Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Yitzchak's Wells: Digging and Re-Digging Today

Genesis 26:17-18, from the Torah reading for the past week:
“Yitzchak (Isaac) went from there and encamped in Nachal Gerar and lived there. And Yitzchak went back and dug all the wells of water that they had dug in the days of Avraham his father, and the Philistines had stopped them up after Avraham’s death, and he called them names just like the names that his father had called them.”

A nachal or wadi is a river bed that flows in the rainy season and is dry in the summer. In the verses that follow in Genesis 26, Yitzchak’s people don’t just re-dig old wells but also dig new ones, and they quarrel about them with the Philistines. Quarreling is probably not just verbal. Yitzchak names two wells after the quarrelling itself – “Struggle” and “Accusation”. Then he moves a bit away and digs a well and there is no quarrel, so he names that one something like “Breadths”, “for the Divine has given us enough space for us to be fruitful in the land.” Soon after the Philistine king, along with one advisor and his military chief, approaches Yitzchak and he is surprised, believing they hate him. Instead they say they have seen that the Divine has blessed Yitzchak. So they propose a treaty, and each sides swears to it. Another well is found, and Yitzchak names it after the treaty-making.

1. This whole episode takes place in the area from the Gaza Strip to Be’er-Sheva (Beersheba). In biblical times, this is a border region for the Israelites and the Philistines. Part of the scenes take place in what today is a part of Israel called Otef ‘Aza or the “Gaza Envelope”, the communities just outside the Gaza Strip which were attacked savagely by Hamas on October 7.

2. Rabbi Matt Berkowitz of The Schechter Institutes in Israel wrote last week about Zionism something like this: Through centuries of exile Jews kept connected with the places of their ancestors in the Land of Israel and the names of those places. When they returned, they reclaimed the old wells, came to live in the places and restore their ancient names.

3. Palestinians have the same dream about the villages the lost in 1948. They say that Israel has filled in the wells, erased the ancestral names of the villages they abandoned or were forced out of in the war of 1947-1949, even when those towns were settled with new residents. That’s true in many places, though not all. It’s also even more complicated than that. Arabic place names are often themselves versions of Hebrew names from the Bible. Many places in Israel have names in both languages. Some sites have ancient names or labels, Hebrew or Arabic or given by Christians, but the sites are near yet not quite exactly right on the biblical spots.

In Israel, bus and train and destination signs within Israel are in Hebrew, Arabic, and English all at once, coexistence encoded in multiple names. Still, so much of the conflict itself is embodies in names. The war of 1947-49 Israelis call Milchemet Hashichrur, the War of Liberation, and Palestinians call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. However you assign the responsibilities leading up to it, it is clearly both.

4. The Torah talks of digging into the ground, in search of water. I shudder over and over as I read those words this year. In Washington last Tuesday Rachel Goldberg, the mother of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, reminded us about 240 people whose lives are literally underground. #BringThemHomeNow. So much of the Gaza war is about tunnels underground.

And so much of conflict in Israel-Palestine and throughout the Middle East is about access to water.

5. As I listened to all the speeches about anti-Semitism in Washington last week, and all the historical events they referenced, I realized something about Yitzchak and the naming of the wells in Genesis that I had never paid attention to before. Some of the wells Yitzchak calls by the names his father gave. Some Yitzchak names in relation to the conflicts of his own day, or the respite from conflict, or gloriously at the end the making of a treaty.

Not all the names are the same names Avraham had given. Yitzchak carries those names, but chooses when to use them and when to name in relation to the dynamics of his day – with his current enemies, or with his current frosty-but-nonviolent neighbors, or with his current treaty-partners.

We Jews often talk about anti-Semitism today as though every act and every manifestation is the same as what happened in Shoah or the European pogroms or the Bible. It all has the same name, the name my own generation inherited from our parents and our ancestors before that. (Though those are not actually all the same, biblical and Christian and modern anti-Jewish hate.)

But we also have to know when to name things in our own way, in the context of now.

Some anti-Semitism is just like before, and some is new. Some of the dynamics are another iteration of the same history – but some of the dynamics Jews have to be able to name in relation to the people here with us now. Intertwined or nearby, in the Land of Israel or other lands. A struggle is different from an accusation; neither is good but they are not identical. Not-fighting -- giving each other space to breathe or even prosper -- is not the same as treaty-making.

To say that it’s all the same anti-Semitism over and over can trap us, prevent us from finding reconciliations, and at worst become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the same time, the unique new “struggles” and “accusations” against Jews today are frightening in their own way, and against those we Jews have much less experience to lean on, perhaps.

