acharei mos-kedoshim
sholem aleichem,
These two Torah portions are full of difficult verses, particularly Kedoshim. Someone who curses their parent? Put to death. Certain kinds of gay sex? Put to death. Sex during menstruation? Cut off from the people.
What are we to do?
A common Jewish answer is that we are meant to wrestle with verses like these. We are, after all, the b’nei Yisrael, children of the god-wrestler, so named after the incident in Bereishis where Yaakov wrestles something (a man? an angel? god? himself? his brother?) and receives the new name Yisrael.
But it is easy to misunderstand what wrestling with a text (what wrestling with haShem) really means.
Here are the key verses:
וַיִּוָּתֵ֥ר יַעֲקֹ֖ב לְבַדּ֑וֹ וַיֵּאָבֵ֥ק אִישׁ֙ עִמּ֔וֹ עַ֖ד עֲל֥וֹת הַשָּֽׁחַר
Yaakov was left by himself, and a man wrestled/yeiaveik with him until the rising of the dawn.
[…]
וַיֹּ֗אמֶר לֹ֤א יַעֲקֹב֙ יֵאָמֵ֥ר עוֹד֙ שִׁמְךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל כִּֽי־שָׂרִ֧יתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִ֛ים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁ֖ים וַתּוּכָֽל
He said: Yaakov will not be spoken as your name any more, but rather Yisra-el, because you have fought/sarisa with god/elohim and with man and you prevailed.
So, the word for what Yaakov and the “man” did (yeiaveik/wrestle) is actually not the word used to form his new name. Instead, sarisa/you-fought combines with el/god to make yisrael/he-fights-god.
But we still call Yisrael the god-wrestler, because wrestling is the more precise term for what he did. In fact, I’d argue that the Torah davka says “fought” in the later verse to draw our attention to the importance of the specific word “wrestle”. We’re supposed to pause here and say: “Yaakov wasn’t just fighting, he was wrestling. What does that specificity teach us?”
Let’s learn.
The root for yeiaveik/wrestled, אבק, only appears twice as a verb in all of Tanakh, once in the verse we’ve already quoted and once in the next verse. As a noun, it appears six times, each time meaning something like “dust” or “dirt”. The BDB suggests that the meaning “wrestle” comes from the idea of “getting dusty” as you wrestle in the dirt.
As a verb, אבק only appears in the niphal binyan, which is usually a passive voice (i.e. to be wrestled). In this case, I think it indicates a kind of reflexivity or mutuality. You don’t wrestle someone, and you aren’t wrestled by them: you and they wrestle together. Both you and the one you are wrestling with are the subject of the verb.
This isn’t true of fighting in general. There are ways to fight at a distance. There are ways to fight someone who isn’t fighting you. But wrestling must be done with a partner. In wrestling, you hold your partner close. In wrestling, you get into the dust of creation with them. At times, it may be hard to tell where you end and your partner in wrestling begins.
There’s an idea in our tradition that Torah study should be done לשמה, for its own sake. In its plain meaning, לשמה means learning Torah without ulterior motives. Rebbe Nachman, for example, discusses a case where someone isn’t learning לשמה, for its own sake, but instead only learning in order to be called a Rabbi (Likutei Moharan Torah 3). In such a case, Rebbe Nachman says, the learning is not so significant. Learning לשמה means learning without this kind of personal motive.
But there is also an idea that לשמה stands for לשם ה, for the sake of ה, the final letter in the name of haShem. This letter ה is associated (Tanya Chapter 17) with the Shechinah: the divine presence that accompanies us in exile, the aspect of haShem that accompanies any one person who engages in Torah study (Berakhos 6a). From this point of view (as R Yaakov Klein puts it in his shiur on Kesser Shem Tov 127) learning לשמה is learning for the sake of connection with haShem, for the sake of relationship.
Learning לשמה, then, is not something we do as an individual agent. It isn’t something we do to the text. It is something we do up close, in relationship with the text. When we learn לשמה, the Torah is not tool for nor an object of our action: it is a partner in our learning.
