Vayishlach: A Mother's Mad Insistence

  Though this is love at first sight, its consummation is vastly delayed. Jacob has to work 7 years for his deceptive Uncle Lavan before he is able to finally marry Rachel. A strenuous exercise in delayed gratification. And yet, their love is so great that the text tells us that the 7 years were but a few days for Jacob. Because of this morphing of time he was able to withstand the waiting period. And his commitment becomes a model for a love that transcends time and space. 

  Indeed, this sense of time transcendence takes us back to the moment of Jacob''s weeping at the well. For the Midrash shares that Jacob wept because he saw with prophetic foreknowledge that he and Rachel would not be buried together.1 In this week''s parsha we see his premonition fulfilled. Rachel tragically dies in childbirth and is buried “along the road to Efrat” as opposed to in the family burial site. At that moment of the kiss, the bonds of time were transcended and he was able to have a prophetic vision of the future. 

  Granted, it is a painful vision. But its not unlike the story of Rabbi Akiva who laughed when he beheld the tragic destruction of the Second Temple.2 He laughed because he realized that if the negative prophecy of destruction came true, then that would necessarily mean that all the positive prophecies of return and rebuilding would also come true for the Jewish people. 

  Indeed, we in our own days have had the enormous gift of witnessing the fulfillment, partial thought it may be, of the myriad prophecies of return to the Land of Israel. We are the living recipients of that prophetic fruit.

  In the poem below Rachel weeps for the fulfillment of the prophecy of her children''s return to this land. She reminds us that just as Jacob love for her transcended time and allowed him to make it through those 7 years of work, so too if we beleaguered builders of Jerusalem can but access the vastness of our love for this land, then we can also weather through whatever waiting periods time may hold. 

May we merit to witness the fulfillment of a true and enduring peace in this holy land.

  The Wait 

 You wept

  As wet as wells

  Having spilled

  The crowning ton of stone

  Onto the sand

With withered hands

  but high romance

 Made the skinny shepherds 

  call the place

  - the wailing well -

  for generations to come

  

And seven years 

  grown old 

  between your gaze and mine 

  - was like a day -

  held between the gates 

  of withered hands 

  and weathered 

  wait

  And know that 

  I weep as well 

  when memories of 

  the future spill 

  into our tent

  and premonitions

  limp into our 

  lamp-lit den

 For if this ominous

  prophecy 

  must be then promise me 

  to plant your stones 

  on that baneful road

  where house my bones

And let memorial stand, 

  a somber marker

  in a severed land

  To mark the promise

  of prophecy

  of transcendence

  of time and of distance 

  with a mother''s mad insistence

  that the exile of her children

  must end

  And when finally march 

  our children by

  from their battered walk 

  through genocide

  

I will be weeping3 

  loud with pleading

  at that corner-side

  

- where Jerusalem 

  meets Gush Etzion

  with her border guards

  and building zones

And I will lament with rage

  the historic parade

  through Europe, Arabia

  Aushchwitz, Asyria

  and back to my grave

  at Bethlehem''s

  barricades 

  And with the force of my weeping

  and the form of your rocks4

  will our children return

  to the road to Efrat

And nineteen hundred years

  - will be like a day -

  held between the gates

  of withered hands

  and our children''s 

  will to weather 

  the wait.

1Bereshit Rabbah 70:11

2 Talmud Makkot 24B

3 Foreseeing that the Jews on the way to exile would pass by the site, the Patriarch Yaacov buried her on the road on the way to Ephrath and not within the city so that she would sense their anguish and pray for them (Bereishit Rabbah 82:10). Add to this the quote from Jeremiah, “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not.” (Jeremiah 31:15) Thus, Rachel stands as the archetype for the mother weeping for her children.

4It is interesting to note that Jacob in both of these stories is engaged in the moving of rocks. First he makes a stone altar (a matzava) at the site of his famous dream of the ladder. Then he moves the massive stone from atop the well for Rachel. And finally, in the story of her death, he again creates a matzeva, a stone memorial, upon Rachel''s roadside grave.