Questions for the Shabbat Table: Vayetze
A printable study booklet: one question per page, the Rav’s answer, its source, and a lesson to discuss as a family.
Each of the three Patriarchs is met by a force that contests him. This lecture follows that symmetry: Yishmael facing Avraham’s kindness, Esav facing Yitzchak’s rigor, Lavan facing Yaakov’s truth. Rav Raphaël Benizri shows that the last of these adversaries is the hardest to pin down, because he does not oppose truth head-on: he translates it, dilutes it, whitewashes it. The question then becomes what passes intact from one generation to the next.
The Rav starts from the twofold motive of Yaakov’s departure — to flee Esav’s threats, and to seek a wife within the circle of the Hebrew family — and detects in it the danger of a Judaism without borders, without a national entity, claiming to be the conscience of the world from nowhere in particular. Against this he sets the original design: first a national entity, and only then an influence radiating outward.
The lecture then moves through the stones of “the place” and their counter-model, the Tower of Babel; through the three laws given after the departure from Egypt; through Lavan’s name and its whiteness; and on to the mound of stones that separates the two men and receives — the only instance of its kind in the Torah — a name in Aramaic.
What this lecture teaches
The second motive of Yaakov’s departure carries its own danger. On the one hand, he is fleeing Esav’s threats; on the other, he is seeking his soulmate within the sphere of the Hebrew family. But to remain attached in this way to the old kinship is to risk a cosmopolitan Judaism, without national borders, without a national entity, claiming to go on being the conscience of the world from anywhere at all. Yet the original intention, when Avraham was directed toward the land of vision, was altogether different: first a national entity, and then an influence radiating from that place.
One cannot be oneself outside one’s own borders. Outside them, we are forced to take the thinking of others into account, and there is a real possibility of drowning the purity of the divine message under garments, under a wrapping that has more to do with seeming than with being. That is why it is said that whoever lives outside the Land is like one who has no G-d: he cannot express himself clearly and distinctly without a touch of the culture of the people among whom he lives. The Rav gives the example, heard from certain politicians, of a man who calls himself a Jew, but of Christian culture.
Three forces rival the three Patriarchs. Yishmael rises up against the hesed (lovingkindness) of Avraham, against his goodness. Esav rises up against the rigor of Yitzchak. And against the truth of Yaakov stands Lavan. None of these forces attacks an attribute from outside: each is its possible counterfeit, which makes the confrontation all the harder.
Lavan’s name speaks of whiteness, and our Sages read a paradox in it. His name comes from the word meaning white, to whiten, and it was interpreted to mean that he will whiten the sins of the children of Israel. One may then ask what we have to do with a Lavan who would whiten Israel, when he himself sought to abolish the meaning of kinship, the root of lineage in Israel — the lineage of the Patriarchs. This contradiction is the heart of the problem, all the more so because Lavan is also “the Aramean,” and the same letters spell the deceiver, the cheat, the schemer: it is said of him that he sought to uproot the people.
Lavan lays claim to everything Yaakov has built. The daughters are my daughters, the sons are my sons, the flock is my flock: all that Yaakov has achieved, Lavan declares his own. He wanted to take our own children from us. And we go on living this on various levels, when there are those who want at any cost to rob us of the Land, of our Judaism, our values, our spirit, our spirituality. Lavan’s claim does not belong to the past.
The stones taken from that place are those of the world’s umbilical cord. That place is the embryo of the earth. Just as the umbilical cord nourishes the child in its mother’s womb, so Yaakov, through the truth he reveals, is called to nourish the other nations that the people of Israel carries within itself. For the people of Israel is the sum of all humanity, and that is precisely why Yaakov is the image of Adam.
The task is not to remake humanity but to restore it. We are not going to start humanity over; we are going to restructure it, to refound it on what already exists. We do not claim to make a new world: we want to restore it to what it was at the beginning and rid it of the impurities it has accumulated through all its attempts and failures. It is a work of restoration, not of foundation.
