Friday Dispatch: My Father's Blessing, My Mother's Stones

My first d'var Torah (and some news!)

Friday greetings,

On Wednesday morning, I reached the final part of my application process to the Academy for Jewish Religion (AJR) – the admissions interview.

One requirement was to write and deliver a 7-10 minute d’var Torah.

Literally “a word of Torah” in Hebrew, a d’var explores and draws meaning from the week’s parsha, or Torah portion. It should engage with the text in ways that offer us something pertinent to consider, pose questions to ponder, and/or open up new possibilities for understanding and relating to ourselves, each other, Judaism, and the world.

Dear reader, this was my first time writing a d’var (please be gentle with me), but it won’t be the last because… I was admitted to the rabbinical school program at AJR!!

Read on for some reflections about Jacob, dreams, blessings, and the bag of rocks I’ve been driving around with for months. It’s on the long side, so I invite you to pour a cuppa and get comfy.

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Sometimes for me, encountering Torah can feel a lot like standing at the threshold of the ocean. It’s so vast that it can be overwhelming, much like life itself. I find that it can be helpful to simply pause before diving in – to give ourselves a chance to acclimate. We might feel the sand beneath us, the temperature of the water lapping over our feet. We might take in the wide horizon and feel awe – a little fear, a little wonder – at all these depths contain, most of which we will never see or understand. Then, we can slowly take some steps forward, appreciating how amazing it is to experience even an inlet of these waters.

This is how I invite us to enter this week’s parsha, Vayetze: slowly and mindfully. It may have oceanic potential and infinite meaning, but as with anything, we can only begin to understand it by choosing one focal point.

As with any parsha, there is the visible story and, just as with the ocean, the intricate ecosystems it contributes to beneath the surface. I hope this d’var will result in something tangible we might hold onto throughout the week, as if bringing a shell or a stone with us from this time at the shore.

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Veyetze opens with Jacob setting out on his journey from Beer-Sheva and stopping to rest for a night. He takes a stone for a pillow, which doesn’t sound very comfortable, but, one imagines, he’s making do with what is available to him.

He then dreams his now-famous dream about the ladder with the messengers going up and down from Heaven, and the blessing he receives from Adonai, nothing less than an intergenerational blessing of home and abundance. Not only does God tell Jacob: אֲנִ֣י יְהֹוָ֗ה אֱלֹהֵי֙ אַבְרָהָ֣ם אָבִ֔יךָ – I am the God of your father Abraham’s house – but, according to Chizkuni, the commentaries of Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoah, the very stone Jacob used as a pillow and later anointed with oil, “had been part of the altar on which his father Yitzchok had been bound on the occasion of the Akeydah.”

Even before he begins to dream, Jacob, without consciously knowing it, is already linking the stories between past and future generations.

One thing I question is the word “IF” in Jacob’s acceptance of the blessing he receives in the dream. God’s blessing is unconditional, whereas Jacob’s vow to Adonai seems to imply that he doesn’t fully trust God to follow through. He says: “If God remains with me, protecting me on this journey that I am making, and giving me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I return safe to my father’s house— יהוה shall be my God.”

Despite any uncertainty Jacob may have, as his “if” suggests, he anoints the stone with oil and renames the place where he slept Bethel, House of God. What can we make of this?

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The thing with dreams is that they’re ethereal. They may leave us with a promise, or even a vision of something so much bigger than ourselves such as an entire nation spread across the earth more numerous than dust. It’s ungraspable.

We read that Jacob wakes up “shaken” by the dream. He seems genuinely surprised that he hadn’t known before that God was in this place. Ma nora ha makom ha ze, he exclaims. How awesome is this place! But he does something else – he pours oil on the very stone that was present on that fateful day for his father.

And though Jacob leaves Bethel that day, the stone remains a marker of memory and a physical embodiment of God’s blessing. I wonder if it also represents something else: An obligation.

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As I pondered the many possible meanings of this story, I found myself thinking about the bag of stones I’d been driving around with for the last few months.

