Vayishlach: December 5, 2020/19 Kislev 5781

When I started out on this project to post a weekly d'var Torah, there were a couple of weeks for which I was looking forward to writing. This is one of them, sort of. I wasn't 100% sure of when I would work this topic in, but this week seems like the right place. This week's parashah is Vayishlach, and in it, Jacob, along with his entire camp, prepares to meet Esau and his entourage. After sending ahead livestock as a peace-offering to his brother, Jacob sends his family across the Yabbok River, but before he can follow them, he is accosted by a mysterious figure who wrestles with him all night. Jacob's opponent is understood by commentators to have been an angel, likely Esau's guardian angel, but angel or not, he cannot defeat Jacob, even after magically dislocating Jacob's hip. To earn his freedom, the angel gives Jacob a blessing, and, like his grandfather, a meaningful renaming. “Your name," the angel says, "shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.” The new name, Israel, means "He struggles with God," and that is perhaps the greatest inheritance of the tribes descending from Jacob. Struggling with God, with religion, and with mitzvot is one of the things that I love most about Judaism, and it's what helped me reconnect to my own Jewishness after a long period of disconnection.

What does it mean to struggle with God, and moreover, how can one prevail in such a struggle? Is that really something a person or a nation can do? God is the Master of the Universe, right? So how can we prevail over God? We struggle with God every time we try to understand what it is that God wants from us. We have all these different rules. Rules for how to eat, how to wear clothes, how to plant our fields, when to work, when not to work. The written Torah is not always clear. But we're covered there because Judaism doesn't do sola scriptura. We approach the Torah's words through layers and layers of commentaries, interpretations, and commentary on the interpretations. Our tradition teaches us that Moses received not just the Written Torah on Mount Sinai, but also a corpus of explanations, the Oral Torah. Today, the Oral Torah is preserved in the Talmud, and, if you've never opened a page of Talmud, well, it's an experience. You've got Rabbis arguing with one another, often coming to multiple mutually-exclusive conclusions, tangents on seemingly irrelevant topics. Reading it, one quickly realizes that the stereotype of Jews entering the legal profession is not without basis - our entire religion is based on legal minutiae and corner cases. You can violate Shabbat to cut down a tree to make charcoal to fire the forge to make a scalpel in order to circumcise a baby whose eighth day of life is Shabbat, but what if that baby was born by C-section? What if the baby is born without an anus? What if it doesn't urinate? (you can't violate Shabbat for a C-section bris, you locate the thin portion of the skin where the opening should be and make an incision, and you shake the baby in a sieve, respectively). It's just a series of debates and arguments spanning eight centuries. And this is the basis for our religion. But aside from some of the crazy tangents, the Talmud also provides us with a great parable for understanding our human role in understanding the Torah. 

There is a famous story in the Talmud where the Sanhedrin is debating whether a specific type of oven is susceptible to ritual impurity. The entire assembly agrees that the oven is impure, except for Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus. Now, Rabbi Eliezer was very conservative in his rulings but was highly respected by even those colleagues who disagreed with him. He was, in some ways, the Antonin Scalia of his time. In any case, he was outvoted, but he continued to argue his position, with miracle after miracle seeming to back him up - streams flowed backward, trees bent themselves, the walls of the study hall started to fall. Finally, a voice from heaven came down and said "Rabbi Eliezer is right. He is always right." And the majority admonished God that, with all due respect, He is outvoted, as the Torah is not in heaven. We were given the Torah, and now it's ours to wrestle with. A few months ago, I told this story to a user on Reddit who was in the process of coming to Judaism after having been raised by Messianic (but actually Jewish) parents. She wanted to jump in head first to observance, but she didn't understand how Halakha actually works, and she was dumbfounded by the idea of a wide variety of rulings and positions existing for just about everything. Now, I wish I could take credit for this response, but another member of the community gave, in my opinion, one of the best and most succinct summations of the difference between how Jews seek to serve God and how other religions do so: "We don’t decide what to do by what pleases God, we decide what pleases God by figuring out what to do." That is the key to Judaism. It's not about just believing and, while doing is important, just blindly doing mitzvot is not the essence of Judaism. It's important to understand the laws, both in letter and in spirit, so that we can act as effective partners for God in the great endeavor that is called Judaism.

For me, the thing that makes Judaism great is that there is rarely one answer to anything. We don't just look at a source and go, "Aha, see, this is the correct way." We can say, "here is that source, but there is also another source which says something else, and it also raises a potential third position" (as the saying goes, two Jews means three opinions). We rely on rabbis to guide us through the process of understanding halakha, but it isn't that they have some sort of mystical spiritual power to divine God's commandments. Rabbis are scholars, just as much as they are counsellors or pastoral figures, trained in interpreting halakha. Just because they make Torah their profession does not make them infallible, nor does it mean that only they should occupy themselves with learning and interpreting it. Any Jew can learn Torah (in the broad sense of the word, not just the Five Books), and there is something for everyone in it. As Ben Bag Bag tells us in the fifth chapter of Pirkei Avot, "Turn it over, and turn it over again, for everything is in it". Last Rosh Hashanah (5780/2019), my brother and I were talking at lunch to an individual who is on the committee at his synagogue tasked with attracting millennials, and, seeing as we are both millennials, he wanted our opinion. What we told him was probably not the simple, direct answer he was hoping for. What we told him was that, like for any age group, every person is different. Some people are going to be attracted to ritual, tradition, and learning. Others are looking for community, and yet others are looking for opportunities to engage with the wider world. And more realistically, everyone's looking for different combinations of things. 

At the Pesach Seder, we read in the Hagaddah about four types of children, each with its own question, alluded to in the Torah's description of telling the story of the Exodus. There's a wise child, a wicked child, a simple child, and one who does not know how to ask. Now, the text of the Haggadah does list everything out with quotes from the Torah, but the tradition in my family was to replace that with a song, "The Ballad of the Four Sons", to the tune of "Darling Clementine". The whole allegory, while applicable to Pesach, can be extended to Judaism in general. And just as important as recognizing the different types of questions is knowing how to answer them in a way that best serves the needs of the questioner. The wise child, in the song, asks "will you please explain the laws? All the customs of the Seder, will you please explain their cause?". In contrast, the simple child asks simply, "what is this?". If one were to answer the simple question with all the minute details of the laws, the answer would fall flat, as the simple child is neither ready for nor interested in that sort of an answer. In the same way, the wise child is not going to appreciate the simple answer, because they are looking for depth. For the fourth child, who does not know how to ask, we are told to open up to them, and this is important too. Someone who is not able to ask questions, whether due to inability to ask or a lack of background on which to base questions, needs to be guided, but the teacher must understand how the student learns in order to best impart their knowledge.

There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 14.7 million Jews in the world, and that means at least that many different ways of being Jewish, and we have to recognize that even those whose Judaism looks different to ours are still heirs to their own legal and spiritual tradition. How do you Jew?