וַיֵּצֵא יַעֲקֹב מִבְּאֵר שָׁבַע וַיֵּלֶךְ חָרָנָה׃ וַיִּפְגַּע בַּמָּקוֹם וַיָּלֶן שָׁם כִּי־בָא הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וַיִּקַּח מֵאַבְנֵי הַמָּקוֹם וַיָּשֶׂם מְרַאֲשֹׁתָיו וַיִּשְׁכַּב בַּמָּקוֹם הַהוּא׃
Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran, and encountered a certain place. He had to spend the night there, for the sun had come in. Now he took one of the stones of the place and set it at his head and lay down in that place.
Genesis 28:10-11
Jacob fled from his brother Esau whom he had deceived. He left his father's house and went toward his mother's family in Haran. What can we learn for our lives from Jacob's going out and going toward? And what is "the place" and his encounter with "a certain place"?
Today I watched this video on the New York Times channel featuring two monks from the Plum Village Buddhist Monastery teaching mindfulness this week at the climate summit:
Many years ago, Thich Nhat Hanh (called Thay, like rebbe or roshi), the teacher of these monks, sent me to Judaism to find the mindfulness in my ancestral tradition." Stop running," Thay said to me, "Mindfulness is at the heart of every great religious tradition. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a great tradition." And so I set forth, and encountered Jacob, a major figure of this week's Torah portion and so much of Judaism.
Jacob is born suffering and uses deceit to try to escape. He flees, he runs. He is so lost in fear and pain, obstacles to mindfulness, that he doesn't know he is protected. According to mystical and traditional interpretation, he is in fact being escorted by the Shekhinah, the hidden divinity behind all form. Until he stops and allows healing to take place, he is unaware of everything that protects him.
And so he runs and runs. He doesn't know how to stop, so he is stopped by mysterious forces. The mystical texts look deeply into the letters and words of the Torah scroll and find that "the place" stops him. The mountain drops on him. Night time falls on him. He stops and touches the earth. He stops and lays down on the mountain that held his father's trauma, Mount Moriah. His trust transforms it into a place of refuge and he sleeps. Here he wakes up and exclaims, “Healing Presence is in this place and I, I did not know it."
He has stopped running away from pain and suffering and discovers the power within to be a healing presence for his ancestors and for himself.
וַיִּשָּׂא יַעֲקֹב רַגְלָיו וַיֵּלֶךְ אַרְצָה בְנֵי־קֶדֶם׃
Jacob lifted his feet and went to the land of the easterners. He looked around him, and there: a well in the field…
Genesis 29:1
He lifts his feet and walks in full presence and mindfulness to the East. He is alert to everything around him, to earth's water source and to the people tending it. This well is Miriam's well, the flow of life that will protect us as long as we protect her.
May we learn to walk on the earth in full presence and mindfulness. May we hold up our ancestors as models of mindful living, in full awareness of how to share precious resources, value all life and find our power to be the change that is so needed.
_________________________
Rivkeh Speaks: And She Said: I Will Go. Eilech
But the children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?”
Genesis 25:23
It is an old story.
Something shining appears
in the horizon of the ordinary.
A messenger arrives.
The mystery at last is
searching for you -
ten camels and one is yours.
Your young self knows without hesitation
how to say Eilech: I will go.
You love crossing the threshold of your tent.
You forget to look back and even though
it would shatter you again and again -
following this road
you discover your life
I was never happier
riding high above
when everything I longed for seemed possible.
We left the green fields and rolling mountains
descending into bareness.
Is this our destination? I asked the messenger
who wordlessly motioned toward
the far end of a field
where an old sad man walked,
his darkened eyes, cast down.
This, this is my husband? I fell
hard: it was a long way down.
I hid my tears behind
a veil, beginning my new
path of deception: how else could I survive?
When he bent towards me
our broken hearts met in that dusty ground,
his hand gentle with my
ruptured youth.
Now an old woman walking in the field unveiled
I wonder: how did the great
river of my love get so diverted?
One son, the dreamer, living far away
with his abundance of wives and children
while my life is with the son
I never loved enough who never deserved this.
Oh how often I regret, if only I had
a mother, a grandmother to guide
me through fear, if only
I had known there had always been another way.
If only I had been able to listen
to the wisdom of my body
as the speaking of the Divine -
the shared womb of a mother of twins, a model
of a better world to birth my sons into -
I might have been another kind of mother
to another kind of people.
And so I lived split in two
and like an oak hit by lightening
I slowly began to grow another trunk
as grandmother to the children
dwelling close to me, so many bodies
hungry to be seen and to be loved.
Now I am the open tent and
all are welcomed across my threshold
to the love I spent my whole life
longing for. B’zot Ani boteach,
I sing, returning from the fields.
this is why I exist, in this I trust.
Elana Klugman
11-13-21
READ MORE: Vayeitzei | Shifting from Conflict to Shared Dilemma