Stones and Strife
In this week’s parashah, Vayetzei, Jacob travels from the Land of Israel to his mother’s hometown in search of a wife and a safe distance from his angry brother. Along the way, he stops for the night and the Torah tells us וַיִּקַּח מֵֽאַבְנֵי הַמָּקוֹם וַיָּשֶׂם מְרַֽאֲשֹׁתָיו, he took from among the stones of the place and placed beneath his head (Gen. 28:11). From the way this verse is written, it is hard to know how many of the stones Jacob took. Some commentators look to verse 18, in which Jacob awakens and removes the stone from beneath his head, and conclude that Jacob took only a single stone from among the stones of the place. Others give greater weight to the verse here, suggesting that he gathered multiple stones and arranged them into a kind of shelter; the later verse, they argue, is to be understood as a generalization.But there is a third approach, found in a midrash (Hullin 91b): according to this midrash, Jacob gathered twelves stones — representing the twelve tribes that would issue from his descendants — to make his resting place for the night. Immediately, each stone began vying with one another for the privilege of being the stone upon which Jacob would rest his head; a miracle occurred, and the twelve stones fused into a single stone, ending the conflict between the tribes.
And yet, throughout the story of our people, the tribes continue to jockey with one another, using their unique skills and abilities to set themselves apart from their fellow tribes! So what is this midrash trying to teach us?
No matter where we turn — whether family, workplace, Jewish community, or American society — we encounter diverse perspectives, conflicting interests, and competition for the “best” place within the group. We lament this difficult state of affairs, longing for a situation in which conflict would disappear and harmony would reign.
But the Torah does not actually advocate a complete elimination of conflict; instead, our tradition asks us to work through — not avoid — our disagreements. As Roger Fisher and Scott Brown of the Harvard Negotiation Project write, “It would be a mistake to define a good relationship as one in which we agree easily... the working relationship... is one that produces a solution that satisfies the competing interests as well as possible... in a way that appears legitimate in the eyes of each of the parties” (Getting Together, 5, 8-9). In other words, we must become like the stones, like the tribes: uniting as one, while still retaining our individual perspectives. Fisher and Brown challenge us to stop seeing people with different perspectives as adversaries to be conquered, and instead to see ourselves as “two partners facing the future, side by side” (6). Theirs is an approach that the Torah would heartily endorse, a vision our ancestral tribes attempted to live by, and the challenge parashat Vayetzei sets before us.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Abe Friedman
