Draft Jacob's ladder- Women's Learning for Elul 8.23.21

Context for our study:

As we prepare for the High Holy Days, we are engaging in teshuva ("return" to our best selves). This week, we examine how Prayer and Study are two modes of being in ourselves, and of connecting with God.

In the spirit of teshuva, we will see how these modes are dialectic, that is, in conversation and building on one another for our entire lives:

• Sometimes we lean towards our rational brain, learning, seeking, knowing.
• Sometimes our hearts burst open in joy, or are broken open by hardship, or simply become quiet encountering all that we do not know.

How might we activate each mode -the Study self and the Prayer self- to keep our teshuva dynamic and alive?

Let's look at our texts and discuss possibilities.

JACOB:

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

T.S. Eliot, "East Coker" (quoted by Zornberg in her introduction to the texts we'll consider here)

אִ֣ישׁ תָּ֔ם יֹשֵׁ֖ב אֹהָלִֽים׃

"A (tam) wholesome/ complete/ ordinary/ innocent man who (yo-shev) dwelled/ sat in tents."

Let's look at this text paragraph by paragraph, then we'll put it all together:

Focus on the 1st paragraph

(10) Jacob left Beer-sheba [his parents' home], and set out for Haran [where is was going to seek a wife from his mother's brother's family]. (11) He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.

Notes:

Verse (11): "He came upon" can be translated literally as he "collided with" or "bumped up against the boundary" of a certain place

• "A certain place" (ha-makom) is literally translated as "the place." The Place (ha-makom) is one of the names our Jewish tradition uses for God.
• So, we can read: "He bumped up against the boundary of God." Or, "he collided with God"... (wow!)

Now, adding the rest of the verse:

...(11, continued): and stopped there for the night, as the sun had set.

Putting the possible translations together, consider some possibilities as to meanings we can surface from this line:

• ...Jacob has "bumped up against" the Divine in the dark. He has collided with his own Divine "Blind Spot"...
• ...Upon suddenly colliding with "The Place" in the darkness, Jacob "stops there for the night"
• ...he is "stopped short" by the boundary between all he knows, and what is does not (yet?) know
  • but this is phrased with an active verb - "he stopped there" in response to it having gotten suddenly dark - he is stepping into a "conversation" with this newly encountered "blind spot"

QUESTIONS

Taking a step back into our own selves

• What does it feel like to be in the literal dark? What do you do when you find yourself in the literal dark?
• How and when is the "darkness" a good thing?
• What might "darkness" symbolize in our teshuva process?
• How can we actively "stop there [in the darkness] for the night," like Jacob? How can we seek our blind spots? Why do we want to?

Focus on the 2nd paragraph

(12) He had a dream; a stairway [ladder] was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky [heaven-wards], and angels of God were going up and down on it. (13) And the LORD was standing beside him and [blessed Jacob]...

Contemporary Commentary: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (2009)

What is "it" (bo) that the angels move upon? [Zornberg now quotes Bereshit Rabba - midrash, rabbinic extrapolations-through-storytelling about the Torah:]

Rabbi Hiyya the Elder and Rabbi Yannai disagreed. One maintained: They were ascending and descending the ladder; while the other said: they were ascending and descending on Jacob. The first view is clear. ... [In the second view,] "It is you [said the angels] whose features are engraved on high;" they ascended on high and saw his features and they descended below and found [Jacob] sleeping. This can be compared to a king who was found sitting in his council chamber in judgment, while at the same time he lay asleep in the corridor.

[Zornberg resumes, commenting:]...Jacob-in-the-dream becomes a split being: on the one hand, he is the very image of ideal humanity that adorns God's throne; on the other, a sleeping body, supine, shamefully torpid.

The restless energy of the angels acquires a dissociated quality: clearly, they are agitated by these two versions, ceaselessly returning to both images in an attempt to integrate such contrary identities.

How can a king be in two places at the same time? Dignified in his council chamber and prostrate in the corridor? The split baffles the angelic imagination: angels are famously capable of fufilling only one mission at a time. Single-minded, they are ill equipped to comprehend human complexity. (p.275-6)

QUESTIONS

• Angels are limited, according to Zornberg, in their ability to comprehend or "integrate" human complexity.
  • Why then might angels be a useful image here?
  • What, if anything, might they represent within Jacob himself?
• The image of the angels on the ladder/Jacob is immediately followed by the statement that God was standing beside Jacob and blessed him. God's blessing is followed by Jacob awaking (which we'll see in the next paragraph).
  • An important mode of Torah interpretation looks at what preceeds and follows each area of the text. Here we see Angels-God's blessing-waking: what do you make of this sequence?

Focus on the 3rd paragraph

(16) Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is present in this place, and I did not know it!” (17) Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.”

Contemporary Commentary: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (2009)

Waking from sleep, Jacob senses God's presence. The midrash elaborates: with criptic restraint, it adds one letter to the word mi-shnato - "from his sleep": mi-misnato, "from his learning."

The ninetheenth- century Hasidic commentator on the Torah... the Ma'or Va-Shemesh meditates on the possible meaning of this baffling midrash. [He says:] The main elements in worship of God are study (Torah) and prayer (tefillah). These two modes are in dialectical relation: in the words of the Talmud, "An ignorant person cannot be a pious one," on the one hand; on the other, "One who says, I need nothing by Torah, has no Torah."