Yes, I’ve been driving around since this summer with a ziplock bag of rocks in the trunk of my hybrid Corolla. More than once, I’ve thought, I’ve really got to write about this! There was something slightly absurd about it, yet at the same time, I sensed a deeper meaning there.

When I encountered this parsha, suddenly I saw the connection and began to see why on earth I’ve been holding onto these stones.

For one thing, I told my mom I would, and that is reason enough. You should know that I collected the stones from the porch of my parents’ home of 40 years, which is now for sale.

Starting at age 10, this was a place where I had many dreams, literal and figurative, about what blessings life might hold. Finding my way forth required much wandering and plenty of fear (and not always the awesome kind!). My path forward, like all of our paths, required faith. There were many years when I felt I was just swimming in a vast ocean of becoming, with nothing to hold onto, not even a physical place to which I would return.

What I did have – and what this story helps me see – was the blessing of my parents’ enduring love and solid support.

When it came time earlier this year to help them prepare to leave this home, my mom asked, “What about my rocks?” Her question did not surprise me, as she was very attached to the stones she placed around the edges of the side porch and the old Victorian barn. I knew leaving this place held grief and uncertainty for her.

I said, “Mom, don’t worry, we’ll take these rocks with us, and we’ll find a new home for them.”

“I’ve got an even better idea,” she said, suggesting that we bring the stones to the plots at the Wildwood Cemetery where she and my dad will eventually be buried. Suddenly, the stones had the potential to link past and future, becoming symbols of the connections between Jacob’s dream and the very descendants God promised him.

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Hamakom, the word meaning “the place” that appears five times in Vayetzei, has become one of the many names for God. This parsha shows us that the place may not be a physical one. God travels with us, and stones become markers of life-affirming dreams across the generations. The place is both literal – Bethel – and figurative – wherever we rest our heads and dream.

Stones are a way of taking that which is too vast for us to comprehend and making it manifest. Sometimes we find ourselves driving around town with rocks in the trunks of our cars, reminding us to have faith even when it all seems too big, even when we’re not at all sure where the journey is taking us, and even if we wonder, as Jacob implied, whether God will follow through on God’s promise at all.

The 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote, “Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task.” Even though God blessed Jacob freely and unconditionally, Jacob’s task still lay before him: To become Israel. Many more chapters await him on that journey. But anointing the stone is an important step toward his becoming himself and fully receiving God’s blessing. It is not enough to sleep and dream and be blessed. We must wake up and take action.

The stone as a marker of hamakom is much bigger than the place itself. It is a powerful way of linking each generation to the ones before and those yet to come. Likewise, shepherding my mother’s stones from her beloved home to her eventual grave is part of my journey of receiving and fulfilling God’s blessings and becoming fully myself.

On a very personal level, I’ve thought a great deal about embarking on this path of becoming a rabbi at a moment when it’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed by the world.

This makes me think of a different story about another famous stone, the one Sisyphus was condemned to push up a mountain for all of his days. To see life in this way is to betray God’s blessing. Instead, I look to Jacob’s story as an affirmation of God’s presence and the task of this vast inheritance that calls us to wake up where we are and see that God is here.

When I feel doubt alongside my gratitude for being alive, when blessings feel as ethereal and fleeting as dreams, I often turn to poetry. This week, I found comfort and renewal in the opening lines of Doris L. Ferleger’s 2024 poem, “Stone for a Pillow”:

Dear God of Abandoned Hope,
I entreat You, may I feel each stone You place
under my head as a bolster of bright brocade.

May we rest and dream, may we journey bravely into the unknown, and may we wake up each morning knowing that the stones we sleep on and the ones we anoint as holy are interchangeable with invocations of God’s promise and presence.

May we return to hope every time we place a stone on a loved one’s grave or pick one up from the ocean floor. Ours is not a journey for the wary, yet we are blessed to continue it. HaMakom is right here, among us, with the stones that mark it so.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

My parents on the porch, March 2020

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