Vaietzé 5776 - English

By Rabbi Dario Feiguin

B´nei Israel Congregation, Costa Rica

Between What We Feel and What Is Appropriate

The appearance of love from an unusual romantic situation is a key point in the development of this week’s Parashah, Parashat Vayetze.  It is especially unusual because it appears in a world where marriages were arranged after an economic agreement between the two families.  

Young Jacob has escaped from his brother and gone to Haran.  There he falls in love with Rachel.  He works for seven years to deserve marrying her.  But he is deceived and into his tent comes the other sister: Leah.

The argument from the liar is: “Lo yaase ken bimkomeinu”.

Laban says, “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older.”

The love Jacob has for Rachel clashes with the local customs, but the truth is that almost every time what one feels and what one knows is appropriate follow different roads.  

Arbitrary and even absurd customs change with time, but it would be silly to believe you can survive our world making decisions based only on feeling, without considering what others expect as a product of social convention.  

At the same time, if you live accepting social regulations without listening to your heart, sooner or later you will get sick with unhappiness.  

What must we do?  What we know is appropriate or what we feel?  

Jacob did both.  He had to accept external pressure and to be able to have his beloved Rachel by his side, had to work for seven more years, because that was the local custom.  

What we sometimes do is choose and even create smaller frames of social belonging where we can share some values, traditions, customs and a lifestyle with others, that allows room for our feelings and, at the same time, lets us be how we are and not how we should be.  

The strongest frame for this purpose is family.  

But that frame can stretch.  A community can be the space where we are not forced to do what is expected from each of us, what is a convention or a custom, but instead we can fill it with affection, commitment and passion, with room for spontaneity, without clichés and formalities.  

The clash between Jacob’s love and the local custom is the clash between feelings and social standards, but it is also the clash between tradition and change, continuity and fracture, and at the same time, between acceptance and rebellion, conformity and seeking, submission and creativity.  

He, like his grandfather Abraham, like Moshe Rabenu, Isaiah, Rabi Akiva, Rambam and Baal Shem Tov will be later on, all of them passionate and committed individuals, devoted their lives to the search for a path with continuity and their own way; they mark a direction.  

May each of us manage to discover our own.  

Rabbi Dario Feiguin