Torah Posting: ויצא
Ya’akov has barely set out from his father’s house — having just received his second blessing, all divinely ordained deceptions apparently forgiven — when we learn he is the synthesis.
Ya’akov’s father, Yitzhaq, drew his spiritual sustenance from the manifest material world. He loved his red meat, he loved his eldest son, ’Esav the hunter, and he loved his wife, Rivkah, most of all. You might not even suspect there were anything wrong with this, except that the previous parashah makes clear that God wants to correct this tendency. God wants Ya’akov — the quieter, stranger son — to receive his father’s blessing, not the brutish ’Esav, and God works through Rivkah to bring this about. What is the reason for this?
I posit that it is because Yitzhaq is the antithesis. He is the middle step, the unfinished business of the establishment of this lineage. Yitzhaq’s worldliness and love of comfort is a reaction against his father, Avraham, leaver of homes and climber of mountains, who with heavenward eyes and transcendental zeal tried to offer up his beloved son, Yitzhaq, as a burnt offering, as Avraham believed God was demanding of him. Avraham’s unique derangement from his unprecedented encounter with the Divine was the thesis. Yitzhaq’s antithesis was necessary to protect the human heart of the lineage. But now, through secret prophecies and maternal transmissions, Ya’akov has overcome his father’s trauma response and become the synthesis.
Ya’akov sets out from Be’er Shev’a, and when the Sun sets, he takes a stone for his pillow and goes to sleep. He dreams of a ladder with its base on the Earth and its head up in Heaven, and the Divine Messengers are going up and down it.
The synthesis between Heaven and Earth.
And from the top of the ladder, the God of Ya’akov’s fathers speaks to him and tells him of the great lineage God has planned for him in this land. God even adds that “ונברכו בך כל–משפחת האדמה ובזרעך” — “and in you and your seed all the earthling families will be blessed.” And God promises to be with him in his sojourns until this promise is fulfilled.
When Ya’akov awakens from this dream, he says, “יש יהוה במקום הזה ואנכי לא ידעתי” — “The LORD is in this place, and I did not know!” And Ya’akov felt the fear that is the beginning of knowledge. Before he leaves the place, he makes an altar out of the stone he used as a pillow. He anoints it with oil, and he calls the place בית–אל, House of God.
Then Ya’akov makes an interesting vow — a conditional vow. IF, he says, God will be with him and sustain him through this crazy adventure as God said God would, THEN יהוה shall be his God.
The Synthesis is not a man of blind faith.
Ya’akov’s next encounter is at a well in a field, a place reminiscent of the love story of his father, Yitzhaq. Three flocks of sheep are by the well, which is blocked up by a stone. Ya’akov asks the shepherds where they come from, and they reply they are from Haran, the place of Rivkah’s brother, Lavan, where Ya’akov is going to find a wife. In fact, the shepherds say, here comes Lavan’s daughter, Rahel, with the sheep. Ya’akov asks them to water the flock, and they give him some crap about how it’s not time yet, he rolls the stone off the well’s mouth himself.
This gives Ya’akov and Rahel a chance to meet. He kisses her and raises his voice and weeps. Then he explains himself, and hearing he is Rivkah’s son, Rahel runs off to tell her father, Lavan, that Ya’akov has come.
Lavan appears thrilled, and he brings Ya’akov into his home for a month. At that point, Lavan begins to be curious what it is Ya’akov wants, exactly, in exchange for the help he has offered around the house. At this point we learn Lavan has two daughters. Of his elder daughter, Le’ah, all we hear at first is ועיני לאה רכות, her eyes are weak. It is implied that Rahel is the fairer daughter. Ya’akov is so taken with Rahel, in fact, that he offers to serve Lavan for seven years in exchange for her hand. Lavan agrees.
The text says the seven years seemed but a few days to Ya’akov because he loved Rahel so much. However, when the time is up, and Ya’akov asks Lavan to let them go and be married, Lavan throws a big feast, and in the ensuing madness, he brings Le’ah to Ya’akov instead, and Ya’akov “went in to her,” which, for these cultural purposes, means they are de facto married.
