Vayetze
by Rabbi Jim Rosen
Though I try desperately not to draw attention to such matters, its no secret that I’m hobbling around a bit of late. I am calling it an attack of 'acute stupiditis.' I trained for a marathon and did not do it right. In fact doing precisely what one should not do which is when feeling good increasing the mileage far too much. My reasoning: I did a half marathon in June how much harder could it be to go to the full race?
The question of course could be asked why does any one do such things in life? I have of course a very spiritual and noble reason. That is the belief which I speak of constantly that life is far more marathon than sprint. That the enduring things require long hard and sometimes painful hours of slogging through the muck in order to get to the finish line. That love and hope and religion and relationships and all of the things that normally we count as being significant are not attainable overnight, but rather require patience, the ability to tolerate set backs, and much more. And so to stretch into a long term challenging very difficult goal is the kind of thing that people are often inspired by, at least I am.
That’s the noble part. I know a few people that would say 'we’re talking mid-life experience here – I didn’t use the word crisis.' And a marathon is a lot cheaper than a Lamborghini.
But I figure if I’m going to learn anything from this and be able to teach anything from this at least it might coincide with the Torah reading. No, not the one with Jacob limping – that’s next week. But the famous scene of Jacob and the Ladder. Fearing the worst, running away from Esau, Jacob flees out into the hill country where he is afraid and alone in the dark. There alone with his fears and dreams and hopes he falls asleep and awakens to a dream featuring a ladder linking the earth to the heavens. With angels who seemed to be a little bit directionally challenged, first going up and down the ladder.
And Jacob realizes what of course some of us have, if we are lucky, come to understand in life – that 'God was in this place and He did not know it.' And that is what most of us if we are at all honest and sensitive souls come to understand very often. That the most significant experiences, the touch of the transcendent, the Divine, and the mysterious are always there when we can get the alarm clock to ring on time and alert us to their realities.
But Jacob at last sees what is to be seen and it will transform him.
But not all at once for it seems as if his initial prayer is conditional, is a vow of the hedged bet. 'If God will be with me, if God truly be my God then I will tithe and give God a part of what I have.'
If? You see the mysteries of the universe unfolding in front of you, a message with the force of a sledgehammer in front of your head and you ask If? And all attempts to soften that If fail on the anvil of Jacob’s own immaturity. He will grow. Painfully, gradually in the marathon of life he will grow.
I don’t know about you, but I cannot go very long, or far without having Jacob’s Ladder in my head. I guess it doesn’t hurt that the name of the place where all this happens is Beth El. It doesn’t hurt that our own ark is arranged in large measure to resemble Jacob’s Ladder, the tribes each of them on a rung of the Ladder. For the Ladder is not simply a connecting device between the stark material earth and the ethereal heavens. It is a certain kind of device – one with multiple rungs. And you don’t get there to the top, that is, with an express lift. It is always one step at a time.
Now for those of us at a certain age we may have in mind another kind of stairway to heaven. Led Zeppelin made that famous when I was in high school. But Jimmy Paige the lead singer was once asked how he came to that image about 'the lady who knows that all that glitters is gold, and she’s climbing the stairway to heaven.' And said he 'there’s absolutely no meaning to the words.' It was one of the defining songs of that generation; the early 70’s and it had no meaning! But I guess if there is anything we ought to think about in our lives – it is the potential meaning of the stairway to heaven in our lives. I would like to suggest it is a vital one.
Why a stairway to describe the attachment to the Divine?
Years ago a philosopher by the name of Søren Kierkegaard coined the term 'the leap of faith.' By that he meant that your rational faculties can only take you so far when it comes to meeting and living the reality of the Divine. At a certain point you throw yourself off the cliff. You dive into the abyss, living your life in light of what you are prepared to accept and believe.
Abraham Joshua Heschel countered that’s not really the way Jews look at life. For us it is a 'leap of action.' One of the chief ways we come to understand the Divine is through deeds. Holy deeds. And by that he meant everything from building homes for the indigent, and doing the nails of the elderly, to the lighting of candles, and yes the gathering here on Shabbat as we do. All of it, every act a Mitzvah, every act potentially unique and special and Holy. But still a leap.
