Vayishlach 2019
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, Yaakov leaves Lavan’s house and learns that Esav his brother who wanted to kill him is coming with 400 men. He sends his family ahead and prepares them for war and then Yaakov crosses back over the river Yabbok alone in the night. There he has the famous struggle with someone the Torah calls a man and the commentaries tell us was the angel of Esav. Jacob’s thigh is injured but he is victorious and his name is changed to Israel, from the word “sarita,” “to struggle.”
Why did jacob go back alone in the middle of the night? Rashi has a strange explanation from the Talmud: “Jacob forgot small (pachim) jars and went back to get them.” What kind of jar is a pach? It is a jar for olive oil.
The mystics write that the entire story of Yaakov and the angel is a reference to Chanukah. Yaakov’s injury was on the kaf hayerech the rounded part of the thigh. The word pach which is the word for the jar of oil found by the Maccabees and the word kaf are the same Hebrew letters. This story is one of struggle between the Jew and Esav, his enemy. It happened in the middle of the night. Yaakov emerges hurt but victorious. To celebrate Chanukah we use a jar of oil to light a lamp in the midst of the night. The entire holiday emerges from a spiritual and physical struggle with the Greeks.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (Likutey Halachot, Kiddishin 2) says that the seven lamps of the Menorah in the Temple are a symbol of the 70 faces of Torah that bring us spiritual light. Though we live but sometimes our life is more like sleep, more like a dream. Chanukah teaches us that we can rouse from that sleep, we can have light in the night. The purpose of the candles is not utilitaian, one may not study by the chanukah lights, its purpose is just to make the night less like night. To stop our spiritual sleep. To engage in the struggle of being a Jew in a Greek world rather than retreat from it.
The Torah tells writes in the blessing that Noah gave to his son Yefet, (lit. “beauty”), “Yaft elokim l’yefet, v’yishkon b’ohaley shem.” God gives beauty to Yefet (Greece) and he will dwell in the tents of Shem (the Jewish people). From here the Talmud derives that the one language other than Hebrew in which a Torah may be written is Greek. Yet, paradoxically, the Talmud says that on the day the septuagint, a greek translation of the torah,was written, darkness came to the world.
Perhaps the answer is that to use the beauty of Greece to write the words of the Torah is a good thing, this lends additional beauty to the Jewish perspective, but to retranslate the Torah into Greek, and thereby to view the Torah entirely through a Greek lens, brings spiritual darkness. Chanukah is about utilizing the outside world as a way of beautifying the Torah but we must not transform the Torah into its image. This great struggle will not be easy, we may, like Yaakov, be injured, but ultimately, if we learn to light the lamp in the midst of the darkness, the sun will rise for us as it did for Yaakov.