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December 12, 2003/Kislev 17 5764, Vol. 56, No. 12
How to see the face of God
Torah study
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN
Vayishlach/Genesis 32:4-36:43
Not many biblical personalities can claim to have seen the face of God. Jacob does so twice, both in this week's portion.
The first reference occurs in Genesis 32:31, following Jacob's celebrated wrestling match. But with whom did Jacob wrestle? The conventional answer is with an angel. But look at the text itself. At the outset, we are told that he wrestled with a nameless "man." (Genesis 32:25)
But at the climax of the wrestling, this man changes Jacob's name from Ya'akov to Yisrael, "for you have striven with" - Elohim veim anashim - "and have prevailed." The JPS version of the text translates the Hebrew as "beings divine and human."
Who are the humans with whom he has striven? Laban and Esau. How should we translate Elohim? Instead of "divine beings," why not "God"?
Jacob names the place of the struggle Peniel, "meaning, I have seen a divine being face to face, yet my life has been preserved." At the outset, Jacob wrestles with "a man." At the end, he recognizes that it was with God that he has wrestled.
The second reference is at the climax of his encounter with Esau. Jacob is terrified at the prospect of this encounter and has gone through elaborate preparations to protect his family. But the meeting goes surprisingly well. Esau declines Jacob's gifts, but Jacob entreats him to accept them, "for to see your face is like seeing the face of God." (Genesis 33:10) Here again, the Hebrew reads p'nei Elohim, and the JPS version makes no attempt to translate it any other way but "the face of God."
Parallelisms of this kind in the biblical text are never accidental. Nor are these two discrete episodes. They are actually one extended act in the drama of Jacob's life experience.
The single thread uniting these two scenes is struggle. Jacob has mistreated Esau, twice. He has manipulated him out of the birthright and robbed him of their father's blessing. Fearing Esau's reprisal, he flees to Haran where he encounters his uncle Laban, who is fully his equal in the art of deception. He eventually reconciles with Laban, but now he must deal with Esau, who is traveling to meet him with an encampment of 400 men.
Jacob sends messengers with gifts to placate Esau, but he also prepares for warfare by isolating his family and his possessions. Then, "Jacob was left alone," surely one of the most poignant verses in the whole of Torah. Alone, terrified, in the dead of night, he wrestles with this man/angel, or with God, and though he is injured, he survives.
Now he must face Esau, and it is in reaction to Esau's apparent generosity that he claims to see God's face in Esau's face. But the entire encounter with Esau is fraught with tension. They part company. Jacob arrives safe to the city of Shechem. The Hebrew for safe is shalem, which could mean safe and sound, or better still, at peace.
Back to our portion. The two episodes are really one, the common theme is struggle, and the message is that God may be found precisely in the struggle, at moments of our greatest fear and anxiety. We conventionally locate God in the nice places, but God is not exclusively to be found there. Nor is God exclusively a nice God. Sometimes, God appears to us most clearly in our moments of greatest tension, when we confront our greatest fears and our private demons.
What Jacob had to struggle with that lonely night was the memory of how he had mistreated his brother, twice. That's precisely when God appears to him, twice.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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