Children and stones. A Davar Torah on Parashat Vayetze
You know, you should learn Hebrew. I will explain why, but for the moment, let us talk about this week’s Torah portion, Vayetze.
The first thing you notice about Vayetze in the Torah Scroll is that it almost has no interruptions. It is a long, massive block of text without blank spaces, three columns of uninterrupted writing. There are no empty spaces, none of those pauses that any reader appreciates. Even more by us, when we need to pause and to move to another alya.
It is like listening to someone who endlessly talks, with no break (logorrheic, I think it’s the proper term). I think we all have been, at one time or another, on the receiving end of this kind of conversation. The never-ending talker is agitated, anxious, and often insecure.
Literary critics call it “stream of consciousness”. It is easy for the reader to feel lost and disoriented, immersed in a verbal flood. As readers, we feel the same sense of anxiety and insecurity as the author. This Torah portion is all about anxiety. Specifically, Yaakov’s anxiety.
Another important element of this Torah portion is stones.
At the beginning of the Torah portion, Yaakov -on the run from his revengeful brother- is exhausted and falls asleep. During the night, Yaakov experiences a vision. He dreams of God promising to give him and his descendants the land on which he lay. God says to Yaakov that all the Earth will be blessed through his descendants and promises to bring them back to the land. That’s enough for Yaakov to feel anxious and fearful. Not only for him but for his descendants, too!
When Yaakov wakes up he utters the famous sentence מַה־נּוֹרָ֖א הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה “How full of awe is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Then Yaakov took the stone from under his head, where he had slept, set it up as a pillar, and dedicated it to God. That will be the place where the Jerusalem Temple will be built.
Then Yaakov continues his journey eastward and encounters a group of shepherds hanging around a well with a great stone above it. It’s a big stone. It needs the physical strength of at least three men to be lifted up. But Yaakov, this man we remember as a gracile, frail Mummy boy in last week’s Torah portion, is now so strong and powerful, and he manages to move that massive stone all by himself. Such a display of masculine power obviously greatly impressed a fascinating passer-by called Rachel (which the text informs us was יְפַת־תֹּ֖אַר, “beautiful in shape”). And love is: they kiss each other and fall in love. All because of a stone. That stone has changed Yaakov’s life.
Fast forward many years. Yaakov has been working for Lavan, Rachel’s father. Despite being family, Lavan is not a good employer. He changes his employee’s son-in-law’s wage several times. Also, Lavan is not a good father. He tricks Jacob into marrying the elder sister of Rachel, Leah, condemning her to a life of marital unhappiness — so much for fatherly love.
In her desperate quest for being loved by Yaakov, Leah will give birth to five male children and to the only daughter of the family, plus another two from -we would say today- surrogate mother: she offers Yaakov to sleep with one of her maidservants. Out of the sisters’ rivalries, other children are also born from Rachel and Rachel’s maidservant. In this Torah portion, there are lots of births. Births are recorded in other Torah portions, too. Still, the births recorded here are crucial because these babies are the ancestors of the tribes of Israel. In this Torah portion, the family, whose history we have followed since the time of Abraham, is becoming a people.
And here, we begin to understand why Hebrew is so important. This new civilisation that is beginning to take shape with the birth of the children of Yaakov, who will later become the tribes of Israel, is centred around children. Having and educating children is the first element of a specific Jewish culture. Even Yaakov’s vision at the beginning of the Torah portion was about children and descendants. God says to Yaakov, “Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth […] All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants.” [Gen 28:14] Yaakov will be the first character in the Torah to meet with his grandchildren. This is, by the way, another peculiar trait of Jewish civilisation: our heroes are always grandparents.
What does the Hebrew language have to do with that? Well, look at the word. The Hebrew word for sons is בנים Add an aleph, a mute letter, in the beginning, a silent letter, and you have אבנים stones. Remember what Yaakov does after he dreams the vision and receives the promise of having children and descendants? He takes the stone he has rested and turns it into an altar. So, the connection between stones and children is visible and evident in the Hebrew wording itself. In a language where the verb “to build” לִבנוֹת stems from the same root of the word בן, son, and of the word אבן, stone.
Fast forward some years, and we reach the end of the Torah portion, Vayetze, the paragraphs we have read today. Yaakov has closed to end the relationship with Lavan. This relationship was exploitative in so many respects: work, family, etc. Lavan tries to have him back but suddenly proclaims he cares for his daughters. But Yaakov has become a full grown-up adult and no longer lets himself be bullied. So, he proposes a covenant. Lavan and Yaakov agree on boundaries: not to invade each other’s territory nor to steal from each other. And how do they mark the boundary? With a heap of אבנים stones. And with a pillar, like a pillar that Yaakov has consecrated at the beginning of the Torah portion, after his dream.
So on one side of the boundary, there will be the dominion of Lavan, a man who uses his daughters as a tool to subjugate workers and tricks Yaakov for years, damning an entire family to a life of unhappy relationships. And on the other side of the boundary is Yaakov, the man whom God has promised offspring, children, and grandchildren to live with them in the Holy Land.
Lavan’s civilisation is based on the exploitation of children — and one cannot but think to the Palestinian kids that Hamas has been forced to work to build these tunnels. Hundreds of them died while digging: these are assassinated Palestinian children for which there is no rally, no demonstration.
On the other side of the boundary is a civilisation built around children. As noted in a remarkable new book (Dan Senor & Saul Singer, “The Genius of Israel: the Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation”), Israel is the only wealthy democracy in the world with a high fertility rate.
It is an iron law of demography that as countries become more economically productive, they become less reproductive, except Israel, where the average number of children per family -even in affluent, secular Tel Aviv- is three. In other Western democracies, the fertility rate is dramatically low: 1.5 in the UK, 1.3 in Italy, etc. Ours are ageing societies. In Japan, one of the wealthiest democracies in the world, the number of adult diapers sold is higher than that of baby diapers. On the contrary,. We Jews like reproducing ourselves — since the time of Yaakov.
We should be proud of a country that treasures its children so much to negotiate for their survival and freedom. That specific trait of Jewish culture, the love for children, is offended and insulted by antisemites, who, for example, produce and circulate fake quotes by an Israeli leader to “prove” their will to get rid of Arab babies and, of course, how racist Zionism is and other blah blah blah on the patriarchal nature of Judaism. We see a lot of that garbage these days, and it’s annoying. We are condemned to coexist with this background noise of infamy since the time of Yaakov and Lavan.
But we survived. And we continue to stay, educating our children and delighting with our grandchildren.