On the Run

On the Run 

Jacob was on the run.

In the beginning of the Torah portion, Jacob was about to embark on the most difficult journey of his life, fleeing his native land of Canaan, and heading towards the spiritually foreign land of Charan.

Jacob spent twenty difficult years in Charan. He faced enormous challenges, yet he emerged tremendously successful. He left Canaan as a single, impoverished man and he emerged from Charan with a family of four wives, eleven children and great wealth. Jacob himself described the contrast between his impoverished lonely self who arrived in Charan and the remarkable wealthy family he had become in the land of Charan. Jacob said to G-d: “for with my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps”.  

In the beginning of the portion, on his way out of Canaan, we read about Jacob’s famous dream of the ladder reaching heaven. In the opening verses of the portion, the Torah relates how Jacob arrived at “the place”, which refers to Mount Moriah, the holiest place to Judaism and the future home of the Holy Temple:

And he arrived at the place and lodged there because the sun had set, and he took some of the stones of the place and placed [them] at his head, and he lay down in that place. And he dreamed, and behold! a ladder set up on the ground and its top reached to heaven; and behold, angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.[1]

In the last two verse of the portion, describing Jacob’s journey back from Charan, Jacob again encountered angels:

And Jacob went on his way, and angels of God encountered him. And Jacob said when he saw them, "This is the camp of God," and he named the place Machanaim (camps).[2]

There are at least two major differences between the two encounters. The first difference is: in the beginning of the portion, Jacob had to seek out the angels, Jacob “encountered the place”, while at the end of the portion Jacob did not have to seek out the angels, instead the angels found him, as the verse states “angels of God encountered him”.

The second difference is: in the beginning of the portion Jacob sees the angels in a dream, while at the end of the portion Jacob sees the angels while he was awake. 

The Torah teaches a profound lesson.

Jacob was forced to leave the holy environment of the “tents of study” and was forced to plunge into a spiritually dark reality. Jacob overcame the challenge by discovering the sparks of holiness that are at the core of every creation and every experience. Jacob was forced out of the realm of the holy, yet he responded by finding the holy in the realm of the mundane, by finding the holy spark in every experience.

When Jacob was in Charan, when his values and his soul were under threat, the challenge of the culture so foreign to him forced him to grow. Being so distant from his birthplace, he could not rely on retreating to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but rather, he was forced to discover G-dliness in the land of Charan. He was forced to discover that in order to experience holiness one does not have to dream on the Temple mount, to retreat to the spiritually abstract. He discovered that, if one searches hard enough, the angels are everywhere.

In Charan Jacob discovered that surmounting the challenge to seek holiness in a spiritually hostile environment, elevates the person. That over time, discovering the angels, the sparks of holiness, in daily life becomes easier. Eventually, instead of Jacob having to struggle to encounter the angles, the angles would now encounter him. 

The story of Jacob, related in the opening verse of the portion: “And Jacob left Beer Sheba, and he went to Charan”, is the story of every soul.

Like Jacob, the soul is called upon to leave the comfort of its native land and to descend into the physical world. Like Jacob, the soul leaves an environment where the Divine is easily accessible. Like Jacob, the soul embarks on a journey to a place where it will have to engage with the mundane.

And indeed, just like Jacob, the soul reaches deeper spiritual awareness. The soul discovers that the oneness of G-d can be found everywhere. That no matter how far he or she wanders, no matter how distant the soul's journey, the soul does not have to dream of escaping to an angelic reality. Our soul can wake up, and find holiness everywhere. We can open our eyes and see the angels encountering us.[3]    

^[1] Genesis 28:10-12.

^[2] Ibid. 31:23.

^[3] Inspired by the teachings of the Rebbe, Lekutey Sichos Vol 3, Vayetze.