The chapter with the wells is the only chapter that centers Yitzchak and Rivka themselves, their own life and their own generation. It is sandwiched between two much more well-known stories in which their lives are subordinated to a conflict within the next generation, their sons Yaakov and Esav (Jacob and Esau). Even Yitzchak and the Philistines can’t help but notice in their interactions all kinds of echoes of Avraham’s and Sarah’s own interactions with the Philistines of their times.

Still Yitzchak and Rivka are trying in some way to live in their own generation. To navigate the conflicts of their region in their prime, to figure out what’s just like before and to make room for their own language about what’s happening.

So too for me, in my fifties. I live so much of my Jewish life with the people of my parents’ generation, who can remember when there had not been an Israel and who can remember 1967 and 1973 when Israel’s very survival was threatened by war. My own generation takes Israel for granted, and shared in the struggles to liberate the Jews of the U.S.S.R. and then Ethiopia after that. After me comes a generation who know only a strong Israel and a Jewish people with stature and power in the U.S.

How do we appropriately name the wells we find that were named in previous generations? When do we focus on those who tried to stop them up, and when on our accomplishment in finding life-giving water? How do we learn to give our own names, to the places and struggles our people has been in before?

6. To end on hope: The Torah can’t agree with itself on why Be’er-Sheva, the treaty city, has its name. Or which treaty it acknowledges, the one negotiated by Avraham the father or Yitzchak the son. Genesis 26 and Genesis 21 argue about it, give different accounts. Is the name because of the treaty-making oaths, or it is because of the gifts and meals that celebrated the treaty?

What a privilege it would be to have such a thing to argue about, to have too many stories of peace.

Torah Reflection on Truth and Peace as of Right after Thanksgiving

I just wanted to get on record some reflections on what it's like as a rabbi and leader right now, a snapshot in time.

I have spoken previously about the prophetic verse Ha-emet v'ha-shalom ehavu -- "Love truth and peace." In the Talmud, the verse is quoted in the course of an exploration of a debate between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai. They had some major, nontheoretical and nontrivial disagreements about the laws of marriage. And yet they allowed their children to marry each other. After trying without success to imagine scenarios when the disagreements didn't matter, the Talmud says that both schools of thoughts were loving both truth and peace. Yet they remain in tension, or at least in some cases truth seems to take a backseat.

I have certainly been living this tension for the past month. I am spending time, deliberately, with people who voted both for President-Elect Trump and Secretary Clinton. (The Talmud says that the School of Hillel is followed because they mention their opponents' arguments and positions before their own. That's why I am making it a habit to refer to the president-elect first.) I am trying, without straying from the truth about bigotries and sexism, to be a bridge of peace. It is not easy, but I am committed to it.

In the Torah this week, Rivka experiences twins fighting in her belly. She says, "If so, why is this that I am?" and goes to explore the issue with God. God tells her, "two peoples are in your belly, and two nations from your innards will separate." I read Rivka's question to be -- what is the meaning of "I", the unity of myself, my integrity, in a situation where two opposing forces are jousting, and they are both so connected to me that I feel the struggle in my body?

I have felt most days since Election Day this tension in my body. I seek not to lose my integrity, my I-ness, even as I listen carefully to the two or more perspectives that are vying with great energy.

I am grateful to the many congregants who have talked to me individually, in my office and on the phone and in coffee shops, and to the groups who have gathered with me too and let me structure some conversations. More to come. I will shortly post on a separate page a number of resources and ideas, to work against hate and division.

Parashat Toldot: How Different is Different? Election 2010 Through the Lens of Jacob and Esau

Parashat Toldot begins with the pregnancy of Rivka.  It is a difficult and uncomfortable pregnancy -- "the children were running around inside her".  She and Yitzchak approach God, who informs them:  "Two peoples are in your belly, and two nations will separate from your insides.  One nation over the other shall be stronger..." (Genesis 25:22-23).

The two boys emerge as twins, the second one out holding the heel of the first.  Yet immediately the boys seem different, and they become more so as they grow.  The midrash uses this story to explore every facet of the question of "similar but different" or "separate but connected."  In the rabbinic period, Yaakov and Esav were understood as Israel and Rome.  More poignantly, in the Byzantine period they were Judaism and Christianity.  Each midrash has its own reading on the question:  How similar are we (Jews) and the other?  How different?  What means more?