This is a pretty uncool thing all around, and it’s a good opportunity to get into the topic of misogyny in the Torah.
A friend of mine objected to the way I characterized the story of Lot and his daughters because it seems impossible from our contemporary lens that the text’s explanation — that the daughters got their father drunk and took advantage of him — could really have been what happened. My response was, we can object to what the Torah says whenever we want, but we can’t object to what it doesn’t say. If it says this is what happened, then for our purposes of contending with this text, it’s what happened. So my interpretation of the situation with Lot’s family is that it’s a story about general depravity and wickedness, and the drunken incest part is sort of the culminating moment of demonstrating that Lot’s family is susceptible to it, as though to contrast them further with Avraham, who is not.
Here, though, we have an outright case of men treating a woman as inanimate property, to whom only property laws apply. Lavan is the deceiver here for sure; he’s just doing this for financial gain, basically. But Ya’akov’s response is just to get mad at Lavan. He expresses no interest in Le’ah despite being married to her now.
Here’s the thing. Men have power in this society. They get to act straightforwardly and do what they want. But that doesn’t mean this is the morality the Torah unambiguously supports. We have already seen the way women maneuver in the liminal spaces to make sure the right thing happens. You can’t read the Torah expecting this Bronze Age society to suddenly become feminist. You just have to watch the action and see what happens, to see what the consequences are for humans being humans in this utterly human story about the Divine.
So let’s see what happens here.
Ya’akov asks Lavan why he tricked him, and Lavan says it simply isn’t done around here that the younger daughter would get married before the firstborn, so if Ya’akov wants to marry Rahel, he has to work another seven years, and then he can marry her as well. This comes to pass, and now Ya’akov is surrounded by women: Le’ah, her handmaid, Zilpah, Rahel, and her handmaid, Bilhah.
Ya’akov clearly loves Rahel more than Le’ah, and God does not like this, so God allows Le’ah to conceive first. She names her son Re’uvein — “Look! A son!” — and gives a sad reason: Le’ah hopes that Ya’akov will love her more now that she has borne him a son. Then Le’ah conceives again and bears another son, whom she names Shim’on, from the word “hear.” After two sons named for appealing to her husband’s senses, Le’ah’s third son is Levi, my heart. And finally, Le’ah bears Yehudah, a name that means “praise,” which she gives him because she praises the Lord when he is born. To me the significance of this is clear from the names: At first, Le’ah belittles herself before her husband who did not want her, but by the end, she is full of joy for her sons — and God’s favor to her — and her husband no longer weighs on her in this matter.
How are things going with Ya’akov and Rahel? Not great. Rahel is envious and blames Ya’akov for her infertility, saying she will die if he does not give her children. Ya’akov throws up his hands in anger at her and blames God. We know from our omnipresent narrator that God did in fact do this, but God did it because Ya’akov hated Le’ah. Now he’s mad at Rahel, too. This is sure going great so far.
Rahel’s idea is for Ya’akov to have children with her handmaid, Bilhah, whose children will count as Rahel’s, sort of? And this works, and as Rahel names the sequence of sons borne by Bilhah, she seems to frame it as a contest with her sister. Le’ah, who had stopped conceiving, rises to the challenge and gives Zilpah to Ya’akov, too, and the family keeps busting out sons.
At this point, the sons begin to help. Re’uvein gathers some mandrakes — fertility medicine — and brings them to Le’ah. Rahel, who has still not borne a son herself, asks Le’ah to give the mandrakes to her. Le’ah is shocked by this request. First you took my husband, and now you want my mandrakes, too? And Rahel concedes. Then Le’ah has a bunch more kids, including a daughter, finally — Dinah.
After all this, God lets up on Rahel, and she conceives and gives birth to Yosef.
