Vayetze 5771 / Mending Wall

Dear Friends:

This week's parasha is Vayetze (Gen. 28:10 - 32:3).

In the triennial Torah reading we will undertake to explore this Shabbat, the final section of the parasha, Jacob has finally broken free from his indentured servitude to his father-in-law Laban. For more than twenty years, Jacob has served Laban as a shepherd, and he has prospered. Unable to come to terms of severance by which Jacob could be freed of his service to Laban, Jacob flees under the cover of night, with his family and his flocks in tow.

Laban pursues him and finally catches up, accosting him with these words: "The daughters are my daughters, and the sons are my sons, and the animals are my animals, and all that you see is mine" (Gen. 31:43).

Deciding, however, not to steal back what he believes to be "his," Laban proposes concluding a formal covenant with Jacob. Jacob sets up a stone as a monument to the agreement that Laban will no longer harass Jacob over his accumulated wealth and his wives; in further demonstration of the covenant Jacob instructs his men to set up a pile of stones that will "serve as a witness between me and you."

As I read the passage I was struck by the titular image of Robert Frost's celebrated poem, "Mending Wall" (1915, North of Boston):

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

So now that you've had a chance to reflect on these texts, consider commenting below in response to these questions:

1. Do you believe that "good fences make good neighbors?"

2. Was it a good thing that Jacob & Laban finally are able to make a firm separation, even if it meant erecting a wall of stones between them?

3. How would you apply these texts to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours without walls,

Rabbi Jonathan Blake