Shalom Rav

From this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Yayeshev:

One time, when his brothers had gone to pasture their father’s flock at Shechem, Israel said to Joseph,” Your brothers are pasturing at Shechem. Come, I will send you to them.” He answered, “Hineini.” (“Here I am.”)

Another one of those great “Hineini moments.” Hineini is the same word uttered by Abraham when God sends him to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22:1); by Jacob when he prepares to travel to Egypt (Genesis 46:2); by Moses when he responds to God at the burning bush (Exodus 2:4). Hineini is a word that represents a sense of inner immediacy and purpose, of spiritual openness: “Here I am. I am ready.”

Interestingly, Joseph’s use of the word is unique because he does not utter it as a response to a divine command, but rather to a seemingly innocuous request from his father Jacob. Unlike most of the Torah’s narratives, God is not really a main player in the Joseph story. It is a famously human account, with the divine plan unfolding in a more subtle, oblique fashion. In the Joseph narrative, God almost seems to be directing the action from “behind the curtain,” as it were.

That’s what makes Joseph’s “Hineini” all the more poignant. Though he has no way of knowing it consciously at the time, his father’s request will indeed set in motion a series of events that will have profound and wide ranging consequences: Joseph’s travail at the hands of his brother, his subsequent good fortune in Pharaoh’s court, the rescue of his family from famine and their relocation to Egypt, where they will eventually grow into a great nation. We might say that if Joseph had not been “ready” to do this simple chore for his father, none of us would even be around today to read the story.

Of course Joseph will eventually be able to put these pieces together when he is reunited with his brothers and explains to them: “Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither: it was to save life that God sent me here.” (45:5) By the end of the narrative, he will no longer be the immature and somewhat self-centered youth that we met in this week’s portion. He will understand the method to the seeming madness of his world. He will be able, finally, to grasp the deeper meaning of his life, of the twisting path he has traveled.

Like so many of us, it is only at the end of a long and often difficult road that we are able to sense the inner purpose of our journey. I can think of no better reason for us to cultivate spiritual readiness: to be able to truly answer when we are called: “Hineini.”

“

Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.” (Genesis 32.25)

The identity of this “man” is one of our great Biblical mysteries. One famous midrash identifies him as Esau’s guardian angel; cultural anthropologists claim he bears striking similarities to the river demons of the ancient Near East. As for me, I sometimes feel as if this need to unmask the mysterious night wrestler sort of misses the point.

I’ve often been struck by the artful way the text blurs the identities of both Jacob and the “man.” It’s almost as if the language itself blends their personae together as they wrestle into the night:

Then he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” Said the other, “What is your name?” (32:27-28)

Upon first reading of these verses, it’s not immediately clear who is who – only after we go back and more carefully parse the verses are we able to deduce who is actually saying what. And maybe that’s just it: perhaps the wrestlers are, in a sense, mythic mirror images of each other. And perhaps the precise identity of the man is less important than the transformation that occurs to Jacob during the struggle itself.

I’m also struck by Jacob’s need to be blessed by the other before he will let him go. Why this demand? After all, didn’t Jacob already receive his father’s deathbed blessing? True, but Jacob received this particular blessing while consciously wearing the identity of another. On some level, perhaps Jacob knew he would never truly be blessed until he confronted the true divine image within himself honestly – face to face. (Why else would he name the site of this struggle Peniel – “Face of God?”)

More than anyone else in the book of Genesis, Jacob is a struggler. He’s born grasping at another’s heel and he spends more than half his life in masquerade – posing as another, deceiving others, deceiving himself. Finally, on this dark riverbank, he strips away his masks, his deception, his subterfuge. He uncovers his true identity and receives his true blessing. The poignant irony, of course, is that it appears that this blessing was within him all along.

But isn’t that the case for us all? We carry our true blessings, our true identities deep within – but alas, more often than not, they won’t reveal themselves without a fight…