Vayetzei 5775

And [Leah] conceived again, and bore a son; and she said, This time will I give thanks to the Lord; therefore she called his name Judah: and she left off bearing (Gen. 29:35). This week’s Torah portion has no shortage of birth stories – eleven of Jacob’s twelve sons are born in the course of the twenty-one year span of this parshah – but Leah’s pronouncement upon the birth of her fourth son stands out: what does she mean by give thanks to the LORD? Why only now, with her fourth and final son?

For Rashi (France, 1040-1105), Leah knew through prophecy that Jacob was destined to have twelve sons. Since he had two wives and two concubines, if the sons were evenly distributed the women would give birth to three apiece. Leah’s first three sons, then, were merely what she “deserved;” with the birth of her fourth son, she recognizes that she has received something to which she was not strictly entitled, and therefore offers thanks to God.

Leah sees that, in comparison to her sister and their maidservants, she has drawn a larger share of the sons (and, therefore, social standing – if not necessarily their husband’s love), and she is grateful for her ascendance over her rivals. I have sympathy for Leah: it’s no secret that her husband loves her sister more (29:30); the Torah twice describes her as hated by her husband (29:31, 29:33) and she explicitly states her hope that bearing sons will win Jacob’s love (29:32). The Torah’s compression of this information into four consecutive verses only heightens the pain Leah must have felt. In the context of such a poisonous family atmosphere, it’s not hard to imagine Leah incessantly comparing herself to the other women in the household, fiercely competing for Jacob’s affection.

Understandable, perhaps, but not exactly uplifting. Biblical heroes are far from perfect, but we still look to them as paradigms through which we can understand the world we live in – and I am troubled by Rashi’s vision of a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog competition within the family. I take comfort, then, in the words Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (Spain, 1089-1164) imagines Leah saying at Judah’s birth: “I will give thanks to God, because I desire no more; I thank God for giving me all of this, and it is enough for me.”

The subtle but crucial difference between how Rashi and Ibn Ezra read the verse lies not in the fact of Leah’s gratitude or satisfaction, but in the means by which she develops that sense of gratitude. For Rashi, Leah thanks God for giving her more than the other women; in Ibn Ezra’s imagination, she expresses gratitude for having more than she expected for herself.

In this way, Leah anticipates the words of our Sages of Blessed Memory: “Who is wealthy? One who is satisfied with his portion” (Pirkei Avot 4.1). In Ezra’s Leah finds her gratitude, and ultimately her happiness, in herself, without comparison to others. As we join the rest of America in celebrating Thanksgiving, our parshah offers us the chance to reflect on the foundations of our own gratitude. True happiness, our tradition suggests, arises out of a sense of “enough,” knowing that our needs are met and, perhaps, we have even been graced with a little bit extra.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Thanksgiving,
Rabbi Abe Friedman

Vayetzei 5774

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