The Tower of Babel is the exact counter-model of Yaakov’s stone. That place is the focal point of humanity, the foundation of creation, the place on which the Sanctuary is to be built — the meeting point between the world below and the spiritual. Now the generation of the Dispersion also wanted to raise an edifice, but out of bricks, sand and cement. It wanted to put forward a tower that would be a reference for all humanity, to give a universal law — but a purely earthly one, cut off from everything spiritual: they are the ones who build, they are the ones who define the law, they are the ones who judge what is good and what is evil.
The three laws given after the departure from Egypt answer precisely to this. The first says that we cannot function without legislation. But that legislation must draw its inspiration from a moral conscience embodied in the sense of the sacred; it must not be a court deciding on its own what is good and what is evil — it must refer to a revealed book. The third says that what fixes the laws of purity and impurity is not open to debate about what is fitting, and that G-d alone holds the secret by which the pure can be drawn out of the impure.
Babel did not stand, and every nation carried off a shard of truth. There was a breaking apart, and our Sages say that each nation took a portion of truth, a spark. Consequently, when we live outside the Land, we are always among fragments of truth — but a fragment of truth is not the truth. Truth can only be truth, and it goes forth from Jerusalem; it is the truth of Yaakov, to whom truth is attributed.
Avraham had already answered Babel with an altar. His first stop was Shechem, and not by chance: it is there that kingship risks being shaken, distorted, turned away from what it should be — a representation of the heavenly kingship. Avraham sensed this danger, and he built an altar to proclaim the unity of G-d and to call upon the Name. To Babel, which builds a tower for itself, he opposes an altar that is not for himself.
How many stones did Yaakov take? The question is a reading of history. Some say three stones: one for Avraham, who did not succeed because of Yishmael’s presence; one for Yitzchak, who likewise failed; and his own. Yaakov, for his part, wants descendants who will be the cement of a single house, with its twelve edges. A third version says that there were neither three stones nor two, but twelve, which fused of themselves into one. These stones must form a single block.
Stone is the very medium through which the Torah is transmitted. The Torah was given on tablets of stone. And when the people is about to enter the Land of Israel, it sets up stones on which the essence of the whole Torah is to be written. This stone, then, is the very foundation of Israel’s being. But for it to hold, one must first separate from Lavan — at the moment when Yaakov leaves the outside world, turns back toward the Land of Israel, and seals his taking possession of it.
Going beyond one’s natural limits was already the command given to Avraham. At the Covenant Between the Parts, he is told in substance: go beyond your natural limits, go beyond the laws of causality that govern the world, go out of this immobility in which you keep yourself shut up within the laws of nature, and look at the stars of heaven — so shall your descendants be, like stars lighting up the world in the dead of night. Moshe, after the sin of the Golden Calf, will recall this promise: You promised them they would be like the stars of heaven, and not only like the sand of the earth, trampled everywhere. And yet the sand says something else: the possibility of a normal and lasting life on solid ground.
The Torah, for its part, is white and black. Others have written of the red and the black; with us, it is white and black — the prayer shawl, the Torah scroll. White, in its movement, is the sum of all colors, and that sum at rest is black. As long as the page is white, one may write anything on it; once one has written, one has conditioned it. Everything then depends on the content: if one has written something sacred, the page itself becomes sacred. Before that, the parchment had only a market value; and when the writing fades away, the scroll loses its function — yet one may not throw it away.
Lavan’s name holds two assets, and the second is a trap. In it there is the heart, and there are the fifty paths — not those of wisdom, but those of analysis and deduction. Woe to the one who reasons only with the heart, or who wishes to express his truth only through his feelings. Thought seeks to be fixed, logical, stable, composed; feeling changes with moods and circumstances. To claim to subject the law to the way one feels it, bending it into every possible form, is to write on that whiteness things that do not hold up and whose time is limited.
The only Aramaic translation in the Torah comes at the moment of separation. A mound of stones is raised between the two men: they make a pact of peace, but each henceforth forbids himself any entry into the inner and spiritual life of the other. Yaakov calls it by a Hebrew name meaning “the mound of witness”; Lavan insists on giving it an Aramaic name that means roughly the same thing. Why? Because he would like to replace Hebrew with a universal language, and to remain faithful to a translation of the revealed word.
