Jacob – The Accidental Rabbi

D’var Torah – Vayetzey 5771 – November 12, 2010

Rabbi Maurice Harris

This week’s Torah portion is called vayetzey, and it is found in the book of breisheet, or Genesis in English. Our story begins with a young Jacob fleeing the wrath of his brother, Esau. As you may recall from last week’s Torah reading, Jacob deceived his dying father, Isaac, by pretending to be his twin brother, Esau, and by means of this deception Jacob made off with the special blessing Isaac had intended to give his first born son, Esau. Having been stripped of first-born privileges twice by Jacob at this point, Esau began muttering to himself that he would murder his brother once he got the chance. And having overheard Esau’s plotting, Rebecca sent Jacob away to her brother, Laban’s, household in the town of Haran.

This week’s parashah begins with young Jacob on the road to Haran. He stops for the night at a certain place. He takes a stone to use for a pillow, drifts off to sleep, and has a life-changing dream. Angles, or divine messengers, are ascending and descending a ladder connecting heaven and earth. God appears standing above the scene and blesses Jacob, saying: “the land upon which you are lying I will give to you and to your descendants. And your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread out to the west and the east and the north and the south. Through you and your descendants all the families of the earth shall find blessing. And here I am, with you: I will watch over you, and I will bring you back to this soil. I will not let go of you as long as I have yet to do what I have promised you.”

Jacob awakens from his dream, astonished and alert. “Truly, God is in this place, and I did not know it!” he says aloud. And he adds, “mah norah ha-makom ha-zeh: how awesome is this place! This is none other than a house of God, and this is a gate of heaven!”

Jacob’s dream of the angels traveling up and down a ladder to heaven is famous. Something I find interesting is that the entire story up to the point that Jacob awakens and realizes that God was in this place takes the Torah only 7 verses to tell. But the element of this famous story that I’d like to focus on tonight is a single word that dominates the story – the Hebrew word makom, which means place. The Torah’s storytelling style is sparse on words and fast on action. So when a single word is repeated several times in the course of a story, you can bet that there’s special symbolic significance to it. In this case, the word makom appears 5 times in the 7 verses that tell the story of his dream and his awakening, and 3 of those occurrences take place in one of those verses alone. The narrating voice tells us that Jacob arrived at a certain makom, took one of the stones of the makom to use as a make-shift pillow, and that he lay down in that makom. When Jacob wakes up, startled by his amazing dream, he says that God is in this makom and that this makom is awe-inspiring. Continue reading “D’var Torah – Vayetzey” →

I gave this talk at Temple Beth Israel (Eugene, OR) in 2004.

D’var Torah – Parashat Vayechi 5765 – December 25, 2004

By Rabbi Maurice Harris

This week’s Torah Portion is Vayechi, the last parashah of the Book of Breishit, the Book of Genesis. It is the closing chapter of a book that began with the creation of the universe, took us through the drama of the first human beings, through the stories of the first Jews – Sarah and Abraham and their extended family – and finally through the exhilarating and powerful cycle of stories surrounding Joseph. Breishit opens with the beginning of all things and closes with Joseph and his bretheren dwelling securely in the land of Egypt with Pharaoh’s blessing. The last word of the parashah is the Hebrew word for Egypt – mitzrayim. The stage is set for the second book of the Torah, Shemot – Exodus – and the drama of enslavement and redemption that form the next chapters of the Torah’s epic story.

You may recall the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, only to rise from an Egyptian jail to become the second in command of the Egyptian empire.

Yet another example of Hollywood casting white dudes to play ancient Hebrews… I mean, he’s definitely easy on the eyes, no disrespect to the actor, but ancient Hebrews and Egyptians probably didn’t look quite like that.

When we pick up this week, Joseph has reconciled with his brothers, and the entire family, including his frail, aging father, Jacob, has settled in Egypt. Hearing that his father Jacob has fallen ill, Jospeh brings his two sons, the first born, M’nasheh, and the younger one, Ephraim, to their grandfather. Jacob proceeds to bless his grandsons. In a gesture that has become commonplace in this family, Jacob gives the favored blessing traditionally reserved for the first born son to the younger son instead – a moment that I could easily spend the rest of this talk examining, but that will have to wait for another time.

Later in the parashah, Jacob gives his final words to his assembled sons. Jacob also asks his sons to bury his body in the Cave of Machpela, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and his wife Leah were buried. Jacob dies, and Egypt’s finest courtiers accompany the funeral caravan all the way to the Land of Canaan, where Jacob’s sons bury him at Machpela. After burying their father, Joseph’s brothers go through one more moment of anxiety about their having sold Joseph into slavery. They become worried that, with their father Jacob no longer alive, Joseph may rediscover his anger at his brothers for their terrible treatment of him. The brothers reconfirm their reconciliation, and the parashah concludes with Joseph’s last remarks to his brothers.

Continue reading “D’var Torah: Vayechi” →