Vayetze — The Flight to Haran

This time it is Yaakov who leaves Beer Sheva to go to Haran. Now, we already raised the question last week: in the preceding chapter, at verse 7, the text says that he listened to the counsel of his father and his mother and went to Paddan Aram. Why, then, does the text need to take up Yaakov’s departure again, to bring it into relief? The midrash does not hesitate to say that this departure of Yaakov’s was problematic. May one leave Israel because one is afraid to remain there, because one does not feel safe? May one prefer life in Haran and run the risk of truly losing one’s identity? What will become of him once he goes to Haran?

We are told, then, that Yaakov, although he had received the blessing of his father and his mother, was not at ease. He goes to put the question to Shem and Ever. Shem and Ever are the authorities of that age: they are the ones who preserved this identity of the Ivri, the Hebrew, despite the dor haflagah — the dispersion, the breaking-up of humanity into different peoples, into seventy peoples. They, however, remained faithful to this Hebrew identity and sought to transmit it through the family of Avraham. Now, to clarify this departure — whether or not it was justified — took him fourteen years. For fourteen years he remained in the yeshivah of Shem and Ever, and one may ask why so long: because one is never armed enough to undertake such a journey.

He has several aims. The first is to escape the pursuit of his brother Esav; the second is to look for a wife, since he cannot take a Canaanite woman — which would indeed mortgage his future identity. But Yaakov must also think of returning from his exile with Lavan with far more self-assurance, so as to be able to confront Esav. He has not given that up. Let us not forget that he is the third patriarch, and as such it is upon him that the dimension of Israel devolves. The dimension of Israel is different from that of Yaakov. The dimension of Yaakov is, if you will, an “Israeli” dimension — a national dimension, a nationality in its own right. That of Israel, by contrast, is a spiritual identity. It is what confers on him the title of Adam, the universal title of Adam. It is what projects him toward a new humanity of which he would be the pioneer. Yaakov must become Israel, and that is the reason he arms himself with two blessings.

The blessing of Avraham and the blessing of Yitzchak. What is the difference between these two blessings? The blessing of Avraham tears him away from the daily round of life and turns him toward a heavenly vision. G-d brings him outside — “Look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them… so shall your offspring be.” The offspring that G-d expects of Avraham is an offspring that aspires toward heaven, toward a celestial height — toward spirituality, that is. But must man be torn away from life here below? No! There will be a second blessing, and this time it is Yitzchak’s.

Yitzchak’s is ka’afar ha’aretz, “like the dust of the earth.” You will be involved in the development of the earth, in all the problems inherent in everyday life, and you will be Israel only by having the voice of Yaakov while using the hands of Esav. The voice of Yaakov is wholly spiritual; the hand of Esav is practical — material, in short. What is Israel? Israel is being at once Yaakov and Esav. But it is difficult to achieve that in a foreign land. So Yaakov is not content even with the wise counsel he received from Shem and Ever. He also goes to ask the question of the Holy One, blessed be He.

He pours himself out in prayer. Which prayer? The prayer of the declining day. The morning prayer is the one that Avraham instituted; it is the beginning. It is entirely tinged with hesed, with kindness: in the morning we give thanks to the Holy One, blessed be He, for the possibilities He offers us. It is the starting point of the day, and we begin it within the precinct of kindness. Yaakov — Yitzchak, rather — instituted the prayer of Minchah. Minchah is the goal. How are we going to end the day? What have we done with our time? What have we done with our life? It is the hour of reckoning. If the morning prayer bears the seal of middat ha-hesed, the attribute of kindness, that of Minchah is middat ha-din, the attribute of justice: one must render an account.

Avraham’s prayer is the one that aspires to break free of conditioning by the laws of nature, and Yitzchak’s is that of a man who concentrates his whole life upon an altar. And where does Yaakov stand? Yaakov stands in the span of time between heaven and earth, between Shacharit and Minchah. Paradoxically, his is Arvit — his is the night. Yes, but Yaakov needs mercy; he needs hashgachah peratit, an exceptional providence. And that is why the text specifies Vayetze Yaakov mi-Be’er Sheva, “Yaakov went out from Beer Sheva”: in principle his father was not in Beer Sheva, but Yaakov passed through Beer Sheva because that is where the yeshivah of Shem and Ever stood. There he tried to strengthen himself to face the life of exile, because he is indeed afraid of failure.

