VAYISCHLACH
/This world is like a wedding hall!
A man is staying in a guesthouse for a few nights.
The first night he heard music and dancing from next house,
They must celebrate a wedding!
The next evening he heard the same sounds and again the evenings after that!!!
The man went to the house keeper and asked:
" how can it be so many weddings in 1 family " ?
The guesthouse keeper answered:
" that house is a wedding hall " !
Today 1 family holds a wedding, and tomorrow another.
It is the same in the world, people are always enjoying themselves, but someday is one person, and other days is another!
No single person is happy all of the time!
The world may indeed be like a wedding hall,
Every day is a day if someone 's celebration!
But, how sad it can be,
It can also be like a cemetery,
Every day, someone buries a person dear to him!
We might even think the world as an Hospital,
Some visit the terminal ill, others rejoiced healers , and there are some who celebrates new life's!
There is a reason that no single metaphor is sufficient to picture the world!
In our life's , we experience the world is wedding hall, cemetery, Hospital and many other places.
The very nature of life is we must shift from experience to experience !
Change is the basic element of our being. However, change is not always easy!
Forever Changed ,
yes, in our weeks parashah, this is what happened with Jacob.
Truly life-changing moments are few and far between.
A specific encounter can touch your heart,
or,
a story on the news can make you think,
but very few of these moments reach us so deeply that our lives are never the same again.
However, occasionally an event which seems superficially insignificant can lead to an unexpected transformation.
This is the case in
Parashat VAYISCHLACH
which we read this week.
The portion is filled with what should have been huge, life-changing moments for Jacob.
Jacob and his twin Esau reunite and make up after a 20-year estrangement.
Following this, Jacob’s daughter Dinah is involved in a violent incident in Shechem that prompts her brothers to take revenge on her behalf,
Rachel dies in childbirth,
and Jacob’s father, Isaac dies.
All of these significant events likely impact Jacob in one way or another,
but it’s before all those events,
at the beginning of the parashah
when his life is changed completely.
Jacob is preparing to meet his brother after decades apart, and he struggles with an angel in his sleep.
This unique encounter changes him in an instant,
both physically and emotionally.
The wrestling knocks his hip out of its socket, and Jacob’s name becomes Yisrael, literally
" one who struggles with G-D.”
When Jacob and Esau reunite,
Jacob is overcome with emotion.
And we read:
Jacob proclaims,
“Seeing your face is like seeing the face of G-D ”
The text in Genesis Rabbah,
a 5th century commentary on the Torah,
suggests that Jacob is talking about his own transformation,
and Not,
about his brother’s appearance.
Jacob is sharing with Esau that he has seen the face of G-D and is a changed man, not the deceitful brother who tricked his twin.
He no longer sees Esau as a rival, but as an equal, deserving of honor and dignity.
Clearly Jacob is a new person.
It’s a cliché to simply say
" people can change.”
Our parashah reminds us that change is really about
having our perspective shifted so that we may see the world differently.
The hope is,
that we recognize in ourselves,
not only these significant moments when they happen, but the potential for them to occur at all.