Vayetze: Even with God on Your Side.
During my first year as a middle school counselor, I had an epiphany on the way home from work one day. I had spent the first couple months of my new job really trying to assess and find the commonalities amongst the students I was seeing and their families. I was working in a rich, affluent Jewish day school in Miami, Florida -- the kind of place where people wrongly assume that pain never visits these families because they are so privileged. But pain there was as it is most certainly a part of the human experience. But all these students had very different families and experiences but ultimately were suffering the same basic issue, that of being almost completely void of coping mechanisms. And so it occurred to me that one day while driving home that these well-intentioned parents had done their very best to ever allow their children to experience a single negative feeling in their life. They had shielded them so intensely from having to deal with any painful experience that the ironic result was an increase in pain response. These sweet kids couldn’t handle any level of negative experience so much that their baseline reaction to struggle was at an almost level 10. After that epiphany, the way in which I approached my students and their parents/caregivers switched to one of coping mechanism development couched in a space of reassurance that life can be stressful, that not all stress is bad, and the development of coping mechanisms that helped the student feel empowered to be their own support system (to a degree, of course).
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayetze, Jacob flees to Charan, the birthplace of his mother, in order to dodge the wrath of his brother Esau, who Jacob just swindled out of his birthright. Along the way, we get the most famous dream of all time, that of Jacob and the ladder. In the dream, Jacob sees a ladder or stairway reaching from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending the ladder. The presence of God “stands” at the top of the ladder. God calls out to Jacob from there, inviting him to enter the covenant that God established with Jacob’s parents, Isaac and Rebekah, and his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah. God then tells Jacob that God will always be with him. Upon awakening from this remarkable vision, Jacob surveys his surroundings and exclaims: “Surely God was in this place, and I didn’t know it…How awesome is this place!” (Genesis 28:16-17)
Jacob has the ultimate protection against negative experiences -- the promise of always having God on his side and yet, even Jacob isn’t shielded from difficult life experiences. Further on in the parsha, Jacob agrees to work for his uncle, Laban, for 7 years of indentured servitude so that Jacob can marry Laban’s daughter (yes, his cousin), Rachel, only to be tricked into marrying Rachel’s sister, Leah (yes, his other cousin), and having to work 7 additional years of indentured servitude. Jacob attempts to leave Laban’s household for years and for years, Laban convinces/manipulates Jacob in order to get him to stay. Even with God on your side, stressful and difficult experiences happen. No one is immune from struggle and yet, we need to struggle (to a degree) in order to recognize the sunshine and positive parts of our existence.
I hope if you’re reading this and you’re going through a tough time, you remember that you’re not alone and I wish you a Shabbat Shalom.
Whitney
