Shabbat shalom!
This is a long one, because I got to study a new favorite psalm AND revisit my favorite all-time parsha in one week. Friggin’ fantastic week as far as Jewish study goes. Literally everything else about this week can kindly consume a sizeable satchel of Richards.
ahem
Anyway.
Psalm 46: Invitation/Reminder to Surrender
Psalm 46 earned a bookmark for frequent reference after this week’s discussion with Lexi and the Torah Studio crew. There is so much here, but notably no plea for rescue, nor is it an invitation to bypass the reality of the world, or to ignore the life-giving and destructive nature of existence or the Source of that existence.
What we create collapses. Divine creation also collapses. Source looms among us and our creations. Source looms upon the earth. Creation was made to collapse, and we are made in the image of the Source of creation, collapse, and destruction, with a reminder to look toward the next creating rather than attempting to deny what has befallen us.
The reader is reminded in this psalm that our fortress is the G*d of Yaakov. Not of Moses or Abraham or of today. Specifically of the ancestor who wrestled with life, wrestled with G*d, wrestled with identity, and had not yet fallen into their new name.
We are invited to surrender to reality within a fortress for messy creations, wrestlers who don’t yet have answers, children of messy ancestral creation stories, collapsers of kingdoms, imaginers of new ones. I came away from the excavating of this psalm with a prayerful version of it that I now carry within myself:
May I surrender to reality in order to actively wrestle (within myself and in the world) toward divine relationship with reality’s Source.
May I acknowledge what is true in order to respond with the next right action that will increase my right relationship and proximity (and the proximity of my community) to the divine Source of creation. May each of next right actions propel this world toward the one to come.
Parshat Vayislach: Jacob Wrestles Into New Being
This is my favorite week of parsha study, because Parshat Vayishlach is my favorite Torah portion. It inspired my final essay for my conversion during my first round of studying, Jacob’s moments of wrestling and reunion are the reason I chose my name, Yaakov.
It’s been interesting to start the week thinking about surrender in Psalm 46 and then hold that recent internal wrestling while re-reading this moment of divine wrestling before returning home, coming full circle, following a complex life back to the first partner Jacob ever had, his brother.
The reunion itself is such a moment of surrender… “Family trauma, am I right? Let’s just be brothers, my guy.” (My imagining of one way it would go today.)
Perhaps they have both lived into a deep desire to just be who they were meant to be to one another, perhaps they’ve simply gotten too old for playing out the mechanizations of dysfunctional (if well-meaning) parents, or perhaps one of the myriad of other theories is the right take, but these moments are so relatable because we’ve all been Jacob in this moment in some way, and maybe that’s why that night earned him a name that all Jews carry.
I love it. I love Torah. I love Jacob. I love our messy, traumatized, complex ancestors. I love that I get to read this story over and over and I’ll never have to have the right answers, in the same way that my ancestors didn’t always have them.
I wish you a quiet, peaceful, fulfilling rest this Shabbat. Thank you for witnessing my wrestling.
Yaakov
Ps. Have you checked your #YearOfTorah on Sefaria? Here’s mine, and you can check yours here.