Splitting the spheres of Torah and prayer, intellect and piety, is impossible. A true piety involves knowledge, while intellectual knowledge uninformed by spiritual yearning is sterile and cannot even properly be called Torah. (p. 278)

QUESTIONS

• Torah and tefillah, Study and Prayer - are you drawn to one more than the other?
• When have you had a particularly powerful experience of study? Of prayer?

Putting the 3 paragraphs together

Contemporary Commentary: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (2009)

The ideal of integrity comes to include the work of integration... (p.293)

Incoherence an discontinuity compel [Jacob] beyond the limits of his conscious understanding... (p. 294)

The prayer in darkness is the essential prayer, in which a human [self/selves] too complex for easy composure- meets the divine [self]. In such a prayer, conflict, terror, culnerability- the knowledge that one is not master in one's own house- maystrangely become a source of endless life.

Contemporary Commentary: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (2009)

[In Jacob's arrival at The Place] he finds himself abrasively hurtling against that place, that darkness. A new prayer is born: arvit [Hebrew:"evening"], which represents an unimaginable possibility - that divine light can be revealed in the dark. The world of darkness, of sleep and dream, of loss of consciousness, vulnerability, passivity ...

There is no world for him other than this place: if he will not surrender to this encounter, there is nowhere else for him to go. (p.273-4)

Contemporary Commentary: Rabbi Steve Cohen, The Seven Circles

The great contemporary thinker and writer Adin Steinsaltz writes that just as we swing daily between sleep and waking, so too we need to oscillate between the two opposing modes of study and prayer.

...Study in Judaism does not mean amassing greater and greater quantities of information. Jewish study is a process of thinking, of inquiring and probing the ultimate questions of life: Who are we? What are we here for? How should we live? What can we hope for? These questions admit no final answers, and so our religion calls us to go on asking them throughout our lifetime...

In study, we question, we critique, we analyze. We ask and ask, and every question is not only permitted but encouraged. In prayer, on the other hand, we let go of our questions and step out of our critical minds. In prayer we become simple and whole-hearted.

For many of us, simplicity does not come easily. We have been raised to always question both others and ourselves, and find it almost impossible to turn off the inner voice of doubt and disbelief. But Steinsaltz’s insight may help us to see that a balanced Jewish life allows and even requires us to move constantly back and forth between the two equally essential modes of doubt and faith.

Hannah: the way of knowledge/ the prayer from silence

Whereas Jacob could be characterized by this poem...

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

T.S. Eliot

...Hannah might be characterized by this one:

In order to depart from what you know

You must go by a way which is the way of knowledge.

M.B. Steiner

Berakhot 31b (Talmud, rabbinic commentary 2-6th century BCE)

In her prayer, Hannah said: “And she swore an oath and said, Lord of Hosts [Tzeva’ot]. Rabbi Elazar said: From the day that the Holy One, Blessed be He, created His world, there was no person who called the Holy One, Blessed be He, "Lord of Hosts" until Hannah came and called Him Lord of Hosts.

This is the first time in the Bible that God is referred to by this name. Rabbi Elazar explains that Hannah said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: Master of the Universe, are You not the Lord of the Hosts, and of all of the hosts and hosts of creations that You created in Your world, is it difficult in Your eyes to grant me one son?

A parable: To what is this similar? It is similar to a flesh and blood king who made a feast for his servants. A poor person came and stood at the door. He said to them: Give me one slice of bread! And they paid him no attention. He pushed and entered before the king. He said to him: My lord, the King, from this entire feast that you have prepared, is it so difficult in your eyes to give me a single slice of bread?

Contemporary Commentary: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (2009)

The midrash [above] celebrates Hannah's unprecedented courage in calling God the God of Hosts. Her anguished need does not impoverish her imagination: she can still vividly imagine God's plentitude.

In this sense, she straddles her own poverty and God's wealth and finds a place to stand and cry out. Her prayer creates a completely personal standing place, original, as she is original. (p.96)

NOTES

• Hannah is a grown woman, courageous in her knowledge of her situation, her self, and her stance of need from God.
• She speaks to the God of Hosts (literally, "God of Armies"), from her strength to God's strength. She names God, co-creating God's identity, becoming a mother to God, perhaps.
• Rather than "bumping up against" a blind spot - a way of being that Jacob has not yet explored in himself; Hannah approaches God. Her prayer wells up from the silence within her. Her prayer is the basis for our silent Amidah, or Standing Prayer, more important to our Shabbat service than Jacob's Evening Prayer (which is still important, but secondary to the Amidah).
  • Jacob's prayer, per Zornberg, represents "an unimaginable possibility - that divine light can be revealed in the dark." Whereas the power in Hannah's prayer is that, "Her anguished need does not impoverish her imagination: she can still vividly imagine God's plentitude."

QUESTIONS

Comtemporary Commentary: Beth Weinberg (2020)

We often do not know what will come out of a practice, how it will be meaningful to us, until we are engaging in it.

Prayer as part of teshuva: the context for our study

Engaging in teshuva ("returning" to our best selves), we look to rectify the parts of our lives we know to be problematic. We also look to uncover internal blind spots keeping us from being better versions of ourselves. Indeed, it is often the case that turning towards our own broken hearts can bring about unique spiritual wholeness.

Here we look at two biblical examples of prayer: Hannah's prayer for a child, and Jacob's prayer when he "collides" with the Divine on the road at night. We will see how we might pray from a place of imagination, and also from a place of fear, disorientation, and "not knowing". We might pray from our broken heart. We may pray thereafter in praise.

There are many ways to pray, to talk with God. We will examine how the form of prayer may even be less important than that we pray at all...