Jacob’s Wrestling Match: Who Was That Masked Man?
14 Kislev 5772 / 10 December 2011
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
It was a dark and stormy night. That’s how I’ve always imagined the scene beginning – complete with all the flowery prose of a pulp novel or a melodrama. In one of the most descriptive and telling scenes in the Torah, we meet Yaakov, our father, at the transformative moment of his life.
The chosen one, the golden child has spent some two decades in exile. Having manipulated his brother out of his birthright, having stolen, outright, Esav’s blessing, Yaakov is forced to flee to the home of his uncle Lavan. In that moment Yaakov is a runner – he runs away. His name even means “heel,” “bent;” he’s a trickster, a manipulator, a conman. He avoids confrontation at all costs, and the cost has been his ability to come home – his relationship with his family. So he lingers on the plantation of his uncle, working the land and trying to build a family of his own, until God tells him it’s time to go home – back to Canaan, back to the land of his father.
The next morning, he is to encounter his brother Esav who is coming to meet him at the head of 400 men. Yaakov is afraid of his brother, the hunter, so, ever the master strategist, he divides his camp in two. Perhaps he will have to cut his losses.
And now, on that dark (and perhaps stormy) night, Yaakov finds himself alone, on the other side of the river, without the protection of his family, and he wrestles with a man. We are not told anything about this man, but it seems clear, at least, that he is no ordinary person. Their wrestling match lasts straight through the night and Yaakov has his leg wrenched from its socket, a wound that he will carry for the rest of his life. But, by daybreak, Yaakov manages to gain the advantage and, with his opponent pinned to the ground, swears that he will not let him go until he receives a blessing.
And as he awakes, he lifts his eyes and sees his brother Esav, off in the distance, accompanied by a legion of men, and as they approach one another, Yaakov, limping from his battle the night before, Esav falls upon his brother’s neck and kisses him and cries. Apparently all is forgiven. And just a few verses later, we are told that Yaakov arrives at his next destination shalem – safe, whole, in peace.
The narrative is beautifully constructed, and it’s in this parasha that I remember why the Bible, more than the collected laws and legends of our people, is a truly great work of literature. We glimpse the story of a man as he journeys from trickery and deception to blessing to servitude to wealth to fear to struggle to embrace and finally, to a place of wholeness and peace.
But I am always left wondering, to stay with the melodrama, “who was that masked man?” Who is this ish, this man that Yaakov encounters on the banks of the river. And, perhaps more important, why does Yaakov wrestle with him?
Though all of the commentators, classical and modern, agree that the ish is no ordinary man, the true nature of this individual is a source of centuries-old debate. Rashi, citing an earlier midrashic tradition, says that this was Esav’s guardian angel – if Yaakov can succeed in forcing the angel to submit, he will have gained his brother’s forgiveness for stealing his blessing.
Maimonides and Nachmonides (the Rambam and the Ramban - often confused at parties) disagree over whether the fight is real or part of a dream sequence. The Ramban points out that the ish with whom he wrestles is actually his brother Esav, no angelic guardian, but the man himself. Just as Yaakov wrestled with his brother on the banks of the Yabok, the Jews would later struggle with Esav’s descendants, the Roman Empire and later oppressive Christian regimes. Many Chassidic sources will agree with this assessment. And one midrash articulates a Hebrew pun in which, at the end of our story, Esav – vampire-like – bites his brother’s neck instead of kissing him (B”R 78, 12).
But it seems to me that our Sages, zichronam livracha, have misread Esav. The tendency to demonize this simple man seems rooted, not in the literary character who would sell his birthright for a bit of stew, but in the later confrontation of power and values between Rome and Israel, West and East. Esav becomes Edom and Edom becomes the paradigmatic exemplar of Rome. So our Sages read, anachronistically to be sure, the character of their oppressors onto to the more benign character of Esav. With regard to our Sages, I think, we should not judge them too harshly. They endured, through generations of fear, oppression and murder, more than we American Jews, who generally have excellent relations with our Christian neighbors, can imagine. Yet, though their analogies may have helped them to cope with or understand the broken world in which they lived, I don’t think they do justice to the narrative itself and the growth and development of its characters.
Esav is a man of the moment, a hunter who thinks with his stomach, a lover who thinks with his loins. He is big and strong … and emotional – he is heartbroken when Yitzhak has no blessing left for him. He even takes an additional wife (from the Ishmaelite side of the family) because he wants to emulate his brother who has gone off to marry within the clan. Unlike his brother, Esav is not a planner, a trickster or, likely, a bearer of grudges. He is a simple man who enjoys power, money, good food and good women. He has his faults, to be sure, but it is highly unlikely that twenty years after their parting, Esav would still be licking his wounds, schlepping along his anger and resentment.
But, if Yaakov was not wrestling with Esav, or some metaphysical manifestation of him, with whom was he wrestling? A hint may lie in the blessing which Yaakov demands and receives from the ish (Gen. 32:28-29):
Said he, ‘You will no longer be called Yaakov, but Yisrael, for you have struggled with God and humans and have prevailed.’
