Vayishlach
Genesis 32:4-36:43
Hosea 11:7-12:12
Obadiah 1:1-21
For years I spent most of my workday among people facing serious illness, their loved ones and their care providers. During those years, in casual conversations I was often asked why I did this work. “Isn’t it hard? Don’t you get depressed?”
I often answered that working with the ill and their loved ones was an extraordinary teaching about the preciousness of life. Partly in jest, I would sometimes say to myself that I hoped someday to be able to treasure life just as much even without daily exposure to human mortality in its starkest form.
In recent years, I have had that opportunity. Since weeks now pass when I am not called to a hospital room, I must find ways to sustain my consciousness of the preciousness and fragility of life in other ways. And it is not easy. Many times a day, if the truth be told, I forget what is most important in life, and I fall prey to petty concerns that would be completely washed away in a moment should a phone call inform me that it was time once again to look mortality squarely in the face.
In this week’s parashah, Jacob prepares to return home to face the consequences of his devious behavior toward his brother Esau, who may well — after 20 years’ time — still be seething with murderous rage. The text tells us, “Jacob was greatly frightened and distressed” (Genesis 32:8), and he proceeded to divide his loved ones and his animals into two camps, so that if one would be attacked, at least the other might be spared. Jacob was left alone in the night to wrestle with a dark figure, perhaps his own demons, with whom he had to do battle now, before he could go forward with his journey.
The Ba’al Shem Tov asks us to read this story as a teaching for our own lives. Commenting on this verse, he says, “May a person’s fear/awe of God be always as it is in times of sorrow. At such times a person has great fear; one should sustain such fear/awe at all times.” (Sefer Ba’al Shem Tov, Parashat Vayishlach)
The teaching is paradoxical and completely counter-intuitive. Of course, in times of sorrow, trauma or loss, we are profoundly shaken, frightened by the power of forces beyond our control, acutely aware of our own powerlessness. Most of the time we cannot wait for the relief that comes after the crisis is past, particularly for the reprieve from seeing with excruciating clarity just how powerless we are. We cannot wait to leave the hospital to immerse ourselves in the ordinary stuff of life; we cannot wait to leave the cemetery, wash our hands of death and go home to our loved ones. We long to be numbed yet again to the reality of just how small a place we occupy in the universe, and how little we can understand about life.
Those who desire to see the truth and to devote their lives to service, says the Ba’al Shem Tov, must actively cultivate in ordinary times the very sense of vulnerability that shakes us to our core in times of crisis. We must actually seek to integrate a sense of frightening awe (the Hebrew yir’ah means both “fear” and “awe”) — sober, humble awareness of our finiteness — every day of our lives.
But this sober teaching has a brighter side as well. The Ba’al Shem Tov reminds us of the exquisite verse in Psalm 23: “Only goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life.” Taking the word “pursue” literally, the Ba’al Shem Tov tells us that from our limited human perspective, we often believe that we find ourselves in the midst of great fear, when actually, goodness and mercy are chasing us from behind. That is, we are not only powerless to change the things that can take from us those we love, but we are just as powerless at times to recognize when the Divine is actually moving us forward in love.
May Jacob’s fear at his moment of crisis inspire us to see our own lives more clearly and to live every day of our lives more fully in the presence of God.
Rabbi Amy Eilberg is a spiritual director in private practice.