I would like to dedicate
this dvar Torah to Rabbi Neil Gillman z”l who passed away yesterday. He was a much beloved teacher of Jewish
theology at the Seminary, a teacher who helped so many of his students, including
myself, to appreciate and explore the concepts of God, mitzvah, and more, to go
beyond the halakhah, the practice of Judaism, to create a meaningful and
soulful Judaism. May his memory be a
blessing.
Professor Gillman taught that
we cannot see God on our own, with our eyes, but we can sense God’s presence in
the relationships between us, in the invisible, mystical network that connects
us all.
To illustrate the point, he
gives us the image of a basketball game.
He explains we can know the score.
The game score is concrete, 24 points to 22, but when it comes to a
team’s passing game, we cannot see that in one concrete number. The quality of the team’s passing game is
something we discover over the course of the game, as we watch how the players
work together and move the ball up and down court.
This past week I was critical
of Jacob who takes advantage of both his brother and his blind father. But I would not want to end our evaluation of
Jacob there. As with the passing game,
we need to see what Jacob chooses to do in another situation rather than focus
on only two points in time. He uses his
cleverness for dishonesty, and now he uses his cleverness to get himself out of
a bind as we see with Lavan, his uncle, Jacob has met his match and received a
solid comeuppance for his past choices.
Midah k’neged midah, measure for measure, Lavan tricks Jacob, giving him
Leah as a wife instead of Rachel and then he exploits the moment to demand an
additional 7 years of labor from him.
But Jacob concocts a scheme
to remove himself from Lavan’s clutches, and we should appraise him also how he
handles himself when he is in an adverse situation.
When Lavan hears Jacob’s
proposal for building his own wealth by taking dark colored sheep as well as
the spotted and speckled goats, the Me’am Lo’ez commentary suggests Lavan is
thrilled with the idea. Lavan knows that
these will be the vast minority of his flocks.
He accepts the deal quickly because he does not want to take the chance
Jacob may regret the deal and ask for the real wages he deserves for 14 years
of labor. (Me’am Lo’ez p. 587, Genesis
Vol. 2)
It appears God helps Jacob
here, according to Rashi God’s angels help him collect the animals he requests
out of the flock. Somehow, through
creative breeding, he builds up the special flock from a mere pittance of wages
into a huge flock far exceeding the original take.
Here, Jacob’s cleverness
enables him to escape. And like a great
Black Friday shopper, he finds a great residual value for a very inexpensive
price.
We celebrate achievements of
this kind all the time. We thrill at the
way Batman and James Bond escape from elaborate death traps. We see investors on the stock market who in a
moment, or over time, build wealth through times of uncertainty.
But is this enough to redeem
Jacob’s character? As Professor Gillman
would say, we must explore the darker places of theodicy, of God’s justice in
the world, and so we cannot fully evaluate Jacob until we see how he behaves in
the Joseph stories, when Joseph comes forward as a foil to Jacob, teaching his
brothers accountability, and when Jacob, as far as he knows, experiences a loss
he cannot repair with his wits, a loss that impacts what we come to know as his
fragile heart.
Gillman reminded us always of
the heart, of context, of the humanity, the human condition in Judaism. He was famous for his lively debates with
Rabbi Joel Roth who takes the position that Jewish law is pre-eminent over
Midrash and theology. But the lesson of
those debates, one of which I had the privilege to witness years ago, was that,
again, like the passing game, we cannot have a meaningful Judaism that is all
in one category, but rather, our Judaism, our religious lives and perspectives,
draw from the deep wells of both law, tradition, ritual, midrash and
commentary, and theology, our contemplation of the most vast and perplexing
questions of existence that together we seek to answer week in and week out.
May his memory be a
blessing. Amen.
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