If not Esav, who is the human with whom Yaakov struggles? Benno Jacob, the great 19th and 20th century rabbi and thinker, suggests that the man is none other than Yaakov himself. He writes: “God answers a person’s prayers if the person prays by searching himself, becoming his own opponent.” In other words, in preparation for the next day’s confrontation with Esav, Yaakov wrestles the entire night with his fear, his guilt and with his conscience. Elie Wiesel adds that there are actually two Yaakovs at P’niel: one Yaakov is full of doubts and fears, questioning his worth. The other is the dreamer and the hero, the Yaakov who could look to future, and in doing so, recognize his own worthiness as the progenitor of B’nai Yisrael, the children of Israel. Yaakov leaves the fight limping and broken, but he has prevailed, he has triumphed over the side of himself that always chose to run, avoid confrontation, and hide. He is, at least in this moment, no longer a trickster - he is now a wrestler!
When we think of wrestling, I’m willing to bet that, for many of us, it conjures up images of big, burly men in spandex tights hurling chairs at one another and clobbering each other with fancy-titled moves like “suplex” or “piledriver.” But, for those of us who actually wrestled competitively (yes, you can add this to the category of “things you didn’t really want to know about your rabbi”), we know that wrestling is a much subtler affair. As the great nighttime battle unfolds, one is forced to wonder, why wrestling? Why not “ten paces, turn and shoot?” Why not a duel with swords or spears? First, wrestling is an every-man’s sport. Only the hands and body are permitted, no weapons are used. This means that, while wrestling can certainly be primal and painful, it is rarely fatal. To win is to pin your opponent, or for him to give up, or for time to run out (as it did when the sun rose). Second, wrestling requires two primary skills: stamina and balance, and the latter is extremely important. To achieve victory in wrestling, one must have a keen, intuitive understanding of physics - how to shift one’s weight, subtly overcoming the balance of one’s opponent so as to gain the advantage. But lest we forget the importance of the former skill, remember well that the heart of the wrestler is measured not by his cleverness and balance, but by his endurance. For to win, one must have enough energy yet to stand. And wrestling is a grueling affair…
The atmosphere of a wrestling match is well-captured in the words of American poet, Robert W. Service:
For nigh an hour they milled like mad, And mauled the mat in rare old style. Then up and launched like catapults, And tangled, twisted, clinched and clung, Then tossed in savage somersaults, And hacked and hammered, ducked and swung; And groaned and grunted, sighed and cried, Now knotted tight, now springing free; To bend each other’s bones they tried, Their faces crisped in agony… (Robert W. Service, Wrestling Match)
Or in Rashi’s words: “For this is the manner of two (people) who struggle to overthrow each other, that one embraces (the other) and knots him with his arms.” (Less poetic to be sure, but what do you want from a vintner?)
And locked in this epic battle, entwined in struggle with this mysterious ish, Yaakov finds that his stamina and his sense of balance have been sufficient. And he holds the creature down and demands a blessing.
“You will no longer be called Yaakov, but Yisrael, for you have struggled with God and humans and have prevailed.”
And Yaakov recognizes, in this crucial moment, that his opponent has not been merely himself but God as well. And as “Yisrael,” he realizes that God is in this place, and, perhaps once again, he did not know it.
Herein lies the beauty of Benno Jacob’s interpretation: once Yaakov is willing to finally wrestle with his own demons, God begins to answer his prayer. Tied in a knot, struggling to gain an advantage over his own destiny, Yaakov begins to realize that the stranger with whom he is wrestling is the Ancient of Days, and the victory is not in defeating his opponent, but in contending with Him.
And this is why this passage becomes the paradigm for Jewish existence. We are not B’nai Avraham or B’nai Yitzhak, we are B’nai Yisrael, children of Israel - we are God-Wrestlers. We struggle, throughout our lives, to attain a sense of balance, to conquer our inner demons and achieve a life of sh’leimut, of wholeness. But this is the journey of a lifetime; victory is not to be attained in the blink of an eye. We need stamina to see it through. It is no accident that Yaakov and the ish wrestled well through the night, for, at times, this is how life feels, does it not? We each experience at times, to paraphrase O’Neill, a long night’s journey into day. It’s not easy, and it does not leave us unscathed - remember Yaakov limped away toward his brother Esav. He is not perfect and his life will include other moments of failure. Yet, when he arrives he is a better person and a more honest person for having struggled.
There’s a midrash that teaches that the first, broken tablets were carried in the ark along with the whole ones. In our tradition, we do not cast off the used or the broken; we preserve the fractured and the frail. Not just because we are packrats (though that’s true), but, also, because we sense that “brokenness” affords us better access to the whole, the “bent” allows us to encounter the straight. And it’s precisely this path on which Yaakov finds himself. Rabbi Gunther Plaut points out that philologically speaking, the original name Yaakov received from his wrestling partner may have been yishar-el, God straightens. In others words, the Almighty grants Yaakov, who was akuv, “bent,” the blessing of the upright. But the paradox is that uprightness doesn’t preclude brokenness, and Yisrael carries the remnant of his struggle with him even unto the Promised Land.
Said another way: the Kotsker Rebbe taught, “there is no heart so whole as a broken heart.” And so it is. If we are willing to wrestle: to listen and to speak, to engage and not to flee, to really challenge ourselves and confront our wrongdoing and eschew simplistic answers, then we will have taken one more step toward wholeheartedness. If we can acknowledge that victory is contained within the dance and within the struggle, then we will have earned the title B’nai Yisrael, God-Wrestlers. Then, we will have mirrored Yaakov’s journey toward wholeness, carrying the old wounds of a nation grown wise with time and balance – ever closer to our true selves and to God.