And if all we had was a dream with no content, a dream with of the Divine with no ladder. I suppose we would respond powerfully to that. Who doesn’t respond to the inspiring language of a dream? You can be anything that you want to be.
But two concerns. Don’t get carry away with the sprint element in the dream. Be aware of the hard road ahead. Remember Yaakov Smirnoff the Soviet comedian who made his way to America? He is still out there on the comedy circuit. One of his memorable jokes was about his 1st visit to an American grocery store encountering the incredible variety of instant products. He said 'On my 1st shopping trip I saw powdered milk – you just add water and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice – you just add water and you get orange juice. And then I saw baby powder and I thought to myself, what a country!'
Real dreams don’t come powdered. I like very much what Rev. Howard Thurman once wrote 'saddle your dreams first before you ride them. Saddle them to the hard facts of the world before you ride off to the stars.' Our dreams may romp amongst the stars, but then they must come back to their place on earth bringing with them the radiance of the heights and giving to all our days the lift of magic that comes from the stars. This is to say a ladder should enable us to climb up towards heaven, but it must also stand firmly upon the earth.
And that’s where you and I come in. That’s where the brand of Judaism we practice in this building comes in. And for those of you who are here of different religious traditions I am going to venture the guess it characterizes for many of you the background that you have been taught.
This is to say we will be rooted on this earth. We will be versed in all of the knowledge of the world around us, and we will accept and incorporate into our lives the very best that modernity has given us including the freedom of conscience.
We accept the reality, too, that in a post Holocaust and violence ridden world simple theological pieties will not do. There is too much pain; there is too much injustice that begs for explanation. And so God will have to forgive us if sometimes our statements of belief are a little tentative.
And we know, too, that those who take certain kinds of leaps in life, leaps of unbounded and ungrounded religious fancy arrogantly assuming they know all that God would ever want them to know about the world at large and that violence is its holiest expression – if that be the great leap, the radical jump then most of us would rather stay on the ground.
But I tell you friends for all of the problems of the world; the problems of religion made into a radical doctrine of hate, and the occasional wide eyed, irrationality that gives religion a bad name from those who take the express route to the top of the ladder, for most of us the problem is a different one. We haven’t yet deemed it fit to start climbing at all. Call it the rung of observance, the ladder of commitment, call it whatever you wish. But the well being of our lives, our community, and our future depends on our willingness to get on the ladder and to see it as a crucial necessity to climb. Not a sprint, but a marathon. One rung at a time. With untold set backs to be sure, even strategic retreats with dropping a couple of rungs from time to time, but to be on the ladder and to start climbing.
It means to bring the role of religion, the Jewish in our case into the everyday. Is the business deal I am about to enter into moral, ethical and Jewish? Is the comment I am about to make to my child helpful or self-serving? And make no mistake about it everything is intertwined. The ritual matters of our lives, what we eat and how we eat it, our Sabbaths, our Chanukahs, our Passovers and our holidays implant within us the presence of the transcendent that helps to make a very powerful package with the ethical. One cannot be without the other.
Will you be ready to get on the ladder? To test and to try, to seek and to explore what is this mystery we call prayer? What is this remarkable literature we call the Bible, the Talmud, the moral ethical statements of countless sages. What is the wisdom of calculating your contributions to Tzedakah that they might at least attain 10%, and maybe you’ll even chuckle on that rung for awhile when you realize if it’s adjusted gross; it’s not so bad?
My own hope of course is that once I heal, I’ll get back there on the road. A little wiser, a little more careful, but I know to avoid the road is a cowardice I will not be prepared to tolerate.
For your sake, for our community sake I hope you will join me on the ladder which is not meant to be climbed quickly and once and for all, but throughout a lifetime. One rung at a time, because what is more magnificent than being on the Stairway to Heaven?