To translate is to put to sleep. The word for translation has the same numerical value as the word for deep sleep, for anesthesia. The universal language Lavan would give humanity is nothing but a translation, and a translation betrays the essence of the text, the essence of the language in which it was spoken; it can only be an outer language that does not express the depth of thought. That is why Yaakov insists on keeping the stone: in the word for stone one reads father and son — that is, what is handed down without being betrayed, across the course of generations and civilizations.
Full transcript of the lecture
On the one hand, to flee Esav’s threats; on the other, to seek a soulmate within the sphere of the Hebrew family — that is, to remain attached, after all, to a cosmopolitan Judaism that would like, without national borders, without a national entity, to go on being the conscience of the world. Whereas G-d’s will at the outset, when He set Avraham on the way toward the land “that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1) — the land of vision, of sight, of radiance — was first a national entity, and then, from that very place, to try to radiate outward. Why? Quite simply because we cannot be ourselves outside our borders. We are forced to take the thinking of others into account, and there is a real possibility of drowning the purity of the divine message under garments, under a wrapping that has more to do with seeming than with being. And this […] was not what was wanted. That is why it is said that “whoever dwells outside the Land is like one who has no G-d” (Ketubot 110b). Why? Quite simply because he cannot express himself fully, clearly, distinctly, without a touch of the culture of the people among whom he lives. There are those today who say they are Jewish, but of Christian culture — one hears it these days from certain politicians.
And this is exactly what risks happening with Lavan. You know that there are three forces that oppose, that rival the three Patriarchs. Against Avraham’s hesed (lovingkindness), against Avraham’s goodness, stands Yishmael. Against the rigor of Yitzchak stands Esav. Against the truth, the emet of Yaakov — “You will give truth to Yaakov” (Micah 7:20) — stands Lavan. We will explain this, since Lavan, after all, as his name indicates, comes from the word lavan, white, to whiten; and our Sages sought to interpret his name. Why was he called Lavan? Because he will whiten the sins of the children of Israel. And one wonders: what have we to do with a Lavan who will whiten the children of Israel, when he himself sought to abolish the meaning of kinship, the root of kinship in Israel — that of the Avot, the Patriarchs? He wanted to take our own children from us; he claimed them as his own.
Everything that was still to be achieved, he claimed as his. And we go on living this on various levels: there are those who want at any cost to rob us both of the Land and of our Judaism, our values, our spirit, our spirituality. So what does all this have to do with Lavan? We will come to that aspect shortly; but first let us try to understand these stones that appear, that come to light in this vision. He takes stones from this place, and we have said that this place is the embryo of the earth, and its umbilical cord. Just as the umbilical cord nourishes the infant, the child in its mother’s womb, so Yaakov, through the truth he reveals, is called to nourish the other nations, which the people of Israel holds within its being, within its womb. For we have already said that the people of Israel is the sum of all this humanity; that, incidentally, is why Yaakov is the image of Adam HaRishon, the first man. For we are not going to make humanity anew; we are going to restructure it, to refound it on what already exists. We do not claim to make a new world; we want, in a sense, to restore it to what it was at the beginning and rid it of all the impurities it has accumulated through all its attempts and failures. And so: “He took from the stones of the place” (Genesis 28:11) — the stones of this place, the place that is the focal point of humanity, the place that is the foundation of creation, the place on which the Sanctuary is to be built: that is, the meeting point between the world below, the created world, and the spiritual — between heaven and earth. The generation of the Tower of Babel also wanted to raise an edifice, but out of bricks, out of sand and cement, so that it would hold firm. In other words, it too wanted to put forward something — a tower — that would serve as a reference for all humanity. It wanted to give humanity a law, but a purely earthly one, cut off from everything spiritual.