What failure? That of the Exodus from Egypt. How many people came out of Egypt? A fifth of the people. The other four-fifths preferred not to leave. Here the problem is always that of emunah. What is faith? It is precisely to bring our principles of life — our rules of life, our principles — into accord with reality. When we are confronted with the very thing we have been waiting for, are we capable of giving up everything and answering the call? Yes, the Jewish people in Egypt had certainly affirmed its Judaism in every form. But when Moshe came to tell them that the Holy One, blessed be He, had decided to bring them out of Egypt and lead them to the Land of Israel, so that at last they would be Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel, and not merely […]

— four-fifths of them could not carry it through. Judaism is not a matter of abstract principles of belief, of the philosophical positions of this one or that one; it is rather a matter of making this emunah concrete — this faith, this expectation. And the prayer that puts this emunah and this expectation to the test is the prayer of Arvit. We know that this exile of Yaakov with Lavan for twenty years was already a prefiguration of the exile of the Jewish people in Egypt. And just as Yaakov came out of Lavan’s house with the structure, the framework, of a complete family, the same thing will come to pass at the Exodus from Egypt: the Jewish people lost four-fifths of its number, but it realized its structure as Beit Yisrael, the House of Israel.

This structure of the House of Israel needs to ripen, to reach maturity. We must always bear in mind that when the Holy One, blessed be He, promises things in the Torah, from the moment the promise has been made they are already on their way to fulfilment. The question is how man will respond to these promises. Perhaps he is not ready; perhaps he does nothing to deserve them. So the time that passes between the promise and its reality is the time that we ourselves lose on the way to the fulfilment of these promises. And that is why we find ourselves plunged into the night. Now, there is no mitzvah specific to the night. You know that on Pesach we say Mah nishtanah ha-laylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot — “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Why do we ask this question? Quite simply because there is no mitzvah of the night. All the mitzvot are concentrated in the course of the day, and the night sometimes completes what we did not do. But on Pesach, ve-laylah ka-yom ya’ir — “the night shines like the day” — and it is regarded as day.

Leil shimurim — it is a night of watching, and so it has a particular story, the story of the Haggadah: the story, of course, of reliving that Exodus from Egypt. This passage through the night is problematic. You know, there is an attribute of G-d designated by the word Makom: Baruch ha-Makom, baruch hu — “Blessed be the Makom, blessed be He.” The Makom is an attribute of G-d. Now, makom means space. Ein lecha davar she-ein lo makom — “There is nothing that has no place.” No object can exist without its space; nothing can hang in mid-air. Space is what gives real existence to the object, to every thing. From it comes the verb kayem, to sustain, to cause to exist. So when we say Baruch ha-Makom, baruch hu, it means: blessed be the One who ensures the existence of all things — yet He Himself takes in all of creation. He is the place of the world, but the world is not His place. The Makom is the place that grounds the existence of every being. Indeed, it is the custom in the Ashkenazi world, when one comes to offer condolences to a mourner, to say not the Name but the word ha-Makom, to show that this man who has left this world no longer has a makom — but there is another Makom, the One who encompasses every place, who is mekomo shel olam, the place of the world. It is He who will support you at this moment.

Now, we say that the makom par excellence is Mount Moriah, the place where the Temple was built, because it is the cord to which all creation is bound. It is the starting point of creation; it is the matrix of the whole of creation. From there all of space unfolded, and for that reason this place is space in concentrated form. It is there that the Holy One is enthroned, above the Tablets of the Law, represented by the keruvim, the cherubim — a masculine face and a feminine face — which represent Knesset Yisrael, the Assembly of Israel. So it is with Yaakov that this notion, this dimension of Makom, will appear, because he made this world habitable for G-d: he joined heaven and earth, and in the space that separates heaven and earth he set up a ladder.

Sulam… malachei Elokim olim ve-yordim bo — “a ladder… and angels of G-d ascending and descending on it.” And our Sages specified that Avraham placed the Holy One, blessed be He, on a mountain — very high, that is, but not habitable. Yitzchak called it a sadeh, a field: it exists for its own sake, but it must always be worked if it is to yield anything. Yaakov has this distinction: he transformed this world into a bayit, a house. And in a sense he made possible, in this makom, the meeting of man and the Holy One, blessed be He. And that is why the verse says Vayetze Yaakov mi-Be’er Sheva, and he went toward Haran. He is going, admittedly, to a place where the wrath of G-d had settled.

In the same way, when a righteous man leaves a place, one sees what seal he has left there, what aura he has left behind. And of course this is said of the place he leaves; but the place at which he arrives — it is another way of honouring it, another way of crowning it, of giving it a makom, an attribute of makom, of making it habitable. And our Sages drew a connection: when Moshe left Pharaoh, it was in order to consult G-d, to seek His will. Here too, before leaving Beer Sheva, Yaakov wants to seek G-d’s will, and that is vayifga ba-makom. The second verse of the parashah tells us that he encountered the Makom.