But this is precisely how we’ve been describing wrestling, as distinct from fighting at a distance. In fighting at a distance, we can treat the text as a tool for or as the object of our battle. But text-wrestling is לשמ ה, it is a drawing-close. It requires relationship, partnership, and mutuality.
In a recent episode of God Crush, Pastor Lura Groen says
I find so much delight in scripture. I love it. And that's not language that I hear a lot in Christian circles because there's so much [of] the, like, ways that the Bible has been used to harm us, so there's a lot of negative language. Which is real, right? … I am in no way minimizing that. I just help people find the delight and the beauty … because people who reject, like,
“we don't read the Bible that way”, “We don't believe that”, “We don't harm people with it”, sometimes then minimize it in Christianity. “Oh, it's just all about love. So let's just focus on the love and not what the words on the page are”
This process the Pastor describes, of rejection and turning focus, is a kind of fighting-at-a-distance. Because reading a text with a mind of “I like this, I don’t like that, I’ll welcome this, I’ll fight that, I’ll ignore this” anoints the reader as the sole agent in the process of learning. It is the opposite of learning לשמה, the opposite of wrestling up close.
The Pastor then says something quite bold:
Where I find the words on the page…that have been gifted to us by our ancestors and the Holy Spirit, I do encounter God there, and I find so much comfort there.
The Pastor finds comfort and God in the words on the page, that others turn away from because of their harm. How so? The Pastor explains: by wrestling the text, in precisely the way we’ve defined it. By getting to know them, by drawing close to them, by coming into relationship with them, by letting them be subjects and not objects. As the Pastor says:
And some of that is in the study and the wrestling. And like, I'm a big nerd, right… who likes anthropology and archaeology… I wanna know what this culture was doing, what cultural pressures were, what questions were they trying to answer, what the crisis was that this came out of. I wanna hear like, how has this been used for good and for bad over time? What are the different ways people have interpreted it? I wanna hear what it means right now and right here, like I do believe that God, the Holy Spirit, speaks to us in those ways
But … There are times when I have had a group of people reading a scripture and we are all horrified by it. Every single one in this room is like, what is this? … and then I'll say, God is in our shared horror. The way that the Holy Spirit is showing up in this room is the way that all of us are rejecting this. All of us are saying: “This is wrong. We do not believe this” — and that's the Holy Spirit too.
Learning לשמה, which is wrestling with the text, isn’t a fight for dominance. It isn’t a rejection. It also isn’t apologetics or turning-aside. Learning לשמה, which is wrestling with the text, is building relationships: getting to know the ancestors who wrote the text, getting to the God that inspired them, getting to know the God inspiring us now.
And at the root of relationship is love. As the Baal Shem Tov teaches in the name of the Ramban: you know that you are engaging with Torah לשמה when you are filled with awe and love (Kesser Shem Tov 127).
As a Torah leyner, I’ve made a habit of volunteering to chant the really difficult parts of Torah whenever they come up. The first aliyah I ever chanted, in fact, included the moment when Pinchas is rewarded after murdering an Israelite and a Midianite for being in a relationship.
Why? To be honest, I was tired of fighting these texts, I was tired of the standard apologetics for these texts, I was tired of distancing myself from these texts. I was tired, I think, of deciding what to do with them, of being the sole agent in my learning.
Leyning was a way to get close to the texts. To do something with them, not to them. It’s one of the reasons I love chanting Torah. The scroll contributes the consonants and their crowns and the spaces between them. I contribute vowels and melody and practice. Together, we bring Torah into life.
This Shabbos, mirtz haShem, I’ll be chanting the more infamous passages of Kedoshim for the third time in the last couple years. And this time, I do think I am starting to fall, a little, in love and awe.
With haShem and its Torah.
With all those harmed by it.
With the ancestors who wrote the text.
With the beautiful absurdity of my Jewish community, who insist on preserving and chanting these our ancestral texts verbatim, with incredible care and dedication, even when everyone in the room is horrified by them.
With the Shechinah, who is horrified along with us.
good shabbos,
ada
p.s. Grateful to R Yaakov Klein for his shiurim on Kesser Shem Tov. Note that there are different numberings in different editions of Kesser Shem Tov. If you look on Sefaria, 127 is listed as 94.