At this point, Ya’akov says to Lavan, “Look, bro. I am exhausted. Let me and my dozens of dependents go home now, please.” And Lavan begins to release Ya’akov from this extremely long servitude, through which Ya’akov has made him quite wealthy. Lavan asks Ya’akov what wages he wants to be sent away with, and Ya’akov says, “It’s okay, buddy. Just let me walk through the flocks today and pick all the speckled and spotted ones, and that’ll be fine. That way, when you’re sending me off, you’ll know any animals without speckles and spots are supposed to be yours, not mine.”
Lavan thinks this all sounds very fair, and he puts all the plain white and brown animals in the care of his sons and separated those flocks from the speckled ones in Ya’akov’s care by three days’ travel.
As soon as he’s in the clear, Ya’akov gathers some plants and peels white streaks in them, and he puts this magic into the watering troughs. This causes the flocks to bear speckled and spotted offspring. And Ya’akov keeps doing this day after day, and he only puts out the magic plants when the strong animals are around; when the feeble ones come, he removes them. So through some magic and shepherding skills, Ya’akov raises a massive and hardy flock, and Lavan’s becomes small and weak.
Lavan’s sons are dishonored, and Lavan gets pretty pissed off at Ya’akov, but Ya’akov surely feels entitled to a little more trickster energy after what Lavan has put him through.
God has seen enough now and sends Ya’akov back to the land of his fathers with his unbelievably huge family.
Ya’akov circles up with his wives and says, “Look, your father is pissed at me now. But you know how hard I worked for him, and how he deceived me, and yeah, I did some magic on him, but at least I kept the terms of the deal, unlike him!” And he explains to them that this was not just some common magic trick, but it was in fact shown to him by a Divine Messenger in yet another prophetic dream, the whole speckled animals thing. And he asks his wives, “Are we cool?” And they say yes. So they all mount up on their camels and ride off back to see Yitzhaq, and Lavan returns to his flock. Rahel even stole her father’s idols and brought those along, too.
Three days later, word reaches Lavan that Ya’akov has dipped out, and he raises a squad and pursues. But as they’re about to overtake him, God appears to Lavan in a dream now and warns him not to say a word to Ya’akov.
Sure enough, Lavan approaches him anyway, and he makes his grievances clear, but he tells Ya’akov about the dream and makes clear enough that he’s going to let him go. “But why have you stolen my gods?”, Lavan asks.
Ya’akov doesn’t know it was his beloved Rahel who stole the idols. He gives Lavan permission to search the camp and kill whoever stole them. Lavan searches everywhere, but Rahel had hidden them in her camel saddle and was sitting on them. “My father,” she says with much gravity. “Don’t be upset that I can’t stand up to greet you. The way of women is upon me.” And so Lavan is unable to find the idols.
Is it not clear that this is Rahel using the misogyny of her society to get what she wants? This statement might go unquestioned by Lavan, but the reader knows what’s really happening. The Torah wouldn’t make light of “the way of women” like this if it were passing the judgment that menstruation is some objectively foul and evil thing. This is a comedic moment. Rahel deceives the deceiver and gets away with it. And after all, they’re just idols.
Meanwhile, Ya’akov is mad that Lavan would make a seemingly false accusation about someone in his retinue stealing Lavan’s idols. He demands to have it out once and for all, after some 20 years of servitude. Lavan replies that all that was once his now belongs to Ya’akov, and that’s the way it goes with family. They make a pile of stones and make a pact in the eyes of the God of Ya’akov’s fathers, who interceded in this conflict in Lavan’s own dreams the night before. This pile of stones becomes the boundary between their holdings, and they offer sacrifices and feast and tarry all night on the mountain.
The next morning, Lavan kisses and blesses his sons and daughters and departs. Ya’akov and his holdings go the other way, and Divine Messengers go with them.
The family has formed. The relationships are intact. The women have reconciled with each other, and they have agreed to leave their land with Ya’akov. Ya’akov got what he wanted — and considerably more, perhaps more than he can handle. He’s a real householder now.
🪜