They are the ones who build, they are the ones who define the law, they are the ones who judge what is good and what is evil. Now, you know that three things were given to the Jewish people after the departure from Egypt […]: the civil laws, Shabbat, and the statute of the red heifer. What is the idea? Why these three laws? The first is that we cannot function without legislation — very good. But that legislation must draw its inspiration from a moral conscience embodied by Shabbat, by the sense of the sacred, and not simply be a court that decides on its own what is good and what is evil. It must refer to a sacred, revealed book, and it must realize that what fixes the laws of purity and impurity is a chok, a decree beyond reason — the red heifer. And here there is no room for debate over whether it is fitting or not. It plays out between life and death, of course, between pure and impure — but there is a possibility of drawing the pure out of the impure, and G-d alone holds that secret. Very well; but the migdal, the Tower of Babel, did not stand. On the contrary, there was a breaking apart, and we have said that each nation took a portion of truth, a shard of truth, a spark of truth. Consequently, when we go outside the Land, when we live outside the Land, we are always dealing with scraps of truth, with shards — but that is not the truth.
The truth is that “from Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of G-d from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3). It is the truth that goes forth, that radiates, from Jerusalem — and it is the truth of Yaakov. Now consider what Avraham — he who stood against the Tower of Babel — did when he arrived at Shechem. And you know that Shechem was his first stop, because it is there that kingship would be shaken, and there that there is indeed a risk of distorting, of perverting this kingship — which ought to be, let us say, a representation of the heavenly kingship — and turning it into a kingship for its own sake, a mere monarchy. So what did he do? Avraham sensed this danger […], and there he built an altar to proclaim the unity of G-d.
Yaakov, too — what he does at the moment G-d reveals Himself to him is to take stones, and he says to himself… Some say he took three stones: one for Avraham, who did not succeed, given the presence of Yishmael; one for Yitzchak, who likewise failed, given the presence of Esav. “As for me, I want to bring forth — so I hope — descendants who will be the cement of a house built, if you like, on twelve edges.” And we know well that these twelve edges are the possible combinations of the letters of the Divine Name — of the letters themselves. “And I will bring them together into a single block.” These stones must form a single block.
That is why there is a third version: it was neither three stones nor two, but twelve stones, which fused of themselves into a single stone. And this stone is the foundation stone of the people of Israel, of the edifice of Israel; it is the stone of G-d’s altar; it is the fixed point, the link — or the place — of communication between the upper world and the lower world. We know very well that the Torah was given through stones: luchot avanim, tablets of stone. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave it to us in stone: “I will give you the tablets of stone” (Exodus 24:12). The tablets of stone — stone, tablets made of stone.
And when the people of Israel is about to enter the Land of Israel — precisely in the region of Shechem, the kingdom of Shechem — we are commanded to set up stones on which the essence of the whole Torah is to be written. In other words, this stone is the very foundation of Israel’s being. But for that, one must separate from Lavan, because Yaakov is about to leave the lands outside Israel and turn back toward the Land of Israel, to accomplish his definitive return there and seal his taking possession of the Land. Now you know that at the Covenant Between the Parts, the brit bein habetarim, when G-d revealed to Avraham the plan to make him a people and to settle him within the borders of the Promised Land, He said to him: go beyond your natural limits, go beyond the laws of causality that govern the world, go out of this immobility in which you hold yourself, shut up within the laws of nature — “Look now toward the heavens and count the stars” (Genesis 15:5). Look at the stars of heaven. And He told him: “So shall your offspring be” — your descendants will be like stars in the dead of night, lighting up the world. That is the promise made to the Avot: that the people of Israel will be like the stars of the heavens.
Indeed, Moshe, when he invokes the promise made to the Patriarchs after the sin of the Golden Calf, says: You promised them they would be like the stars of heaven — and not only like the sand of the earth, trampled everywhere. Though one may say that the image of the sand of the earth stands for the possibility of leading, in this world, a normal life, a firm life on solid ground, a lasting one. So Yaakov wants to separate once and for all from Lavan, who represents a real danger for him. Yes — Lavan ha-Arami, the Aramean, whose letters spell ramai: the cheat, the schemer, the deceiver. It is said of him that he sought to uproot everything — he wanted to uproot the people […]. To whiten, as I told you — to whiten. To whiten the sins of Israel.
Some have written The Red and the Black, but with us, the Torah is white and black. The tallit we wear is white and black; the Sefer Torah is white and black; the tefillin are white and black. And we have already said that white, in its movement, is the combination, the sum of all colors, and the sum of all colors at rest is black. As long as the page is white, you can write anything you like on it. From the moment you have written, you have conditioned that page, because you have written on it. From then on, everything depends on the content of what you wrote.
