Israel and the Struggle Within - Vayishlach 5773

Truth be told: I never got into wrestling. It was just never for me. No disrespect to those of you who did or perhaps still do. I had friends growing up who would come into school on Tuesday chomping at the bit to unpack all the drama of Monday Night Raw. A close friend of my brother’s would always play Jeopardy on the computer with us using the name Ric Flair. And my cousin David, as a little boy, would refer to his younger brother Jacob as Jake the Snake, while adoring, as he would say it, “Bwutus the Barber Beefcake.”

So I get it. I get the appeal as kind of a soap opera for men and boys. But it’s not for me.

The one time a year where I get into wrestling is this week. It’s this week on the Jewish calendar where we read one of the most well-known passages in all of Torah, in Parashat Vayishlach. It has been twenty years since Jacob last saw his twin brother Esau, when Jacob and his mother Rebekah conspired to steal from Esau the innermost blessing of their father Isaac. Not the first time Jacob increases his gains at his brother’s expense, Esau is a crushed and broken man, who vows to kill Jacob once their father dies.

And now, it is the night before the brothers are to see each other for the first time since that fateful day twenty years earlier. They each have brought with them all of their families, all of their servants, all of their soldiers, all of their sheep and cattle and belongings. Uncertain of Esau’s intentions, of whether he still bears on his shoulders the weight of that terrible, yet justifiable grudge, Jacob lays down to sleep by himself near the Jabbok River. But he doesn’t sleep much. Instead, we read that “a man wrestled with him until the rise of dawn.” Talk about a steel cage match; Monday Night Raw is only three hours! And it would have gone on even longer. The man says to Jacob, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But Jacob refuses, saying, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Learning Jacob’s name, the man says, “No more shall you be called Jacob, but Yisrael, Israel, for you have struggled with God and with human beings, and you have prevailed.”

This is it. This is the moment where we, as the Jewish people, get our name. We are bnei Yisrael, the children of Israel. The land promised to our ancestors as a holy land, a land flowing with milk and honey, is Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. And, of course, the modern Jewish state on that land, M’dinat Yisrael, takes its name from this story as well.

So you can imagine how recent events in that part of the world have added new layers to this powerful, seminal moment from our Torah. In the three weeks since we last gathered together, the government of Israel decided enough was enough, that 12 years and more than 12,000 long-range rockets fired upon its citizens, upon its men, women, and children, could no longer be tolerated. And so Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, a series of intricate military strikes on the storehouses of Hamas’s weapons and ammunition, as well as those masterminding and executing these terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

On the one hand, let me say this: I fully and completely support Israel’s right to defend herself and her citizens, just as I would support that same right for any nation of the world. If right now, here in New York City, we were being assailed by dozens of rockets fired from a specific location we knew, by people we had identified as terrorists bent on our destruction, do you think people here would simply turn the other cheek and let it go for 12 days, let alone 12 years? Not a chance. Imagine several times a week hearing sirens go off in your town, disrupting your attempts at making a living, your children’s schooling, your infants’ daycare, allowing you and your family, in some places, just 15 seconds to get to the nearest shelter. Imagine the onset of facial twitches and tics caused by the blare of those sirens, a post-traumatic stress disorder that never goes away because of each day’s fresh trauma, teenagers who wet their beds because over a decade of fleeing rocket attacks to a shelter has so stunted their growth that they are developmentally equivalent to toddlers. Would you want your government to sit back and do nothing beyond just hoping and praying that, somehow, it all just blows over? No. Way. Yet, in a display of astounding hypocrisy, that is exactly what so much of the world expects Israel to do. And by the way, it should be noted that Israelis, famous for not being able to agree on much of anything, were overwhelmingly in favor of this operation, to the tune of almost 90 percent.

On the other hand, there is the ever-important question underlying it all: will this help Israel make peace? Is this, in the long run, the right move? Or is the current pattern of rockets-rockets-IDF operation-cease-fire one that will beleaguer Israelis and Palestinians for years to come? After all, as my favorite music group says, “If you can heal the symptoms, but not affect the cause, you can’t heal the symptoms.” Is Israel trying to heal the symptoms without going to the heart of the issue? Will anything really be accomplished if we can’t move beyond the status quo? How can there be progress while fingers are endlessly pointed, where each side paints the other as unwilling to negotiate at best and the spawn of evil at worst?

The answer? I don’t know. But perhaps the first Israel can help us out. See, the Rabbis wanted to know, like we do: just who is this man who wrestles with Jacob? Is it some sort of messenger of God? Is it the guardian angel of Esau? Esau himself? Maybe Jacob’s entreaty to be blessed hints that it’s his father Isaac, from whom he stole the blessing meant for Esau. Maybe it’s a dream in which he grapples with all of these ghosts of his checkered past conflated into one daunting opponent.

But what I believe, what I see when I read this text, is that the man with whom Jacob struggles so passionately is none other than Jacob himself. At this crossroads of his life, both figuratively and literally, Jacob is blessed with the opportunity to reflect upon his life until now, to put himself and his deeds on trial, so to speak. His wrestling is a coming to terms with the motivations behind and the results of his actions—good, bad, and everything in between. It’s an honest and thorough evaluation of who he’s been, who he is, and who he hopes to be, in which everything is on the table and nothing is hidden away. And while he comes away physically injured, walking with a limp, we read in the verses immediately following the beautiful reunion with Esau that Jacob arrived in Shechem, the next city of his journey, shalem—whole, intact, complete, and at peace.

And so I pray that it is for us: for the State of Israel and her people to struggle amongst themselves and with their neighbors to eventually achieve a true and lasting peace. But also for all of us, all of b’nei Yisrael, the children of Israel, to learn from our shared namesake, and remember, no matter how vehemently we may disagree on the paths to peace, no matter how heated our debates and arguments may be, that it stems from the passion and fervor and love for Israel that we all share, that common bond we all feel to the depths of our hearts and souls. And I pray that, like Jacob becoming Israel, each of us, all of us, will be strengthened by the struggle, within and without, so that we arrive at our destination shalem—whole, intact, and at peace, with ourselves, with our community, and with our neighbors.

AMEN.

Supplication for Days of War

In light of the current situation of Israel and Gaza, I wanted to share these beautiful words of prayer composed by an Israeli colleague. 

"A Supplication (Tachanun) for Days of War"
By Rabbi Yoram Mazur

Our God, Who blessed our Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and our Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, bless the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and all those defenders of our people who stand on guard. Protect them and save them from all distress and anguish and grant blessing upon all the deeds of their hands. Hear our prayer and their prayer and save them.

Send Your blessing upon Your people, Lord of all worlds, to concerned mothers and pained fathers, to citizens who are banished from their homes and to children who have ceased their play. Show Your compassion for the sake of schoolchildren who sit in bomb shelters. Please remember us favorably, grant us Your salvation, and offer us Your mercy, for in You we trust.

Please, merciful God, set Your mercy upon us, and remember Your covenant, with Abraham our father, Your beloved. Spread Your shelter of peace upon the seed of Ishmael the son of Hagar and upon the children of Isaac the son of Sarah, and may the prophecy inspired by the verses in Zechariah 8:12-13, ‘But what shall be sown will prosper – The vine shall produce its fruit, the ground shall produce its yield, and the skies shall provide their moisture. I will bestow all these things upon all of them … and you shall become a blessing, have no fear,' be established for them and for us, and let us say, Amen.