• This Week's Torah Portion

Toward the end of Parashat Vayechi, Jacob offers his grandsons a deathbed blessing that has become incorporated into the daily bedtime Shema liturgy: “Hamal’ach haho’el oti mikol ra'”–“The angel who has redeemed me from all harm–bless the lads. In them may my name be recalled, and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac, and may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth” (Genesis 48:16). Who, one wonders, is this angel who saved Jacob from all harm, whom he commissions to bless Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh?   There are a number of angels who punctuate Jacob’s story. There are the angels who ascend and descend the ladder at Beit El, where he camps after fleeing his brother Esau, but none of them save or bless him. Rashi on Genesis 48:10 suggests that the angel in Jacob’s deathbed blessing was the one “usually sent to Jacob when he was in trouble.” Rashi asserts that this angel is the one referenced in Jacob’s speech to his wives before leaving Laban’s household, who advised him to claim all the speckled and mottled sheep as his overdue salary (Genesis 31:10-12). It is worth noting, however, that when Jacob suggests this form of payment to Laban, there is no mention in the text of any angelic guidance on this matter. Ibn Ezra points to a verse in Exodus 23:20 referring to God sending the people of Israel “a messenger before you to guard you on the way and bring you to the place that I have made ready,” though it would seem strange for Jacob to be referring to an angel/messenger that God has yet to promise to send.   Of course, there’s also the “ish” whom Jacob wrestles at Yabbok (Genesis 32:25-30), often understood to be an angel, given that the name change to Yisrael that he proposes at the end of their wrestling match is meant to memorialize that Jacob “wrestled [sarita] with God and men” (Genesis 32:29). An angel is the closest any of us can get to wrestling with a non-corporeal God. That angel, however, doesn’t quite save Jacob; in fact, he deals him a major physical blow, “wrenching Jacob’s hip at its socket” and leaving him forever “limping at his hip” (Genesis 32:26, 32). This same angel refuses to tell Jacob his name, but assents to giving Jacob a farewell blessing (Genesis 32:30), perhaps qualifying this angel to be the one featured in Jacob’s later blessing.   Assuming for a moment that this is the angel that Jacob invokes in his blessing to his grandchildren, one has to ask why Jacob wants to bestow upon his progeny a legacy of such wounding struggle, especially given the backdrop of the whole episode is Jacob’s feared reunion with his brother Esau, which appends an implication of ongoing sibling rivalry to the legacy. Add to this the end of Jacob’s blessing that refers to his grandchildren multiplying greatly. How would that wounding angel be a facilitator of great fertility?   Later, when Jacob returns to Beit El in Genesis 35:10-11, we have a reprise of Jacob’s renaming as Yisrael, this time with God appearing to Jacob directly and blessing him with fertility (preh urveh ukehal goyim yihiyeh mimcha), a beneficent moment immediately and dissonantly followed by Rachel’s tragic death while giving birth to Benjamin (Genesis 35:16-17). Read together with the scene at Yabbok, Rachel’s struggle in childbirth becomes an echo or second episode of wounded struggle in which she is left not just limping but dead and yet manages to leave behind an additional son for Jacob. Might the parallels between these two stories, culminating with the death of Rachel in childbirth, give rise to a reading where the “angel” that Jacob has in mind when blessing Joseph’s children is that of their departed grandmother, Rachel?   That’s the interpretation I have in mind when I read Yehuda Amichai’s (1924-2000) 1962 poem “Jacob and the Angel,” where he imagines Jacob wrestling with a feminine angel:  

Jacob and the Angel Just before dawn she sighed and gripped him that way, and defeated him. And he gripped her that way, and defeated her, and both of them knew that a grip brings death. They each forswore naming names. But in the first light of dawn he saw her body, which remained white in the places the bathing suit had covered, yesterday. Then someone called her suddenly from above, twice. The way you call in a little girl from her playing in the yard. And he knew her name and let her go.

יַעֲקֹב וְהַמַּלְאָךְ לִפְנוֹת בּוֹקֶר נֶאֱנְחָה וְתָפְסָה אוֹתוֹ כָּךְ, וְנִיצְחָה אוֹתוֹ. וְתָפַס אוֹתָה כָּךְ, וְנִצַּח אוֹתָה, הֵם יָדְעוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם תֶּפֶס מֵבִיא מָוֶת. וּוִיתּרוּ זֶה לָזֶה עַל אֲמִירָת הַשִּׁם. אֲבָל בְּאוֹר הָרִאשׁוֹן שֶׁל שָׁחַר רָאָה אֶת גוּפָהּ. שֶׁנִשׁאָר לָבָן בִּמְּקוֹמוֹת שֶׁבֶּגֶד הַיָּם אֶתְמוֹל כִּסָּה. אַחַר כָּךְ קָרְאוּ לָהּ פִּתְאֹם מִלְּמַעְלָה, פַּעֲמַיִם. כְּמוֹ שֶׁקוֹרְאִים לַיַּלְדָה מִמִּשְׂחָקָהּ בֶּחָצֵר. וְיָדַע אֶת שְׁמָהּ וְנָתַן לָהּ לָלֶכֶת.

As in Genesis 32, Amichai imagines a perilous night-long struggle, “ad ʿalot hashaḥar“–until the break of dawn–but in this case, the grappling takes on distinctly sexual overtones. Each of the wrestlers seems aware that to be pinned down in this struggle means death; thus, neither achieves a decisive grip.   Names play an important role in the Yabbok wrestling scene, with the angel renaming Jacob but refusing to tell Jacob his own name. In Amichai’s rewriting, though, both sexual/wrestling partners forego naming names, allowing each other a kind of ongoing identity play. Amichai’s angel takes on a distinctly womanly form in the second stanza, where the Jacob figure sees her naked, with tan lines and white spots created by her bathing suit, suggesting a scene of repose and vulnerability after lovemaking.   Afterwards, however, the beloved she-angel is suddenly called twice from above, pointing, in my reading, to the two seemingly superfluous consecutive verses in Genesis 35:16-17, where Rachel is described as having very difficult labor (vatekash belidetah / vayehi vehakshotah belidetah). The idea of likening her being called away (from life?) to a child being called home from her play outside reads as searingly ironic, but also betrays an awareness that even as adults, none of us exercise control over our own mortality, our lifespans always remaining subject to the arbitrary terms of our (angel-like) mission on earth. That Rachel dies with Jacob and her disagreeing on their son’s name, with Rachel calling him Ben-Oni (son of my sorrow) and Jacob calling him Ben Yamin (understanding Ben Oni as “son of my strength” rather than “sorrow”) (Genesis 35:18), suggests a form of discord between the patriarch and his favored wife that might have haunted Jacob the rest of his days. Amichai revises this, however, and imagines that in the end Jacob “knew her name and let her go” — an image of intimacy, mutual understanding, and acceptance that does indeed seem the stuff of intergenerational blessings.