Vayishlach 5772

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

Parashat Toldot 5771

Parashat Toldot is about what happens when brothers can't get along.

Esau and Jacob, twins, come into the world wrestling with each other, striving in Rebecca's womb. Esau emerges first. Jacob comes in a close second, grasping Esau's heel.

When the boys are grown, Esau trades his birthright for a bowl of stew prepared by his crafty brother Jacob.

Time passes and the rift between brothers only widens. As their father lies on his deathbed, Jacob approaches in the guise of his brother to receive the dying Patriarch's final benediction. Calling himself Isaac's firstborn, Jacob wrests the blessing from his brother. Now stoked into a murderous rage, Esau declares: "Let the days of mourning for my father come, and then I will kill my brother Jacob" (Gen. 27:41).

Toldot means "a family story." Sadly, too little has changed from the Bible's family stories to the "family story" of the Jewish people today. We speak often of K'lal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people; the principle is one of WRT's five pillars, core values of our Reform Jewish congregation here in Scarsdale. But too often the Jewish People acts in a manner that bespeaks all that divides us against ourselves.

I was there when they shot Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin fifteen years ago today, November 4th, 1995.

It was my first year of rabbinical school and I was living in Jerusalem not even three blocks from the Prime Minister's residence. Some of my classmates in fact attended the peace rally where last he spoke in Kikar Malchei Yisrael, since renamed Kikar Rabin, "Rabin Square."

The hours that followed plunged the little nation into anguish and turmoil. Eager to implicate the Palestinians, we learned within a day the lone assassin’s name—Yigal Amir. A Jew. A religious extremist, to be sure, but a brother nonetheless. We saw in the horror of our realization Esau and Jacob intertwined once more in their unending, murderous dance.

The image that haunts me most comes from the day after the assassination. A young man sat silently cross-legged in the most crowded square in Jerusalem. Around his neck he wore a sign, and on the sign a single Hebrew word in blood-red paint: BUSHAH. "SHAME."

The next day the man was gone, the sign with him. But fifteen years later you can still find the same extremist yeshivas—indeed, with more students—the same extremist rabbis like the kind who encouraged Amir, many of them further entrenched in West Bank settlements surrounded by millions of Palestinians, proclaiming that their version of Jewish law takes precedence over the democratic law of Medinat Yisrael. In moments of strife, Jews continue to call other Jews “Nazis," as the Gaza pullout illustrated a few years ago; they scream the word, just like they did about Rabin at a rally I had watched from my apartment terrace one week before his murder.

"Let the days of mourning for my father come, and then I will kill my brother Jacob" (Gen. 27:41).

How little has changed.

Your comments go here.

Rabbi Jonathan Blake