Unscrolled Vayishlach: The Meaning of Freedom

In the night, when Jacob is left alone on the far side of the river Jabbok, a “man” comes and wrestles with him.

Three questions arise:

First, what was Jacob doing alone on the far side of the river? After all, he has already sent his wives, his concubines, his children, and all his camp over to the other side. What is he doing without them?

Rashi (bless him) suggests that he forgot a few small containers and went back for them. Rashbam, however, saw something else at play. “He intended to flee.” (32:23).

How different are Rashi and Rashbam’s readings. In the former, punctilious Jacob won’t dare leave a piece of property behind. In the latter, he is ready to abandon everything – his entire family – out of fear of encountering his brother, who once promised to kill him.

Our second question: who is the man that accosts Jacob, either as he is gathering “small containers” or attempting to slink off in the night. The commentators unanimously understand him to be an angel of God. Perhaps he is the guardian angel of the Esau, but perhaps not.

Our third question: what does it mean to wrestle with an angel?

Rashi tells us that this act of “wrestling,” (yei’aveik), may be connected to the word “dust” (avak), as in: their great scuffle caused the dust at their feet to rise up around them.

The story thus completely subverts common notions of “divine encounter.” Here, there are no bright lights, mystic visions, or heavenly choirs. The angel, unwinged, takes the appearance of a common “man.” The cloud of God’s presence is replaced by a cloud of dust. The revelatory act is replaced with violent striving.

They struggle with one another through the night.

“Then [the angel] said: “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” (Genesis 32:27).

A fourth question arises: why did the angel feel the need to flee as dawn broke?

On an intuitive level, we already understand that such an encounter as this belongs to the nighttime, to solitude and darkness, to the state of terror that dwells on the far side of life’s great crossings. Still, the commentators venture to give us a sensible answer.

According to Bereishit Rabbah, the angel must flee at daybreak because he must go to work. His shift of singing God’s praises in heaven begins with the shining of the sun.

Some of the rabbis push back on this idea, stating that the angels who sing God’s praises are created each morning – shaped from the waves of a river of angelic fire at dawn and then returned to its surging depths at night. This “man,” therefore, could not be one of them.

Before Jacob lets the angel depart, the angel gives him a new name, Israel. The sun then rises.

It would seem, then, that Jacob too – like the angels who cycle in and out of the river of fire – has been made new. He is not the person he was yesterday.

It would seem, then, that Jacob too – like the angels who cycle in and out of the river of fire – has been made new. He is not the person he was yesterday.

This is a central teaching of Torah. The world is never more than a day old, for it is created constantly anew. As put by the Hassidic rabbi, R Yitzhak Meir of Gur, “the world constantly comes into existence and is sustained by the divine utterance.”

To believe this is to see all things as miracles. As Ramban writes, “All our matters and circumstances are miraculous… they do not follow nature or the general course of the world.”

The sense of this statement is that there are, in fact, no laws of nature. As Rabbi Gil Student paraphrases it, “Every time I drop a rock and it falls, that is not gravity but a miracle.”

This is not superstition. In a strict sense, there really are no “laws” of nature. A drop of rain falling from the sky does not trace its path in accordance with “laws” that somehow exist separate to it. Rather, the drop of rain improvises. It falls in line with the forces that tug upon it, yielding to the yearning of the earth.

This is true of all existence, and to recognize this is to escape, however briefly, from the karmic wheel – the drudgery of causality and fixity, in which life is not improvised but rather proceeds predictably and inexorably like dominos falling in a line.

In the encounter with God, as Martin Buber taught, “causality cowers at [our] heels.”

It is in this encounter that Jacob finds the power to release himself from the cycle of grievance and revenge, deception and flight, that heretofore colored his life. It is in this encounter that he claims a new name. It is in this encounter that he finds himself, like the great universe around him, sustained at every instance by the divine utterance.

This is nothing other than the meaning of freedom.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.