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The Biblical Psychoanalyst

A Bimonthly Newsletter Featuring the Work of Rabbi Dennis G. Shulman, Ph.D.

Volume Two, Issue One January-February 2004

Your comments on the following article are welcome. E-mail comments to Newsletter@DennisShulman.com

When God Sends You an E-mail, How Should You Reply?

Dennis Shulman is presently writing a second book, Walking with Moses: A Weekly Guided Tour of the First Five Books of the Bible (to be published later this year). Each chapter will include a summary of, and commentary on the week's biblical reading, written for the open-minded Jew, Christian, Muslim and agnostic who is interested in what the ancient text can teach us today about ourselves and our lives.

This article is an excerpt from Week Seven of Shulman's new book.

No portion of this article is to be reproduced unless prior permission is granted in writing by the author.

In the opening narrative of our reading this week (Genesis 28:10-22), it is in the wilderness, alone, vulnerable and destitute, having only a stone for a pillow, franticly trying to escape from his brother, his past and himself, that Jacob dreams, and encounters God for the first time.

Unlike Sigmund Freud and modern psychologically-minded men and women, who generally view dreams as the creation of an individual's unconscious wishes and fears, the biblical author understands the dream as a direct communication from God. A dream in the Bible is a "divine E-mail."

What is evident from a careful examination of the spiritual masterpiece that is Jacob's wilderness dream, and Jacob's reaction to it, is that, while God offers Jacob a profoundly comforting message, Jacob, as he embarks on his two decades of exile and rehabilitation, is not capable of hearing it.

Jacob left Beer-Sheva, and walked toward Haran. He came upon a certain place and remained there all night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, and using it as his pillow, Jacob laid down in that place to sleep. He had a dream; a ladder was set on the ground and its top reached to the heavens, and angels of God were going up and down on it. And the Lord was standing above it and He said, "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac: the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your seed. Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants. Behold, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I knew it not!" Frightened, he said, "How awesome is this place! ... Jacob then made a vow, saying, "If God will be with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return to my father's house in peace--then the Lord shall be my God. And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God's house; and of all that is given to me, I will give a tenth unto You."

The dream graphically connects earth with heaven, Jacob with God and the past with the future. First, we see the angels going up and down on the earth-heaven ladder. The rabbis ask why the angels go up first. The answer they offer sets the emotional tone for the dream as a whole--that Jacob, and perhaps all of us, are constantly surrounded by invisible divine emissaries who guard and protect us, not from a far-off heaven, but on the ground with us. Thus the dream angels travel from earth where they live to heaven, not heaven to earth.

The dream includes a third blessing for Jacob. The first one, a partial blessing involving prosperity and dominance, was the one Jacob stole from Esau by deceiving his father. The second one, involving land and seed, was invoked by his father as Jacob departed for Haran at the end of last week's reading. This third dream blessing, also a full blessing involving land and progeny, is given by the Lord God Himself. In this blessing, God first states that He is the God of Jacob's father and grandfather, and then reiterates the promise He had made to each of them--that the land will be Jacob's and his descendents, that his descendents will be too numerous to count, that all people will bless themselves by Jacob's children.

Then God continues by making a set of powerful personal promises to Jacob--that He is with him, that He will protect him and bring him back to this land, that He will not leave him until all divine pledges are fully satisfied.

Although, in this direct communication from God to Jacob, God offers blessings and assurances of great beauty, depth, poignancy, complexity and comfort, it is clear from examining the final text in the dream narrative, Jacob's vow, that Jacob, at this point in his life, is psychologically unable to fully appreciate or contain God's message. More simply put: Jacob just "doesn't get it."

After God pledges to this impoverished and childless refugee that his countless offspring will inhabit all the land that he can see, after God pledges to Jacob companionship and protection, today and in the future, Jacob distrusts the divine promise and begins the negotiation.

Jacob says, "If God will be with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return to my father's house in peace--then the Lord will be my God."

I imagine the Lord God, standing above the ladder, listening to Jacob's vow, puzzled and wondering, "Jacob, my son, my chosen one, exactly what part of the dream I sent you did you not understand? And, by the way, who said anything about food and clothing?"

The Jewish and Christian traditional commentators are deeply troubled by the conditional nature of Jacob's vow--that only if God does this for him, then will the Lord be Jacob's God. Much midrashic ink and interpretive gymnastics are devoted to understanding this vow in such a way in order to keep Jacob in a good spiritual light. For example, the thirteenth-century Rabbi Nachmanides argues that Jacob, here, is not casting doubts on God, but rather on himself. Jacob is expressing his deep concern that he will sin so greatly in the foreign land to which he is traveling that he will not be able to make the Lord his God. The Protestant reformer John Wesley makes essentially the same point in his verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis written five hundred years later.

Also prompted by the desire to place the most positive spin on this troubling text and our patriarch Jacob, but approaching it from a different angle, Rabbi Aibu, a talmudic sage of the fourth century, offers a particularly imaginative theory. He suggests that the Torah text here is in some disarray and that the vow was spoken before the dream. First Jacob asked God for His protection during this deeply troubling time and then, God responds to Jacob's request by sending Jacob the dream. By means of this simple alteration of sequence, Jacob's conditional vow becomes a prayer that God not only hears, but answers.

While these traditional comments on Jacob's reaction to the ladder dream demonstrate profound interpretive creativity, they rob the actual dream text of its power to describe who Jacob is, without any halos, and how this story can speak to us.

Jacob's vow can best be understood psychologically. The vow is an expression of the limitations of our hero, as he is, at the end of the first phase of his life. Here, as he stands in Bethel, between the forty years he spent in his parents' home and the twenty years of transformative exile, Jacob's vow is consistent with other disappointing aspects of his first four decades. Here stands a man who has manipulated Esau out of both his birthright and his blessing by exploiting his father's and brother's vulnerabilities. Here stands a man who has lived by his cunning, deception and tricks. In our week's reading, Jacob receives a powerful third blessing, this one from God Himself, and what is Jacob's response? Jacob, today, in the wilderness, a fugitive from his past, frightened for his future, cannot feel blessed nor appreciate the dream's significance. Instead, Jacob angles for more.

Our Jacob, awakened by his dream, is not yet awakened to himself. He is not yet awakened to all that God has given to him. Neither a devil nor an angel, like us, for the most part, our Jacob is an unaware beneficiary of a world of miracle, mystery and wonder, of divine blessing and promise, of messages of beauty and comfort that are not only misunderstood, but ignored.

The great wisdom of this week's reading is that, when Jacob so clearly misses the point of what God is telling him, Jacob is us.

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