid Bilhah.

The Torah tells us that despite Jacob’s preference for Rachel, all of his children came from Leah, the unloved wife (literally, “hated”).  After the birth of the first four sons (Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah), Rachel demands from her husband in what must have been their only dispute:   “Give me children, or else I die.”  Jacob, full of anger, answered:  “Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?” (30:1-2)

Searching for a way to “do justice” to her situation, Rachel proposes to Jacob to conceive a child with Bilhah, her maid, just as Sara did with Agar (according to Rashi), that she may bear upon her knees (adoption ritual, since it implies that it was as if Rachel had given birth to him).  And thus it happened.  “And Rachel said: 'God hath judged me (danani), and hath also heard my voice, and hath given me a son.' Therefore called she his name Dan.” (30:6)

Every one of the names of Jacob’s 11 sons born in our parashah (Benjamin is not born until Parashat Va-yishlach) has its explanation.  In the biblical world, the name constituted not just the person’s identity but their essence.  In Dan’s case, the few words with which his mother justifies her choice intensely reflect her feeling of fulfillment in finally becoming a mother.

In our particular case, the name Dan was attractive to us because it fulfilled a series of important requirements.  First, it is a biblical name.  Second, it sounds alike in Hebrew and in Spanish.  Third, it is short (our son bears two 9-letter last names, each one made up of 6 consonants and 3 vowels), and last (but very important) it has a beautiful meaning associated with justice.

However, looking back, I would dare say that even not knowing the degree of awareness involved in the decision, our choice of the name Dan was deeply linked to Rachel’s words.  “God hath judged me (danani), and hath also heard my voice, and hath given me a son.”  That was exactly what we felt when we welcomed our son into our home.  An intimate sense of Justice.  Justice understood as harmony; the harmony that emerges from the authentic, genuine encounter between our desire to become parents and Dan’s desire to have a home in which to grow up.

Dan just celebrated his 7^th birthday and every day, Ruthy and I feel the fulfillment brought on to us from being his parents.  And every time I encounter the birth of the biblical Dan, I cannot but feel moved by Rachel’s words, feeling them as my own and reflecting upon our own experience.

It is possible that all of this may sound a little bit too personal, but I think that, as a last resort, therein lays the sanctity of the Torah.  To find within it echoes that reverberate in us and on our own existence.  As we recite every time we place the Torah scroll in the Aron Hakodesh (Holy Ark) after its ritual reading:  “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her” (Pr. 3:18).

Shabbat Shalom,

Gustavo