Parahat Vayeitzei - Becoming a Nation

This week’s Torah reading is about Jacob while living in Lavan’s house. Taking Rachel and Leah as wives, and having most of his children. But what is really happening in this portion is the birth of the Jewish Nation.

The parashat starts with Jacob, after leaving his father’s house, putting a stone under his head and going to sleep by the side of the road. Jacob had just gotten a spiritual and physical blessing from Yitzchak. He has all the potential in the world, but he has nothing. The modern day equivalent would be a person graduating from Harvard Law, but has no job and lies down on a park bench with a news paper under his head and goes to sleep.

This is when he has his famous “Jacob’s Ladder” dream. He wakes up and realizes the place he is on is “the house of G-d’. He takes the rock he used as a pillow, turns it on it’s side, pours oil on it and makes it into a “matzavah”. In Modern Hebrew that means headstone, but in ancient Hebrew it meant “an altar”. This doesn’t sound like such a strange thing for Jacob to have done. However, in Deuteronomy 16:22, we are told not to make a matzavah, because G-d hates it.

Now we like to say that our forefathers kept the entire Torah before it was given. How literally they kept it is open to debate, but you’d think Jacob would be spiritually sensitive enough not to do something that G-d hates.

The commentators explain this by saying that at the time of Moses, G-d hated it, but in the time of Jacob he loved it. So what could have changed to make G-d hate something he once loved?

To understand this, we need to look at the concept of Jewish prayer. In Judaism, prayer is both communal and individual. Look at the Amidah, the central prayer in our liturgy. It is said (ideally) in a group of 10 or more, where each person prays to himself. What are they praying for? “Heal us”, “Forgive us”. They are praying for the entire Jewish people. So we have a group of people, each praying individually for the welfare of the community; the prefect synergy between community and self.

Because of this communal aspect, altars are supposed to be made up of many stones, representing the many members of the Nation of Israel. That explains why G-d hates single stoned alters now, but why would he have loved it in the time of Jacob? The answer is because until Jacob, there was no Nation of Israel. Judaism was a single person, first Abraham, the Yitzchak, now Jacob. So there is no problem with making an altar out of a single stone.

Just when does Israel become a nation? It has clearly happened by the middle of next week’s parashat (the term nation is used to describe Israel for the first time). But I would say that it actually happens this week, specifically when Jacob takes his family and leaves Lavan’s house. You have an independent, identifiable group of people with common beliefs and customs. That certainly sounds like a good definition of nationhood.