If, in the end, you have written something that belongs to the sacred, then the page you wrote on is itself sacred. Until then, the hide, the parchment you had, had no value other than its market value. But from the moment you write a Sefer Torah or tefillin on it, it has sacred value. What is more: if you wrote the sacred text and it has faded — the writing has somehow flown away, and the scroll has lost its function: you cannot read from it, you cannot wear the tefillin, you cannot keep the mezuzah — nevertheless you may not throw away the parchment, neither of tefillin nor of mezuzot, and still less of a Sefer Torah. […] And so it is, inasmuch as humanity does aspire to truths, but these truths are truncated —
It has often been said: come now, you are right, and the other one is right too, and that one as well — these are shards of truth. But when they are shards of truth, it means they are not verified truths. The truth can only be the sum of all these truths scattered across cultures, if you like, or across all sorts of revelations; but the truth can only be the one that is revealed — not what man has produced from his own reflection, from his own inspiration […]. Now, Lavan has two assets: the lev, the heart, and the nun — the fifty gates of binah, understanding: the fifty paths of analysis, of deduction; not chochmah, not wisdom, but analysis. And woe to the one who reasons only with the heart, or who would express his truth only through his feelings. There are principles that stem from feeling, and others that stem from the intellect — from thought, from the rigor of thought.
The intellect, reason, is fixed, logical, stable, composed; feeling changes with moods, with circumstances. So if you claim to subject the law to the way you feel it and live it — simply by interpreting it in all sorts of different forms — then you have indeed written on the lavan, on the white, on the whiteness, lies: things that do not hold up, whose time is limited. Now Lavan wanted precisely to reduce all of Yaakov’s thought to that moral conscience of a Judaism without borders, without a national entity, without a Jewish people — only Jews of various cultures; and in so doing he wanted to do away with the Jewish people, to do away with the heritage of the ancestors. And when he parts from Yaakov, there is a gal avanim, a mound of stones separating Yaakov and Lavan. They make a pact of peace, but it seems that neither is to meddle any longer in the inner life of the other, in the spiritual life of the other. And the only time in the Torah that there is an Aramaic translation is in connection with the name given to this mound of stones. Yaakov calls it Gal’ed, the mound of witness, and Lavan insists on giving it an Aramaic name, Yegar Sahaduta (Genesis 31:47), which means roughly the same thing. It is the translation of Gal’ed. But why? Quite simply because he would like to replace Hebrew with Esperanto, perhaps — with a universal language.
And this language — the first language […] — is Aramaic; it is the first language, and it would remain faithful to this translation of the revealed word. You know, targum, translation, has the same numerical value as tardemah — hypnosis, deep sleep, anesthesia. It is the same thing. In other words, this universal language that Lavan would adopt for all humanity is nothing but a translation, and every translation betrays the essence of the text, the essence of the language in which it was spoken — above all when that language is the holy tongue. It can only be safah — lip: a language of the lips, an outer language that does not express the depth of a being’s thought at all.
So Yaakov separates from Lavan; Yaakov, for his part, insists on keeping the even, the stone. Even, as we have said, is the foundation stone. And this foundation stone is av and ben — the father and the son. It is what is handed down from father to son; it is what truly forms the faithful identity of the transmission of values and of the message, what does not betray, what does not change across the course of generations and civilizations. We always study not from a translation but from the essence of the text, from the foundation. Avanim, stones, in the language of our Sages, are the otiyot, the letters.
We once explained that the stone we place on a grave when we visit a loved one is a way of saying that we faithfully keep his memory and take it upon ourselves. He took stones from that place, which is left unspecified; but we have said that this unspecified place is the place of the world, the place of the Sanctuary, the dwelling place of G-d, who is called the Place of the world: “He is the place of the world, but the world is not His place” (Bereshit Rabbah 68:9). Excuse me.
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- Parashat Vayetze: Summary, Themes and Booklet
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- Who is Rav Raphaël Benizri?