Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster reflects on the meaning of darkness in Genesis and why there is always hope no matter how dark things get.
We have entered the month of Kislev, which heralds the onset of winter and the darkening of days. During this time, many people find it difficult to get up in the morning and become depressed as darkness falls in the middle of the afternoon.
This primal fear of the dark is ascribed to Adam and Eve, the first humans, described at the beginning of Genesis. A midrash imagines them becoming frantic as darkness falls at the close of the first day of their lives, knowing that they've disobeyed G-d by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now they are terror stricken. Adam says:
'Woe is me that because I've sinned, the world is darkening around me! The world will return to chaos and emptiness. This is heaven's death sentence upon me!'
In this midrash, the first human, Adam, experiences darkness as punishment, a kind of existential shudder, as all that is familiar dissolves into the trackless night. Darkness is often a metaphor for the scariest of times, times like the present, when grief has overtaken us, as we are witness to the atrocities of families bereft of their loved ones, but in their case, through no fault of their own. The good were massacred by the worst of evils.
The prophet Ovadiah, which we read in a couple of weeks, describes this scenario in his very short book, which only contains one chapter. In this book, Ovadiah gives vent to his fury against the neighbouring people of Edom, descendants of Jacob's brother Esau, interpreted in Jewish thought as representing the Roman empire, and then the Christian world. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that today, for many Jews, Esau represents the Western world, and their subterfuges, both political and religious.
In verses 10 and 11, Ovadiah states:
'For the violence done to thy brother Jacob shame shall cover thee, And thou shalt be cut off forever. In the day that thou didst stand aloof, In the day that strangers carried away what mattered to us more than anything, And foreigners entered his gates ... You were also one of these.'
These words perfectly depict the way the West has reacted to the Jewish people, once again in their history. They stood by during the Eastern European pogroms. They stood by during the Shoah. They wouldn't allow Jews to enter their lands. Canada, a massive country, which could do with a larger population, stated at the time of the Shoah: 'How many Jews should we take? One Jew is too many.' The UK's behavior during the Shoah was even more shameful, and imbued with the type of overt anti-Semitic discourse we have recently experienced in Parliament, with the firing of the only truly philo-semitic member of the Cabinet.
Fifteen years ago, on 6 October 2008, the first Jew to address the Vatican, supposedly as an honoured guest, Chief Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen of Haifa, cited these words from Ovadiah. And was greeted with approval. However, he subsequently learned that he had been tricked by the then Pope. The date was also the 50<sup>th anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII, who had actually betrayed the Jews during the Shoah, as we have now learned conclusively from the Vatican archives.
Rabbi Shear Yashuv was very angry indeed at the way he had been treated by the Catholic Church, and said so. And the present Pope has followed in the footsteps of Pope Pius, by refusing to condemn Hamas and by taking the side of the 'Palestinians', many of whom accompanied the military wing of Hamas into the kibbutzim and perpetrated some of the worst crimes, having voted for Hamas during the last elections.
Not for nothing has the Roman Catholic Church, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, in recent days been condemned as 'morally depraved' by one of our leading Jewish journalists, and social commentator for the Times, Melanie Phillips.
But this is not the only lesson from the Biblical readings coming up in the next two weeks. On Shabbat we read the story of Jacob's ladder and, one week later, his struggle with the angel he encounters, after which Jacob prevails and is renamed 'Israel'. These stories are covered in Genesis 28:10 – 36:43.
What is the meaning of the dream and these angels, depicted in Genesis 28:10-19?
Many modern psychologists and psychotherapists have seen the 'ladder' story as representing the rungs of life in which a child develops in stages from babyhood, through a series of taught obligations, into a citizen worthy of our great civilization (if we are lucky!).
For Midrash Genesis Rabbah, the ladder signifies the many exiles which the Jewish people will suffer before the coming of the Messiah. The first angel represents the 70-year exile of Babylonia (starting in 586 BCE). First the angel 'ascended' 70 rungs and then 'fell down', defeated by Persia. Then the angel representing Persia ascended and also fell, as did the angel representing Greece. The fourth angel, representing the final exile of Rome/Edom, whose guardian angel was Esau himself, kept climbing higher and higher. Jacob feared that this children would never be free of Esau's domination, but G-d assured him that at the End of Days, Edom too would fall down.
Another interpretation of the ladder is suggested by the 1<sup>st century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, Philo, who saw the ladder as follows:
The angels represent souls ascending and descending from bodies.
The ladder is the human soul and the angels are G-d's logoi, pulling the soul up in distress and descending in compassion.
The dream depicts the ups and down of the life of the person who tries to live a virtuous life.
The angels represent the continually changing affairs of men.
We should bear in mind that Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164), who writes extensively about Jacob's ladder, described the angels as the gift of wisdom that G-d has implanted in us. And also, in contrast to other commentaries, he regarded the Muslim world as the fourth exile of the Jews, which had indeed forced him to flee Spain in 1139 for pastures new, as far away from Muslim influence as possible.
Whatever the meaning of Jacob's dream of the ladder ascending to heaven, the Biblical text makes clear that this dream took place during the night, when Jacob lay down to sleep in Bet-El. So in this case, the dark was not wholly negative and, on the contrary, gave rise to a dream of true enlightenment.
As Irish Nobel Literature laureate, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), remarks of his own poem The Gravel Walks, 'I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens.' And this line from the poem is written on his grave:
'So walk on air against your better judgement.'
Hard to believe that Heaney, whose poetry is full of biblical allusions, didn't have our Jacob's ladder theme in mind when he wrote this poem!
In Genesis 32:22-32, Jacob, once again at night, encounters an individual, probably an angel, with whom he wrestles until daybreak. This angel succeeds in putting Jacob's thigh out of joint, but Jacob perseveres and prevails, with the angel telling him that he, Jacob, will henceforth be known as 'Israel', 'for you have striven with G-d and with men and have prevailed.' The Haftorah Hosea 12, which is read on Shabbat, also refers to Jacob's opponent as an 'angel'.
The great Rambam (Moses Maimonides 1135-1204) believed that this incident was 'a vision of prophecy', while the foremost Bible commentator Rashi (1040-1105) suggested that Jacob wrestled with the guardian angel of Esau, his older twin brother, whom Jacob had deceived. Others see this incident as Jacob wrestling with G-d Himself.
Whatever the true meaning of these two incidents, the ladder reaching up to heaven and the struggle with the angel, which are open to multiple interpretations, both took place at night, and this is no coincidence.
Just as night and darkness generally can be a negative time and situation for many people, on the other hand, it is also true that most dreams happen at night; many dreams are helpful to the dreamer; and sometimes dreams are ways of sorting out for us problems and difficulties in our lives, as evidenced by the transition of Jacob, a passive person who had lived until that time, as his Hebrew name suggests, through guile and stealth, into Israel. The Land will be his and he himself is now Israel, the country which struggles, but always overcomes.
This transition is beautifully described in Hosea 12:4:
'In the womb he [Jacob] took his brother by the heel [akav] And by his strength he strove [sara] with a godlike being [Elokim]. So he strove with an angel and prevailed.'
This passage is full of puns, in which the name Jacob, Ya'akov in Hebrew, stems from the word for 'heel', 'akav. The words 'strove' and 'godlike being' in turn become 'Israel', Yisrael, he who strives with G-d and prevails.
May the State of Israel, and the Jewish people, overcome the current dreadful situation in which we are living, and emerge on the other side once again, maybe wounded and bruised, but certainly not defeated. May we all travel from darkness to light and soon welcome in the festival of Chanukah, which commemorates the triumph of good over evil.