He encountered the Makom? One does not “encounter” a place, does one? No — our Sages say that here pegi’ah, “encounter,” means tefillah, prayer. He insisted on receiving a divine revelation attesting that he would return from this expedition safe and sound. And this prayer bears the seal of the night. We said that the night is […]. We light up the night artificially because we are afraid to remain in the dark. At night we are powerless. At night we implore G-d’s mercy. By day we can discover the world with our eyes; at night we grope, we discover the world with our hands. There is thus an enormous danger in this going-out of man from his place.

Do you know who was condemned to exile? The one guilty of an unintentional killing. He was assigned a place where he could take refuge, for fear of being pursued in a spirit of vengeance by one of the members of the victim’s family. Cain, who killed his brother: na va-nad tihyeh va-aretz — “a wanderer and a fugitive shall you be on the earth.” That is to say, the very nature of this space in which we live, which belongs to us, can indeed condemn us to exile, quite simply because we denied someone else his own space — we emptied it. […] We must understand that every person is irreplaceable, every person has a mission to fulfil, and I cannot take his place. I can be a memale makom — and memale makom means a stand-in, doesn’t it? — doing what someone else was unable to accomplish or to finish; there can be various reasons for that. There can even be a makom in the sense of a place of thought.

There is a makom, a place of thought — but that is another register. At the outset, each person has his own makom, which is what allows him to live. But this makom that is his own, he may lose through his own fault […]. And we say: u-mipnei chata’enu galinu me-artzenu — “because of our sins we were exiled from our land.” There is a correspondence between the Makom and the Name — in numerical value, moreover. Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh. Take the square of the Yud: ten times ten, one hundred — multiplying by ten, you have exhausted all the possibilities. Likewise with the Heh: five times five, twenty-five; with the Vav, six times six, thirty-six.

When you add up the squares of the letters of the Name — Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh — you obtain the total, the gematria of Makom. The gematria, the numerical value, of Makom is 186, and the sum of the squares of Yud, Heh, Vav, Heh is likewise 186. That is to say, this notion of Makom is truly a conduit of spirituality between man and his living space. That is what makes it their meeting point. Now, this happens only by day, as we said. But the night, as we said, corresponds to exile. Man is in exile at night because he is unable to act, unable to take in the whole; groping, one can touch only scattered fragments of the world around us. Even if we light up our surroundings, we remain within a very narrow beam of light. But there is an advantage in the night: when I am left to myself, when I am rethinking myself in that state of solitude — provided I am driven by a certain spark — I can already arm myself with new energies. Let us not forget that in the Hebrew calendar the day begins at night. It is the night that launches me toward the day, toward awakening — not the other way round. I do not end my day in the night; at night I begin a new day.

The night is charged with a project for the future. That is indeed what our Sages said, in the words of Shmuel: whoever has not recited emet ve-yatziv in the morning and emet ve-emunah in the evening has not fulfilled his obligation. That is, whoever does not acquit himself in the morning of reciting emet ve-yatziv — the thanksgiving for all the kindnesses, for all the favours that have come to him — and does not affirm in the evening, through emet ve-emunah, his faith in the events to come, in the miracles to come, in the providence to come, has not fulfilled his obligation. And that is how the Sages explain the words “he spent the night there.”

It is there that he utters this evening prayer of man, when the space before him has shrunk and he can see […]; he can fall back on nothing but his faith, and that is what gives him the strength to go and undertake his life […]. And there, too, our Sages said of ki va ha-shemesh, “for the sun had set”: it is not that the sun set — the Holy One, blessed be He, caused the sun to set. He wanted Yaakov to stay, and the Sages gave a parable. When a king wants to be alone with his favourite, beloved minister, he puts out the lights. That means he truly wants to speak with him in intimacy. And here it is a matter of that conversation which emboldens Yaakov to go out into the wider world. Why? Because without it he could not lay claim to the title of Israel; he could not be Adam. And this, I believe, is the path of Yaakov Avinu, who, in the night of exile into which, after much hesitation, he commits his life — vayikach me-avnei ha-makom, “he took of the stones of the place.” The stones of the place were twelve in number, say the Sages.

These are the stones that will, in sum, constitute the founding elements of the Jewish people. Vayasem mera’ashotav — he placed them around his head — in order to protect himself from wild beasts; we shall look at that next time. […] He spends the night there, he will receive the revelation he asked for, and that is what will give him the strength to undertake this expedition into the world of Lavan. Now, the world of Lavan is the one that jealously guarded the title…