Finding our way (Shabbat Vayeitzei 07.12.2024)
The sequel just landed; eight years ago, Disney released the original Moana film, set in the dim and distant past, with great songs by Lin Manuel Miranda. The story centres on a brave young Polynesian girl who heads out on an epic journey to save her people – partly given the courage through a glimpse of her ancestors that comes with the song “We Know the Way.” With lots of drumming, plus lyrics in Samoan and Tokelauan as well as English, it’s a short but characterful song that gives Moana (and us) a glimpse of the ancient Polynesians’ skill in navigating the oceans, using the wind and the sky. They sing: “at night we name every star, we know where we are; we know who we are… and when it’s time to find home, we know the way.”
When Moana’s ancestors go out onto the ocean, it seems that however far they go exploring, they have the skills that help prevent them getting lost: they know themselves, and throughout their travels, they orient themselves so that at any moment they know both in which direction they’re heading and where they come from. These are skills that I can’t help feeling might have benefited Jacob in Parashat Vayeitzei, because when we meet him at the beginning of today’s reading, he’s far from home and seems to be somewhat disorientated. If he has managed to come to the right place to look for a wife, our ancient Rabbis seem to suggest that it’s more by Divine providence than by Jacob actually knowing where he is or where he’s going.
Commenting on the verse “וַיִּפְגַּ֨ע בַּמָּק֜וֹם וַיָּ֤לֶן שָׁם֙ - He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night” (Genesis 28:11), the French medieval commentator Rashi notes that this word וַיִּפְגַּ֨ע really means something like “he unexpectedly landed” somewhere: that is, Jacob wasn’t quite expecting to arrive there for the night, but he did. Rashi then draws on a Talmudic teaching (Chullin 91b) to explain that Jacob got there faster than expected because God shrank the ground before him, so that his journey was miraculously shortened; and therefore Jacob ends up here with a bit of a bump. It’s almost as if he went through a wormhole, which scientists explain similarly to the Rabbis, as scrunching up space and making a tunnel from one place to another, to cover large distances in a short amount of time; a space-age shortcut.
Yet this seems to prove disorientating for Jacob. After he comes to a place in hours rather than days, his sleep there is disturbed by extraordinary dreams, and then he wakes to realise that he is in a holy place but hadn’t known it; perhaps most difficult of all, it will take him years rather than days or weeks to find his way home. This idea that God intervenes to speed up Jacob’s outward travel may be what causes this dislocation: because when a journey is speeded up, we don’t have time to notice the gradual changes from one area to another or to identify landmarks along the way. One minute we’re here, the next we’re there, with no time to find our bearings or even to prepare for the new situation, leaving us to adapt on the fly – which few of us do as well as we might hope – and perhaps not even leaving us where we intended to go.
Intentionality takes time, so if we want to choose our paths, we also need the journey to take its proper time; or at least to pause regularly, looking up to consider where we are now and what new choices we need to make to reach our destination and be ready for it when we get there. In a world that changes as fast as ours, this might be especially important to help us ask whether our ethical thinking is keeping pace with our technical capability. In a world where we spend so much time looking down at our phones and expecting everything to happen within moments, we may need a reminder to pause in our headlong rush, so that we don’t end up like Jacob, unexpectedly landing in places from which we may take years to return.
One possible reminder has Jewish ritual form: Kiddush Levanah is a monthly ritual of going outside at night during the time between the new moon and the full moon, to gaze up at the growing moon and make a blessing over it. It’s a beautiful way of reminding ourselves that each phase matters, each stage, not just the total newness of Rosh Chodesh or the brightness of the full moon. Kiddush Levanah is a chance to take stock of where we are now, while still on the way, acknowledging that although it may feel long and difficult, it’s on the journey that we can grow into our potential.
I love Kiddush Levanah enough to have written my rabbinic thesis on it; ancient navigators of the Pacific islands knew the stars enough to navigate by them – yet the value of taking the time to pause and look up is open to anyone. In our rush from one thing to another, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the guiding stars of our lives and to find ourselves adrift. Instead of looking for shortcuts – sci-fi or otherwise – perhaps we can learn to value each step along the way, by pausing occasionally to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and where we’re heading. Then perhaps we too will be able to sing with confidence that “we know where we are, we know who we are… and when it’s time to find home, we know the way.”
