Shalom! This video is about Parshat Vayeshev. When we last left off at the end of last week, Toldot, Jacob was fleeing from his brother Esau. He just tricked his father Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing and now he was young and immature and I am sure, scared.
So the Torah portion begins with him going to sleep and he lies down on a rock and he has a dream, and he sees a ladder with the feet on the floor and the tab going to heaven and he sees angels going up and down on the ladder and he wakes up and he said “God was in this place and I, I did not know it, how awesome is this place.” And then he basically prays to God and says “If God does x, y and z for me, I will be a faithful servant”.
And the last of the Torah portion basically has him going to a family name Lavan, who has daughters Rachelle and Leah and he falls about with Rachelle and wants to marry her. Lavan gives him Leah and night, he wakes up in the morning with the wrong wife and he wants Rachelle too. He works for his father in law for over 20 years. His father now tries to cheat him, on a flax and in the end, they basically flea from Lavan to make his way in the world.
There is a lot of very interesting aspects to this about how he cheated his father and now his father in law cheats him, what goes around comes around. But I wanted to explore with you the very powerful imagery of this dream of the ladder. What does it mean to have angels going up and down, and there is a lot of different understandings in the tradition. But definitely, one of the main ways which to understand his dream is that Jacob himself was struggling with his own soul and conscience about going down, doing bad things and trying to move up on the ladder. We talk about the ladder as a metaphor for life, moving up in the ladder, gradually increasing your spiritual consciousness, increasing your prosperity, growing in all kinds of ways, growing in holiness.
And so, I think the main point here is to understand that powerful story. It has story of forces taking steps down, but always trying to climb up towards the heaven. No matter what happens in life, always keep climbing the ladder.
And then it has this very powerful sentence that God was in this place and I, it says I twice, I did not know it. In fact there is a magnificent book by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, with that title in which he teaches a lot of wonderful things with seven different rabbinic understandings of that one verse.
Now this is the middle of the Jacob narratives, we do not have any conclusions for a while, he begins to have sons with his two wives, Rachelle and Leah and then with his concubines, and he had twelve sons in all and one daughter, Dina and the stories of Jacob continue in the next Torah portion, the next week. One of the things that we are going to see is what happens when he hears that Esau is coming at him with 400 armed men and how does he get out of that? But meanwhile, in this Torah portion, it is about the consciousness of God in particular places, how do we come to that consciousness, what do we do in life that is dragging us down, we keep trying to climb that ladder, be positive, think up, think holy, elevate yourself. Parshat Vayeshev, this is wonderful Torah portion in the bible.
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