Parshat Veyetzei

Parshat Veyetzei
December 5, 2008/ 8 Kislev 5769

"Indeed, God is in this Place, and I didn't know it!" (Genesis 28:16)

The Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760), the founder of Hasidism, once told this parable:

"If one was to walk in the woods and a spring appeared just when he became thirsty, he would call it a miracle. And if on a second walk, if he became thirsty at just that point again, and again the spring appeared, he would remark on the coincidence. But if that spring were there always, he would take it for granted and cease to notice it. Yet is that not more miraculous still?"

In Parshat Veyetzei, Jacob is on the run. He is fleeing his aggrieved brother, his broken home, and his old life. He stops in a barren, unnamed place somewhere between Beersheva and Haran. He is utterly alone—with neither friends nor family—without a home to which he can return. Worn out from all his running, he falls asleep with only a stone for a pillow.

That night he has an amazing dream. He sees a ladder with its base planted in the earth and its top reaching toward the heavens, and holy beings are ascending and descending upon it. He has a vision of God who promises to be with him in his wanderings. He wakes up and exclaims: "Indeed, God is in this Place, and I didn't know it!"

Sometimes it feels like we spend most our time running. There is so much to do and time is always short. We have dozens of interactions each day, some of them meaningful, most of them not. We rush to work or school, grab a bite to eat, rush back home, zoom through errands and tasks, and tend to collapse into our beds at the end of the day.

One of the functions of religion is to mandate that we take short breaks in our hectic lives, in order to notice things that we might otherwise have missed. Judaism asks us to pause for a moment before we eat something in order to acknowledge the gift of sustenance. It invites us to carve out two short periods in our day to say the Sh'ma, the declaration that there is Unity underlying all the chaos. It gives us Shabbat, a day of quiet, to help us reconnect with ourselves, our loved ones, and God.

Jacob wakes up from his dream and realizes that God has been with him all along; he had just been running too fast to notice. The Baal Shem Tov wakes us up the fact that we are daily surrounded by myriad gifts, springs of living water, which we don't notice because we have grown so accustomed to their always being there. This Shabbat, let's enjoy the chance to pause, to notice, to live life awake.