Kol Shearith Israel Congregation, Panama
Jacob`s Dream
Fleeing from his brother Esav, Jacob embarks on his journey to the land of his mother Rebecca. On the way, Jacob lies down to sleep and has a revelatory experience. The Torah says:
Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the LORD will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth.” (Gen. 28:10-22)
This episode of Jacob's dream has a number of midrashim and commentaries with great content and very deep ideas.
The first question that the text poses is: Where is this amazing place in which Jacob has passed the night? Our sages did not like leaving names of persons or places incognito, so by techniques of association of words or ideas they related prior or subsequently referred to names to other ones found in different parts of the Torah. In this case "the place" is Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham tied his son to sacrifice him as a test ordered by God. It is the same mountain where Solomon's Temple, place of Atonement, centre of the religious life of Israel and nexus of the world with the Infinite, would later be established. The association of these two places is derived from the story of Akedat Itzjak, when Abraham, after walking with his son for three days, suddenly sees the "place" from far away. In this case, Place 1 is equal to Place 2.
We are then shown Jacob's dream. It describes a ladder that rested on the ground and stood up to the sky, and angels going up and down. A commentary tells us the reason why the angels went up and down was because the face of Jacob, that perfect, complete, ideal man, was carved at the base of the Throne of Glory. The angels saw this man´s face daily when they showed themselves before God, but now they saw this same face in a mortal, spread and inert on the ground. This midrash has a fascinating context from an anthropological perspective. The rabbis saw in Jacob, or better said, in Israel, the supreme ideal to achieve. And it wasn't only referring to Israel the man, but to Israel the People. To be an heir to the tradition of Israel is to live in a tension between aspiring to the highest ideals, the plane in which the Divinity dwells, and the plane of the material, the physical world in which we have to eat, sleep, fight for survival, i.e., being human.
God tells Jacob that the Earth where he is laying down will be granted as an inheritance for him and his descendants. A somewhat funny commentary explains that in order for him not to think God was referring only to the space occupied by his body, He compressed all the land of Israel underneath the surface his body was occupying.
Upon awakening, we read in verse 18 that Jacob took the stone that he had placed under his head. If we read carefully we see in verse 11 there was not one but several stones which he had taken. The Talmud says that before his dream there actually were multiple stones, 12 to be exact, and that upon waking these twelve stones had merged and now constituted a single one. This is a symbol similar to the future descendants of Jacob, which began as twelve tribes to form a single nation.
Then Jacob called the place Beth - El, the House of God. So far God had been described as "mountain" by Abraham (Genesis 22: 14) and "Field" by Isaac (Genesis 24: 63). But now, through Israel, the divine experience was described as a House.
After this episode, Jacob begins his journey once again. The man Israel reached his destination, was married to Rachel and Leah and had many children, the future tribes of our people. But Israel the Nation had a different destination. Our journey has not ended. Some years ago a group of the descendants of Jacob returned to the place of promises, to the place of dreams. Despite having been scattered North, South, East and West, the seeds of Israel returned from its diaspora and settled in their ancestral land. They dared to dream there and built the impossible, a modern State, a project of national renaissance. A task so difficult as to erect a stairway to heaven. The children of Israel have persevered despite adversity. God makes Jacob a promise and tells him that his descendants will be like the dust of the earth. It is said that the people of Israel is, in effect, as the dust of the earth, and the more it is stamped upon, the higher it rises. We are a people that was lifted from the dust and ashes, we woke up from our lethargic sleep and also from our nightmares and reminded ourselves that our faces are carved at the top, in a place where nothing but the best is expected from us and we try to aspire to the greatest things. And once we were back to the nexus between heaven and Earth, between the past and the present, we, like Jacob, called the place HOME. Although we came from different places one nationality was forged, a hard stone resistant to the harshest conditions.
Unfortunately the inhabitants of the land of Israel still live with the fear of his sibling, their neighbors, and still yearn for the day that life is like a dream, a place so Holy that even the angels want to descend and return to go up and tell the Creator of Heaven and Earth about the wonders of this place carrying His name and the name of those idealistic Children of Man who are fighting together with Him.
Rabbi David Cohen-Henríquez
Kol Shearith Israel Congregation, Panama
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