Limmud On One Leg
Written by Ben Rich Thursday, 01 December 2011
Ben Rich is this week's contributor for Limmud On One Leg, a weekly Torah e-mail from a selection of educators who have taught at Limmud events. Ben will be presenting again at this year's Limmud Conference.
My wife is called Rachael. I will always be grateful that my father-in-law did not make me first marry her older brother.
Va'yetze deals with the story of Jacob's marriage to Rachel and his travels after tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright. The most striking passage in the parasha describes Jacob's dream as he sleeps at Beit-el near the Canaanite border. In it, he sees angels ascending and descending a great ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:10-15).
There are numerous rabbinic interpretations of this dream from the physical (that the angels that dwell in Canaan cannot leave the land and so need to be replaced by a new 'guard' (Rashi)) to the metaphysical (God is aware of everything we do (Ibn Ezra)).
My four year-old son thinks he is a superhero (Captain Barnacles from the Octonauts). According to him, superheroes live (quite understandably) in superhero land, which - in his mind - is clearly quite close to heaven. From nowhere over the weekend, he announced that he knew the difference between superheroes and God: "superheroes sometimes come to our country, but God stays in the sky".
It seems to me that the story of Jacob’s dream goes to the heart of my son’s distinction. The God we see in Va'yetze is ready to intervene directly to protect Jacob wherever he goes: to guard him and never abandon him. For example, when Jacob flees his father-in-law with his family to return home, Laban pursues him intent on punishing him (Genesis 31-32). God then directly appears to Laban in a dream and warns him not to "attempt anything with Jacob, good or bad."
This is God as superhero, intervening to "Protect!" and "Rescue!" as Captain Barnacles would say. This God, who appears throughout Genesis and has direct relationships with Patriarchs and Matriachs, is, however, an uncomfortable model for today. A God able and willing to directly intervene in the affairs of men and women is culpable for the Shoah, 9/11, war and the seemingly growing number of natural disasters.
Just as the ladder of Jacob’s dream provides a bridge between earth and heaven tying them together, it is also a symbol of their separateness and of distance. So it also links ancient and modern understandings of God's relationship with our world.
Today's relationship with God needs to be more sophisticated. God 'guides' me, but there remains a distance between the world of heaven and the world of people. I cannot and do not expect direct intervention.
Va'yetze is a metaphysical reminder that our thoughts and actions are all observed and understood by an omniscient God, but, more importantly for me, it provides an early trailer of the post-biblical God in which the responsibility for those thoughts and actions lies with us. As do their consequences.
And that, I explain to my son, is the difference between God and Captain Barnacles.
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