Vayetze: From “against” to “next to,” and then perhaps to “with”

(Delivered on Friday November 23, 2012)

Most of you are probably aware that I have a sister – her name is Dahlia, she is an amazing person, and we love each other dearly.

 I also have another sister of sorts. Her name is Hunaida Sababa. She is a Palestinian Christian from the West Bank, near Bethlehem.  Her family hosted me for a month a long time ago, when there still was a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. We became quite close during that time, and I adore her.  Snce that time, we have barely kept in touch. I have probably seen her only 3 times in the 16 years since I lived with her.

But last week Hunaida posted a message on my Facebook page. It was a simple message – “How are you Rachel? My whole family misses you – I miss you!” That was all. And it was enough. Enough to understand that she loves me, that she cares, that her heart was breaking just like mine.

She did not mention the rockets from Gaza into Southern Israel and Tel-Aviv or the Israeli army’s bombing campaign over Gaza. Just – “I miss you. How are you?”

Of course she was thinking about those bombs and those rockets. I know that I am one of the few Jewish people she has a relationship with. I know she wrote out of true compassion towards me.

Our Torah portion this week is full of sibling relationships – and these relationships are full of tension.  I want to bring you three images of siblings– two from this week’s parasha and one from last week’s – which, gathered together, contain a message about how to digest and respond to the almost war that took place over the last many days, and the fragile cease-fire that is now in place.

The first image:

 Jacob is on the road at night, alone.

He has stolen his twin brother Esau’s blessing. Esau wants to kill him, and so Jacob flees.

This is the first time Jacob has ever been alone. He had always been with his brother, entangled with him, since conception. Since their nine months together in their mother Rebecca’s womb, they have struggled with each other.

Now Jacob has separated himself from his brother and from the struggle. A cease-fire is in place. They are not actively fighting each other for the moment.  And they will each flourish on their own, find wives, have children, build up their wealth.

 Separation is a good first step, but it is not enough. They still haven’t figured out how to be near each other. They have certainly not made peace with each other, and they won’t for twenty more years.

 All is quiet, yet tense and incomplete.

This week the heaviness in my heart lifted as the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was announced. There was a sense of tempered relief. My friends and colleagues in the Southern Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod could emerge from their safe rooms and bomb shelters. At least for now, my cousins in Tel-Aviv are not living in fear of another siren and another rocket headed their direction. And it seems that my cousin Roy won’t get called up for reserve duty.

But the quiet is tense and fragile. Perhaps trust can be built back up? Perhaps things can change and evolve in the political sphere such that the ground can be prepared for a peace agreement? It is a BIG perhaps. A cease-fire is not enough to give me hope. And I don’t want to have to wait twenty more years, like Jacob and Esau did, for peace to come.

My husband shared with me what he learned during a tour of the state house in the region of Schleswig-Holstein an area of Germany where he lived for a year of high school. This region borders Denmark and at one time had actually BEEN Denmark. The official way of encapsulating the story of what happened between the Germans and the Danes after WWII is this:

“From against each other

to next to each other

to with each other.”

At least Jacob and Esau, Israel and the Palestinians, are holding back from killing each other. But who knows when the next bloodletting will begin. They have not yet moved from “against each other” to “next to each other”. And they are nowhere near “with each other.”

Jacob is on the road at night – alone.

The second image:

The full womb.

Jacob finds his way to his uncle Lavan’s household and marries Lavan’s two daughters, Leah and Rachel. Over the course of 14 years, 12 pregnancies yield 12 children for Jacob, with Leah, Rachel and their two respective maidservants.

After more than a week of watching the civilian death toll rise on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border. Children, men and women killed and injured. A pregnant woman in Gaza, among them. After all of this, it is disorienting to read about all of these pregnant bellies, all of these bouncing babies.

The full womb.

In the words of Amichai Lau-Levie, an Israeli-American Jewish educator and founder of the organization “Storahtelling”:

Eleven times in just one chapter, one womb after another fills with new life. Rachel the beautiful is the last to become pregnant, and her barren bitter rage as her sister pops ‘em out is reminiscent of the bitter barrenness of all great matriarchs before her. . . .

Rachel is jealous of Leah’s fertility and Leah is angry that Rachel is the one more loved [by their shared husband, Jacob]. But they, the mothers of the future nation somehow manage,. . .  to put away that rage for the sake of a united home where children can grow healthy and peace can nourish life. The Womb will Stop the War

Here again, we have rivalry between siblings – this time between Leah and Rachel. But for the sake of their children –for the sake of the nation and the future, Rachel and Leah find a way to move from hostility, to cease-fire, to peace – from “against” to “next to”, to “with”.

Our third image is actually another full womb. But this time it is Rebecca’s painfully swollen belly, as she, in last week’s Torah portion, carries those twin boys, Jacob and Esau. The Torah tells us that the babies struggled in her womb.

In Arabic and Hebrew the word for “womb” is the same –  “rehem”. In Aramaic this word means “love.” In Arabic and in Hebrew this word also mean “compassion.”

Amichai Lau-Levie writes:

Confused with the opposing forces in her swelling womb, [Rebecca] goes to challenge God for answers – how can one person hold such polar opposites as she was doing? The reply she gets echoes today: There are two within you, there will be struggle, and one will prevail. 

Later in the story it’s written that Rebecca loved Jacob and Isaac loved Esau. 

But I don’t buy it, [says Lau-Levie]. I don’t think the Bible is telling us the whole story here. The agenda of the editor is choosing a side, the winner. I’d rather not, [he says].

I think Rebecca, who carried both boys in her belly loved them both, each in her own way. And even if she favored Jacob’s claim to the blessing and the [birthright], Esau too came from within her, and was worthy of her care, compassion, love.. . .

I want to aspire to this version of Rebecca, proud and pregnant, Mother Earth. I aspire to hold within my soul the love for both opposing forces, and within my mind the care for all sides and battling brothers, no matter the rage.

The Womb will Stop the War

In next week’s Torah portion, the estranged brothers Jacob and Esau come together, after twenty years of tense separation. It seems that they reconcile. They fall on each others’ necks and weep and kiss. And Jacob says to his brother that to see his face, “is to see the face of God.”(Genesis 33:10)

They do not stay together though.  At the end of next week’s parasha, the brothers go their separate ways again. But this time they leave without that simmering tension. They leave more complete – they leave in peace.

They agree not to be against each other anymore – they can at least live next to each other in peace if not necessarily with each other in intimacy.

I have no fantasies about Israelis and Palestinians running to each other, weeping, falling on each others’ necks and kissing. I have no delusions of these two brothers weaving their lives together in some intimate idealistic way. At least, I haven’t had these dreams for the past twenty years.

What my Palestinian sister Hunaida and I still have is rachmanut -  compassion for each other, yes, perhaps even love. But we come from two different peoples with different dreams, different interests and different visions. I do not want to share a state with her.  I would rather show my passport on my way from the state of Israel to the state of Palestine to joyfully and safely visit her, so that my children might finally meet hers.

My hope right now for us is this: that we can continue to hold both our Israeli and our Palestinian brothers and sisters in the same womb of compassion. And that out of that compassion we might do all that we can to help both sides move forward from “against each other” to “next to each other” – from a fragile cease-fire to a lasting peace.