vayetzei:
sholem aleichem,
I'm drafting this newsletter later than usual, because a school I teach at had a COVID outbreak last Friday, went fully virtual, and came back to in-person teaching this week. Chaotic. As a result, I have been spending far more of my time reading lengthy reply-all faculty email threads than is healthy for me, or productive for my writing. There has been a lot of anger directed towards the students, which I know comes from a place of fear and lack of control. But I find myself needing to remind people quite frequently that the course of this pandemic -- the reason we are in the situation we are in now -- is not the fault of "irresponsible college students" but of irresponsible government officials. Of grown human adults who refused to follow reasonable scientific precautions. College students are responsible for their actions, of course, as are we all, but we need to have some perspective and lots of chesed in these times. I should stop myself before writing the whole newsletter about this.
This week, Yaakov journeys from Beer-sheba to Haran. He stops to sleep, and he dreams:
וְהִנֵּ֤ה סֻלָּם֙ מֻצָּ֣ב אַ֔רְצָה וְרֹאשׁ֖וֹ מַגִּ֣יעַ הַשָּׁמָ֑יְמָה וְהִנֵּה֙ מַלְאֲכֵ֣י אֱלֹהִ֔ים עֹלִ֥ים וְיֹרְדִ֖ים בּֽוֹ
a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it.
Why does the verse say עלים (going up) first and then וירדים (going down) afterwards? Rashi explains that this is because that the angels that had been accompanying Yaakov in the one land were not permitted to leave that land. They had to ascend, and the angels that would accompany Yaakov on his travels had to descend. The Berditchever Rebbe explains that this motion of angels is the direct product of human action. As we change our behavior, as we change who we are, we propel one set of angels heavenward and call another set of angels to earth.
All transitions are processes. We're often attached to picking specific moments when a transition occurs -- when a name change is legal, when a child is born, when a convert goes to the mikvah -- but we also know that all of these are processes that occur over time. Often, the moment we regard as the transition moment occurs long after the transition was in fact solidified.
But this angelic perspective does raise up one moment of the process above the rest. We learn in the gemara that this stairway is extremely wide:
כמה רחבו של סולם שמונת אלפים פרסאות
how much width did the stairway have? eight thousand parsaos -- a distance that would take the average human eight hundred days to walk side to side
And why must this stairway be so wide?
והנה מלאכי אלהים עולים ויורדים בו עולים שנים ויורדים שנים וכי פגעו בהדי הדדי הוו להו ארבעה
it is written: "and behold: angels of elohim going up and coming down on it"
going up: two
going down: two
and when they met with each other: four
The stairway has to be eight hundred days of walking wide to allow these angels to meet and be (even just for one moment!) side by side on it. If there is any single moment of transition separate from all the rest, this must be that moment: when the angels of the past self and angels of the future self are perfectly balanced.
After waking from his dream, Yaakov says:
אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יְהֹוָ֔ה בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי
surely haShem is in this place and anochi [I] did not know it
Recall that anochi is the "I" used to indicate intimate connection with an other, the I that accompanies a Thou. But Yaakov is talking to himself here, so who is the Thou of anochi? I believe that this use of anochi rises up in him from the moment when his four angels were side-by-side, his past and future selves in perfect balance. This is the anochi of being in an I-Thou relationship with your past and future selves, the anochi of recognizing a moment of profound change in yourself and seeing all the different versions of yourself as fully and beautifully holy.
When Yaakov went to sleep, he placed a stone [אבן] under his head, and after experiencing this moment of anochi he vows to turn the stone into a beis elohim: a house of haShem. The gematria for stone [אבן] is the same as that of מחה: to wipe out, or to destroy. The stone as a stone is a symbol of destruction of the past self. But after having this dream, after experiencing that moment of balance and profound respect for the past self, Yaakov takes this symbol of destruction and turns it into a dwelling-place for holiness. I do not mean by this that Yaakov held onto the past -- those angels eventually reach heaven, and this is just part of that process of transition.
In order to experience this sacred moment ourselves, the stairway of our transition must be wide enough for our angels to reach that moment of balance, that moment of opportunity for loving change. But the way society functions currently is (far too often) to force the stairways of certain people narrower: to remove possibilities, to remove time, to restrict and restrict until the angels cannot pass each other and cannot stand side-by-side. This is the narrow place from which we cry out, as the Psalmist writes:
I cried out to haShem from the narrow, and haShem answered me in a wide expanse
How wide? Eight thousand parsa'os. Which expanse? The stairway of transition.
May all your stairways be expansive - and gut shabes,
ada