If you look at a map of the United States this week, color coded by the party of its new Congressman, you see a picture vastly red with pockets of blue.  If you total all the votes cast in elections for the House of Representatives, you find what looks like about 55 percent for the Republicans and 45 percent for the Democrats.  Which is the truer description of similarity and difference among Americans?

I read today a document prepared by a group of Muslim scholars reaching out to the leaders of all the world's major Christian churches.  The document spelled out in detail the similarities in the teachings in Christianity and Islam about love of God and love of other human beings.  The same document acknowledged the vast amount of lethal weapons in the hands of Christian-led and Muslim-led governments.  Which is the truer description of similarity and difference?

It takes very little to activate differences.  There is a famous experiment in social psychology called "The Robbers Cave", conducted by Professor Muzafer Sherif.  In the study, a group of white middle-class boys, all the same age and from similar backgrounds, were randomly split into two groups and each group was bused to its own camp.  Each group bonded, each group gave itself a name -- the Eagles and the Rattlers -- and the boys were initially unaware of the other group.

In the second phase, the groups were brought together under various competitive scenarios.  Very quickly, physical violence broke out between the groups.  It escalated beyond what the research team had predicted.  In the end, Professor Sherif had to generate problems and tasks that threatened both groups or required both groups' participation in order to solve a dramatic problem -- to pull off a rescue, or deal with a water shortage facing both.

The Robbers' Cave study showed that even the smallest differences can become magnified quickly and easily.  Professor Sherif would say:  even if Yaakov had been as hairy as Esav,  if both had been hunters, there would have been conflict if only one could inherit the blessing from their father.  Yet if there had been a common threat to unite them, an overarching problem to solve, even the studious Yaakov and the brutish Esav could have come together.

This week, Democrats and Republicans face a choice.  Are we so dramatically different, that we have to view the other as a threat to our society?  Or can we recognize a common origin in the idea of liberty, even if one child says "equal liberty" and the other says "live free or die"?  Can we recognize in the crisis of joblessness something even more important than the difference?

This question goes not just to Obama and Boehner, but to each of us who is worked up about the election, whether our candidate won or lost.  It's no secret how much people have invested in the differences, how much of our identities are tied up in our philosophies.  Nothing wrong with that.  Yet for the good of all of us, we need to be not just Esav, but Yaakov's twin brother.  Not just Yaakov, but Esav's twin brother.

Parashat Toldot: The Voice and Hands of Yaakov

"Jews are not an electrical people."  One of my rabbinical school classmates quoted this line in a seminar, said I think by one of her friends.  It rang true at the time; I knew very few Jewish people who finished their own basement or did anything involving wiring.

Up here in New Hampshire the story is entirely different.  Here, Jews are electrical people, with a particular talent for woodworking.  And, to get to the brothers Yaakov and Esav, there are members of the tribe who hunt as well!

Our parasha this week is framed by the contrast between Yaakov, "who sat in tents", and Esav, who had "the hunt in his mouth" (Genesis 25:27-28).  Yaakov is presented as crafty and strategic, Esav as rough and tough.  Many of the traditional midrashim go a step further.  Yaakov's tent is taken as the beit midrash, the house of study.  Esav, by contrast, is spiritually and intellectually empty, all power and no soul.

In the early modern period, many Europeans denigrated Jews for being a strange kind of society -- too many intellectuals, too few people who worked with the hands.  Of course, it was medieval Europe that had forced the Jews to live that way.  But modern Jewish movements picked up the same criticism.  Jewish socialism and Labor Zionism wanted to remake the Jews, as modern industrious people who did depend on others to work the land and to build things.

When Yaakov comes dressed up in animal skins with food for his blind father, Yitzchak muses, "The voice is the voice of Yaakov but the arms are the arms of Esav" (Genesis 27:22).  To Yitzchak, the combination of the two sets of qualities didn't make any sense.  But today, it's the dichotomy that doesn't make sense, or shouldn't.

It's true that Jews are overrepresented in the Wall Street wrongs of the past few years.  Some will say that it's Jews living off the real labor of others.  That it's Yaakov cleverly trading some stew today for birthright-and-blessing, booming profits down the road.  But in New Hampshire you can see that Jews in fact do everything.  Your elders and your officials....your woodchoppers and waterdrawers (Deuteronomy 29:9-11).

We're a grounded, down-to-earth community capable of big thoughts, visions, and commitments as well.  Maybe what made Yaakov and Esav as youths both so dislikeable is the fact that both were forced to play only one type.  From our vantage point, we should be proud if we can have arms like Esav's when they are attached to the voice that would eventually mature inside Yaakov.