11/28/20
Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and set out for Haran. He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, (God is ofter referred to as a rock or stone, and one name for God is HaMakom, The Place, which for me means god is wherever you are) he put it under his head and lay down in that place. He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. And the LORD was standing beside him and He said, “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac: the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your offspring. Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants. Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is present in this place, and I did not know it!” Shaken, he said, מַה־נּוֹרָ֖א הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה
“How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.”
In 2015 I wrote a drash on this passage. I was in a time of personal despair and fear and loss, and this is what I wrote, ostensibly in the voice of Jacob but really in mine:
Sleeping at this place
Or at least trying.
A stone for my pillow,
There is no comfort here.
I obsess and worry,
I have made such a mess.
I see steps that could take me away.
There could be happiness,
There could be One-ness,
But not yet.
Not at this gate at the entrance to heaven.
I want so much.
I want to be of help,
I want to do good,
I want to experience everything,
I want to be wanted.
I watch so many others make the effort
But I don't know what it leads to.
I stare through the bars of every unlocked gate,
But I don't go in to
This entrance to heaven.
What if all it leads to is oblivion?
What if there is no traveling up that ladder?
Only pain, then nothing?
No one will remember a thing.
I'm an idiot,
A fraud!
Overconfident and messy,
Brash and hurtful,
Selfish and false,
No one needs me.
Soon it will not matter.
Amidst all this self-pity
I have one thing to hold onto.
Yes,
It's that stone pillow
For my hard, hard head.
It tried to make me comfortable,
In its own rocky way.
I asked for a place to sleep and it said,
Here I am
At the gate and the entrance to heaven.
In the morning I will be exhausted.
I probably will have slept but I won't remember having done so.
I will move on, because that's what I do.
I will leave behind the stone pillow
In this place
As my assertion
That I was here
That I saw what there was to see,
That I considered my options
And that maybe I will return,
And maybe not,
To this rock
At the bottom of the stairway
That led to the gateway to the entrance to heaven.
I was writing about trying to lean on God, or the idea of God, or on something bigger than myself, to grab a rock, find a place, that would give me something to hold onto while I started on a journey I didn’t want to be on and wasn’t sure I was going to survive. All I saw was my fear of the future and I ignored the rest of this parsha, where Jacob goes on to work hard, fall in love, have many children and then go home to face the pain he caused his brother.
I used to use this depressing piece for Tachanun. For those of us who only go to Shabbat services, which these days includes me, Tachanun is a series of prayers you say after the weekday Amidah, with your head in your hands, admitting to your recent horribleness and asking for mercy and forgiveness. You only say this after the weekday Amidah and even then there are many exceptions, because you’re not supposed to say Tachanun on a festival or a joyous day, like Shabbat. Something I didn’t notice when I first started to use this for Tachanun is that implicit in a prayer for forgiveness is hope. You don’t pray for mercy if there’s no chance you might get some. And I forgot that.
Anyway, I did survive, with a lot of help, much of it from members of my shul and our clergy. Five years later, and I read this five year old kavannah in preparation for today’s drash, thinking I’d already done most of the writing I’d need to do and could coast for most of this week. But when I read it I realized, alas, that it doesn’t fit me now, and it doesn’t even fit the Jacob I’m seeing in this portion but I couldn’t see then. Jacob works his ass off. He doesn’t give up. Jacob hopes and he hopes hard. So who was I to give up? Especially in light of what we’ve been going through the last four years, and the last nine months, all that shared fear and loss and despair, all that shared hard work to get us to a new place, all the gratitude I resented and, this week anyway, I adore and cling on to, who was I to stay stuck in anger and depression? There’s a vaccine and Trump lost and I had a great meal on Thanksgiving. How awesome is this place!
Five years ago, in 2015, I didn’t notice in these verses that the angels were ascending and descending the stairway, all I experienced was that I was standing outside of heaven, wrapped up in lonesomeness and yearning. But now, in the midst of Pandemic Time and at the end of Trump Time, I see those angels and they are going up and down, up and down. And the gateway to heaven isn’t shut, and God is not taunting Jacob with what he can’t have, God is talking to Jacob and showing him a future that ascends and descends and ascends and descends, in constant change, we are always changing, and it’s the rock that’s solid, where God, or God-ness, or Holy Wholeness or the community of good people or loved ones, whatever is holy and divine for you and for me, whenever and however, these people and things, This hope, they are rocks, they are my place, our place, haMakom.
So I wrote a new version, for this Shabbat, and for us. Maybe it’s the trytophan/sauvignon blanc/Thanksgiving version, could be, and maybe it will pass, but here it is anyway:
Sleeping at this place
Stones for our pillows,
There is comfort here.
No matter what messes we have made
We can be angels
For other people
And as we go up and down
We can change and make change.
It gets better
It gets worse
Nevertheless
We survive.
There is grief and
There can be happiness,
There is One-ness,
And we are always,
If we but have the eyes to see,
At the bottom of the staircase to this gateway to the entrance to heaven.
We want so much.
We want to be of help,
We want to do good,
We want to experience everything,
We want to be wanted.
We all make so much effort
Never really knowing where it will lead.
But if we unlock the gate
Or climb over stupid walls,
The entrance to heaven belongs to us.
And what if there is no heaven and all it leads to is oblivion?
What if there is no traveling up that ladder?
What if there is only nothing?
Oh well.
We are grateful for these stone pillows
For our hard, hard heads,
Trying to make us comfortable
In their own rocky ways.
We asked for a place to be and each rock pillow said,
Here I am
I am always here
Relax
At the bottom of the stairs to the gateway at the entrance to heaven.
And like Jacob,
We will return
To ourselves
To each other
To this awesome place
And this holy ground
Real or metaphoric or myth
It is ours
And we deserve it.
Thank you, rock
At the bottom of the stairway
That leads to an unlocked gate.
How awesome is this place!
It is holy ground.
This is none other than the abode of God,
And that is the gateway to heaven.
Thank you.
Amen
