(Delivered December 6, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Earlier this week, on a night when sleep eluded me, despite soul-crushing fatigue, I started to ponder Jacob’s second inexplicable night-time encounter. This second encounter is quite unlike the starry-eyed, angel-filled aha moment from last week’s parsha, Vayetze—the God-wink that awoke Jacob to the divinity that he didn’t previously recognize was available to him. 

The words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Truly there is God in this place, and I didn’t even know it

are words of a young man just leaving his family to make his own way. Jacob’s moment of discovery in Parshat Vayetze is full of possibility, of angels moving freely between earth and heaven, between here and there. There is possibility everywhere in this touch of God; the radiance of it practically leaps out of the scroll.

But now, in Vayishlach? As Jacob churns over the prospect of reckoning with his twin brother Esav, a shiny, star-dusted God is not on the menu, no matter how much he wishes it were. Like many of us, he can no longer believe in a simple God. Indeed, if Parshat Vayishlach had a subtitle, it might be God for Grownups.

Jacob is not the young man first awakening to wide-eyed wonder. He is different now. He is in a different place in his life, rundown by the strains of work and family—an unfair and unscrupulous boss who also happens to be his father-in-law, four wives, many children, complicated relationships and competing interests. 

Jacob is weathered. 

As he girds himself to reconnect with the brother whose detached nature he took advantage of, at great emotional cost, he is filled with misgiving. By this time, he’s been cheated himself, by Lavan’s greed and trickery. He has been robbed of blessing himself, through his beloved Rachel’s prolonged difficulty in conceiving. Jacob has absorbed on the molecular level that life is full of heartbreaks and injustices. 

When he learns that Esav, his brother, is coming to meet him, with a retinue of four hundred men: 

וַיִּירָא יַעֲקֹב מְאֹד וַיֵּצֶר לוֹ
Jacob was very afraid, and in distress

In his state of foreboding over how his brother would receive him, and perhaps (as Rashi teaches) fearing that he might cause Esav further harm, Jacob goes into crisis mode. He divides his entourage into groups, imagining the worst: that perhaps Esav and his army of 400 will attack, and leave him with nothing. In a classic, “the heir and the spare” move, Jacob hedges his bets in the hopes that he can diminish risk, and perhaps stave off the disaster he deep down feels like he deserves. He sets his various groups in motion—some animals and servants being sent as a peace offering to his brother, closer family members spirited off across the river for safekeeping, eventually to be subdivided again with respect to where they fall in his hierarchy of love—all the while praying for God’s protection from the brother he presumes the worst of.

Eventually Jacob finds himself alone. And then not alone. A mysterious presence tugs at the strings of his disquiet all night long, as Jacob tosses and turns. The text is thrillingly unclear as to what is happening. Is there actually another person there, or is Jacob wrestling with his own conscience? Is it a ladderless angel? The Hebrew slips through our fingers, like so much dust. 

What remains is the theological lesson. The text goes on to say that the stranger renames Jacob as Yisrael: 

כִּי־שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁים וַתּוּכָל
For you have contended with God and with people and prevailed

This word שָׂרִיתָ contains multitudes: you have contended, you have wrestled, you have exerted your power. The sin and the resh bring us to top of the food chain (think שַׂר הַטַּבָּחִים, Pharaoh’s chief officer) or even to the realm of royalty. שָׂרָה, after all, means princess. So whatever the physical or psychological nature of Jacob’s dustup, the text seems to want us to categorize it in the sweep of divinity. Perhaps, then, all the better that its nature is unclear. The ambiguity is part of the message.

And afterward, Jacob names the spot Peniel—the face of God. Or is it Penuel—God turned away? Clearly Jacob’s crisis of faith makes an opening for both sensations. He has felt the presence of the divine, and he has felt it vanish. The ephemerality of it, the strenuousness of holding onto that sense of connection leaves him damaged, with a limp that makes the phrase ‘crippled with anxiety’ all too real.

I personally am grateful for this confusing, opaque, non-reassuring description of encountering God. I’m grateful to read of the hair’s breadth distance—literally a verse—between seeing the face of God and feeling God turn away. I’m grateful that all this turmoil and searching is depicted as happening in the dark of night. 

Isn’t that what it’s really like?

Faith takes work. It takes wrestling. It’s hardest in the dark.

To locate this spiky, destabilizing experience of God with Yaakov Avinu—Jacob our ancestor, someone whose name we invoke every time we open a siddur to pray—hammers home that message. When we are praying, we are invited to bring a Jacob-consciousness, a stance of searching and doubt. It’s a feature, not a bug. 

And, of course, Jacob’s new name, Yisrael, is the name by which we come to know ourselves. In this haunting passage, our tradition gives us the gift of reassurance that our own uncertainties are part of the process, that our struggles are inherent in our identity as Jews. The moments when we see the face of God, and the moments when God turns away are all with us in our prayers, as in our lives.

We are alone. And then not alone. 

Shabbat Shalom!