Self-Reliance

If you read chapter one of Genesis carefully, or for that matter, any of the chapters that follow, then you can not help but realize that the Divine deed of significance is not so much the act of creation, as the act of separation. In the beginning, the universe was unformed and void. From it, God separated the heavens from the earth. God’s next act was again separation, the distinction between light and darkness. Then God proceeded to distinguish between the earth and the sea, and so on and so forth. It is not merely the physical world undergoing a process of partition and classification, but the temporal universe as well. One day from another, night from day and of course, the Sabbath from the rest of the week – declared holy, kadosh, which means “separate.” Each and every act takes something shapeless and undefined and transforms it into a new entity with boundary and definition. The first human being, possessing both male and female characteristics – “m ale and female God created it” – a condition that lasts until chapter two when gender distinction is introduced. The tree of knowledge, a moral distinction – the ability to distinguish between good and evil. The Tower of Babel – the tale of how languages were separated one from the other.

The list goes on and on, and in each instance the point is the same. Creation is not what the philosophers call creation ex-nihilo, creation from nothing, rather something “new” is introduced by way of being separated from that which preceded it. The same holds true for the central figures of the Bible. If the secret to God’s powers of creation lies in the ability to separate one thing from another and thereby create something new, then for human beings, the ability to be “God-like” is found in the capacity to draw on this same process of separation and individuation. From Abraham’s leaving his father Terach’s home to create a new faith, to Joseph’s being sold by his brothers into slavery, to Moses’ being separated from his family of origin, to the very name of the second book of the Bible – Exodus – the dramas of our people reflect the ability of a person or people to disengage from the tangled and amorphous mass of that which came before and form something new. Sometimes, as with Joseph or Hagar being cast into the wilderness, that process happens against our will. Sometimes, as with the newly freed slaves, the process is an act of liberation. But it is a truism of the biblical text that the people or groups who are unable to move forward and separate from the past – from Lot’s wife turning back and being preserved as a pillar of salt, to the wilderness generation longing for the fleshpots of Egypt – they are the ones who suffer inglorious fates. They are the ones who never do what we all must do: grow. As strange as it sounds, the act of disassociation and the act of the act of creation are interdependent. Heroic character, biblically speaking, comes by way of detachment, self-discovery and eventually, self-reliance.

There is no figure in the biblical text who exemplifies this principle better than the father of our nation, Jacob. Born into the house of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob’s defining attribute as a youth was being a yoshev ohalim, “a dweller of tents.” In other words, he was a “mama’s boy,” he stayed close to home. He never left – physically or emotionally. His character was formed and informed by his mother Rebecca’s watchful eye and abiding influence. Only when mother and son realize that Jacob’s life is in mortal danger does he become a fugitive from his own household. He is literally on the run. In fact, the very names of these Torah readings tell the story: Va-yetzei (And he went out), Va-yishlach (to be sent out). These are chapters about Jacob going from one place to another, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually.

It is only in this week’s parasha that Jacob fully detaches and becomes his own man. He has dwelled uneasily in the home of his father-in-law Laban for many years. He has amassed wealth, he has married Laban’s daughters, he is now the father of many children. But he has yet to create the most important thing – himself. Only towards the end of the Torah reading, at the point that Jacob breaks the golden handcuffs of his existence and takes his family and his possessions and flees, only then does Jacob truly come into his own. “Here is the mound,” Jacobs tells his father-in-law Laban, “and here is the pillar that I have set up between you and me.” “I am not to cross to you past this mound, and you are not to cross to me past this mound and this pillar.” (Genesis 31:51-53)

In order to appreciate the magnitude of what is taking place, you have to remember that the fundamental building block of biblical society was the beit av, the father’s house. The ancient Near East was patrilineal, patrilocal and patripotestal; in other words, lineage, household and power were derived from your father or father-in-law’s home. Jacob’s act is so courageous because it is only at this moment that he breaks free from all the encumbrances that had defined him until now, and he places the terms of his future on the one and only thing that is in his hands – himself.

When the clocks change, as they did last week, wedding season begins. I have a wedding tonight, I have one next week. I’ll be dancing the hora quite a bit between now and the spring. It is one of the best parts of my job to see so many Jewish homes being created. When I am speaking to young couples and counseling them on the road to the huppah, my number one worry has nothing to do with finances or children. The recurring concern that emerges is whether a young bride or groom is able and willing to detach him or herself from a family of origin and create a new independent home. I see this concern voiced by one partner or the other, expressed not necessarily in words, but in body language or facial expression, sometimes in a private phone call to me later on. One partner is not sure whether their successful, seemingly independent and impressive spouse-to-be (usually the groom), will ever be able to extract him- or herself from the grip of parents. It is not that I would ever encourage a rupture between one generation and another, God forbid. But the text in Genesis is pretty clear on the matter: “Therefore a man leaves his mother and clings to his wife.” (Genesis 2:24) The language is almost surgical in nature; the separation is difficult and it can be traumatic, but it is also necessary. You can’t create something new, certainly not a new home, unless you are willing to separate yourself from the one you came from.

What is true for our families is true for pretty much every dimension of our lives. “There is a time,” wrote Emerson, “in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.” (Emerson, Self Reliance) Jacob came to know about the nature of identity formation what each of us knows, but far too few of us act upon. We are who we are and we become who we seek to become only when we are able to create a sense of self distinct from what came before. This is why the rabbis teach that no person can be a prophet in his or her own city. The distinct tonality of our own voice can best be heard when it is introduced in a new context. There are so many unseen forces that incline us towards conformity with the past. We revere precedent to the point that it prevents us from going forward. We heed advice from loved ones, believing it to be infallible, rather than listening to the counsel of our own hearts. Mordecai Kaplan once reminded us: “The past or its proxies can no more pass judgment upon the present than the child can sit in judgment upon the man.” (Judaism as a Civilization, 404.) I do believe, with all of my heart, that perhaps the surest sign of a maturity, and the most difficult to come by, is to be found in a person’s ability to determine which advice to listen to and which advice to ignore. “It is easy,” Emerson went on to write, “…to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Jacob steps into his own at the moment that he chooses self confidence over timidity, intuition over imitation and his own gut over the judgment of history. The sensitive reader will see that it is only after his successive breaks with his past that Jacob begins the process of return and reconciliation, to his brother, to his family and to becoming the father of his people. Perhaps the most beautiful line of the entire Jacob saga will come next week when the Torah calls Jacob shalem, which means to be whole or complete. It is true of Jacob and it is true of us today: only by leaving home can we come home; only by breaking away can we become shalem. It takes daring, it takes faith, and it takes fortitude. It was by this process that our world came into being, and it is only by this process that the identities we each seek to create can be actualized. May we, like Jacob, find the courage to create worlds of our own, the worlds that sit waiting to be created.