Peace and Tranquility

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, December 19, 2008

Sometimes when we come home at the end of a long day, we don’t want to do anything or go anywhere. We take off our shoes, put on our warm robe, and hope for a little peace and tranquility.

That’s how Jacob felt at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion. He had been through a lot. He had escaped from Laban and his sons, and survived the confrontation with his brother Esau. He had lost Rachel, who died on the way back to Canaan, and arrived home just in time to bury his father, Isaac. He was forced to stand by the rape of his daughter Dinah, and his sons’ ill conceived revenge while all the while Esau, his brother, is settled and thriving.

Our portion begins as “Jacob dwells in Canaan, the land where his father sojourned”. It seems that he is expecting that there would not be much more to his story. Like the narrator of a spy novel I read recently, he is hoping to retire from adventures and bore himself to death. But, of course, that is not to be.

The rabbis wondered at this, at why Jacob could not settle down peacefully, and since Jacob is also Israel, the personification of the Jewish people, they saw a great deal of significance in it.

On the one hand they viewed Jacob’s troubles as a lesson in our inability to see ourselves clearly. They taught: “A person tends to see the failures that come his way as deriving from external factors and hides from those that are of his own making.” They note that immediately after saying that Jacob wanted to settle down peacefully, the next verse begins with one word: Joseph, and that’s all you need to know. From Joseph will come turmoil and tension: aggravation to fill the rest of Jacob’s life. But it’s not really from Joseph, is it? Joseph’s story is not really any different from his father’s: sibling rivalry, estrangement, separation, parental grief. Jacob was alert to the danger from Esau. He was wide awake to the threat that Laban posed. But to the danger from within himself; he was totally asleep. 

One of the rabbis who particularly identified with Jacob and his troubled life was Don Yiztchak Abravanel, a famous Biblical commentator and leader of the Jewish community of Spain at the time of the expulsion. He was an advisor to Queen Isabella and attempted to intervene with her on behalf of the Jewish community.  We are told that just as he had convinced her to relent, the chief inquisitioner walked in and accused the queen of selling her soul for the silver the Jewish community had raised. Abravanel himself had been born in Portugal, and fled to Spain when the Portugese Jews were expelled. He knew the difficulties the Spanish Jews would be facing should the expulsion order not be rescinded. Abravanel  translates the Hebrew word migurei, as meaning not sojourning, but fear, terror. Jacob is returning to the place of his father Isaac’s terror,  the place of the Akedah. Perhaps because, for Jacob, the son of Isaac, Canaan is a fearful place, God often speaks gently to Jacob, telling him not to be afraid. 

Finally, there are still other rabbis who take a very different approach. They ask, should Jacob have been seeking peace and tranquility in the first place? Is that appropriate in a troubled world?

Rabbi Sha’ar Yashuv Cohen writes: “The sages were uncomfortable regarding the wish to live at ease. There is here a hesitation about the desire to request ease and to be enveloped in tranquility ... The words of the sages demonstrate a resistance to the idealization of ease and quietitude in the life of the righteous….. public life and involvement in mitzvoth…is not always convenient. Perhaps the righteous yearn for tranquility but it is certainly not good for the world. At a time when the whole world is embroiled in trouble, the righteous do not sit beneath a vine or fig tree, and even not in the tent of Torah and wisdom, in the study hall of Shem and Ever. The aim of the righteous is to repair the world.” 

Many of us, in the years following 9-11, following the second intifada, following the confluence of statistically unlikely events in the election of 2000, following mornings of headlines that covered the whole front page, were looking forward to some quieter years, with one column headlines. This fall it became clear that it wasn’t going to be this year. 

Like Jacob we were focused on external dangers, in our case, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and failed to appreciate the internal dangers, things that were happening here at home that would also have the potential for damaging our society. We knew the housing market could not go up forever, we talked about excessive compensation and about how much richer the richest one tenth of 1% were getting even at the expense of the richest 1%, not to mention the rest of society, but we never took a hard look at what was going on around us.

Now that we are facing difficulties, it seems every other newspaper article includes the words, “not since the great depression of the 1930’s”. We are returning to a landscape that traumatized our grandparents or parents before us. Facing that, we too are in need of the reminder “al tirah”, do not be afraid,

To me it is the commentaries which criticized Jacob’s search for tranquility, which seem to inform us best. Seeking our own welfare or that of our family alone, they remind us, is not the solution. In our tradition, the righteous do not retreat to a mountain top, to live lives of peaceful contemplation. Our prophets were intimately involved in the problems of their societies and that model has continued through the ages.

The Hassidim had a saying: a Tzadik im pelz, a tzadik in fur, What kind of tzadik, they imply, responds to the cold by covering himself in fur, rather than making a fire which will warm everyone around him? The tendency when we are frightened and stressed is to circle the wagons and to focus on protecting ourselves and our immediate families, but this will only increase our troubles. We need to see that finding solutions for ourselves is part of finding solutions for our community as well: the real solutions are the ones that don’t pit one group or one country against another, but benefit the whole.

Jeremiah’s prophecies include the words, “and Jacob shall return and be quiet and contented, and none shall disturb him.” The kabbalists insist that this is not only about a change in the world but also about a change in Jacob. When he stopped seeking ease and pleasures, stopped placing his own material and even spiritual gain as his central goal, and focused instead on the desire to mend the world, then the storm carried on its wings, the redemption of the land and the people. Ken yehi ratzon, so may it be for us, for the storm in our own time.