Trees and life

• Author: MICHAEL M. COHEN
• Published date: 06 December 2020
• Date: 06 December 2020
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

That wound is passed on to his son Jacob, who calls God "Pahad Yitzhak," "the fear of Isaac" (Genesis 31:42).

Does the Jewish people continue to carry that wound?

In his poem Heritage, Haim Gouri writes, "But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts."

Human pathos emerges from reading the Akeida. Expanding from that response, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai challenges us: "The real hero of the Binding of Isaac was the ram, who didn't know about the collusion between the others. He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac."

Echoing Amichai's sentiment, Jeremy Benstein asks, "Who is the Tanach's first killer? If you said Cain, you're off by a few verses. It was Abel, who slaughtered lambs for his sacrifice."

Both writers ask us to expand our vista outside our human silo. What would that mean for this week's parasha? A river, sunrise, and trees.

As Jacob approaches his brother, Esau, he "was greatly frightened" (ibid. 32:8) and "crossed the point of crossing/the ford/ma'avar of the Jabbok" (ibid. 32:23).

Rivers are boundaries. River crossings in religious and secular texts often symbolize leaving one status, one identity, for another. Think of the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. For Rabbi Norman Cohen, "The Jabbok was to be Jacob's Rubicon!" Shortly after Jacob reaches the other side, he wrestles with "a divine being" (ibid. 32:29), who changes his name from Jacob to Israel. Jacob's wrestling match lasted "until the break of dawn" (ibid. 32:25), when he received his new name.

Bob Dylan sings, "They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn." That popular concept was first coined in 1650 by English theologian and historian Thomas Fuller in his religious travelogue "A Pisgah sight of Palestine and the confines thereof: with the history of the Old and New Testament acted thereon."

While a popular concept, it is not true. The darkness of night is the period when the sun is 18 degrees or more below the horizon. There are, in fact, seven stages of dawn from the time the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon until the sun rises above the horizon. When our parasha (Torah portion) talks about "until the break of dawn" (ibid. 32:25), "dawn is breaking" (ibid. 32:27), and "the sun rose" (ibid. 32:32), it acknowledges some of those stages.

In the Mishnaic (Berachot 1:3) and Talmudic discussions (Berachot 9b) regarding when the morning Shema prayer can be recited, the answers given reflect those different stages of dawn. The question...