Between Two Poems

A Wrestling Blessing Match

Another One by Ron Padgett

When you’re a child you learn there are three dimensions
Height, width and depth
Like a shoebox
Then later you hear there’s a fourth dimension
Time
Hmm
Then some say there can be five, six, seven…

I knock off work
Have a beer at the bar
I look down at the glass and feel glad.

I’m not going to analyze the poem. Each reader can love it or hate it, or anything in between, for themselves. I am clearly in the first category, or I wouldn’t have started this post with it, so I’ll just write that I especially love the way it ends. By the time the glass of beer is empty, are we back at the shoebox again? Is the shoebox the goal, or is it perhaps to carry the lightness of the shoebox, with all if its childhood magic inside, and enable it to unfurl into those other dimensions of time and place, timelessness and placelessness?

The shoebox is empty of course — empty of importance, and self, and needing to be right. The shoebox exists in the makom of interbeing, intrinsically linked to everything else (all of which are also empty except for the breath of the One Who Made Them).

Somehow, to me, this is Jacob. Our ish tam, our earnest (childhood-shoebox-like) man who learns how to be empty so he can be full of the One. I’m always rooting for Jacob. Every year when he flees his childhood home after the old switcheroo with his brother Esau’s birthright blessing, and he lays that stone underneath his head and has the dream of the ladder with its feet on the ground and its arms reaching up to heaven, with angels ascending and descending — I think, ahh that’s so Jacob! To dream of a ladder that’s sturdy and grounded, where up is up and down is down, in a time in his life where everything is all confused — his older brother’s blessing has become his, the birth order has flipped, the sun has set before its natural time, and all he wants is something to make sense.

He wants the shoebox, but he’s entered into the makom of dreams now, into the month of Kislev, where we understand and experience the wrestling ideas that sleep is a fraction of death, but dreams are a fraction of prophecy (according to the Talmud that fraction is 1/60). A little death, a little prophecy, every night.

In this week’s parsha though, Jacob has decided that he’s done with letting fear rule his life. He’s done with being full of himself. (Go Jacob!) He’s going to face his brother Esau, no matter the outcome. He’s ready to return to the land of his birth and face his past. In this journey, he is both practical and mystical — he prepares lavish gifts for his brother to be sent first, he directs the movements of his large, multi-wife household with all the skill of a Broadway veteran, and he readies himself for the worst. But he also prays and takes stock of his inner makom. He remembers the blessings he’s received and the promise that the One will be with him wherever he goes, even here. We might say Jacob prepares for this epic meeting in all dimensions.

Then, my favorite moment of the parsha occurs, just before Jacob and Esau have their reunion. Jacob, on the banks of the Yabok river…

וַיִּוָּתֵ֥ר יַעֲקֹ֖ב לְבַדּ֑וֹ וַיֵּאָבֵ֥ק אִישׁ֙ עִמּ֔וֹ עַ֖ד עֲל֥וֹת הַשָּֽׁחַר

וַיַּ֗רְא כִּ֣י לֹ֤א יָכֹל֙ ל֔וֹ וַיִּגַּ֖ע בְּכַף־יְרֵכ֑וֹ וַתֵּ֙קַע֙ כַּף־יֶ֣רֶךְ יַעֲקֹ֔ב בְּהֵאָֽבְק֖וֹ עִמּֽוֹ׃

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר שַׁלְּחֵ֔נִי כִּ֥י עָלָ֖ה הַשָּׁ֑חַר וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ לֹ֣א אֲשַֽׁלֵּחֲךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־בֵּרַכְתָּֽנִי׃

And Yaakov was left alone—
and a man wrestled with him until the coming up of dawn.

He saw that he could not prevail against him,
so he touched the socket of his thigh;
and the socket of Yaakov’s thigh was dislocated as he wrestled with him.

Then he said:
Let me go,
for dawn has come up!
But he said:
I will not let you go
unless you bless me.

I don’t know about you, but if I was left alone at night on a riverbank and a stranger challenged me to a wrestling match, I’d want to understand why first. Unless of course I already knew…Unless I was wrestling myself, my own shadow, a most powerful angel. Then, what a wise choice to ensure the wrestling is not in vain, but actually yields a blessing.

It’s interesting to note that the injury Jacob suffers is in his hip socket — the place that connects the upper body and the lower body. Maybe the limp that Jacob walks away with is his final reckoning with hierarchy, allowing him to live into some semblance of peace — that his feet could be on the ground and his head could be in the heavens, like that dream ladder.

It’s interesting to note that the Hebrew word used for “let go” at the end of the wrestling match, has the same root as the title of the parsha, Vayishlach, meaning “and he sent.” So the very act that Jacob is in the midst of engaging in with his estranged brother — sending gifts, family members, himself to this much-anticipated meeting — carries within it the same energy, the same force, from which Jacob’s blessing comes.

To close the wrestling match scene, the mysterious shadow figure asks Jacob, “What is your name?”

Now I think it’s fair to say that Jacob’s shadow angel already knows his name. But Jacob needs to speak it out in this moment because it’s about to be changed, or at least added on to. From the Everett Fox translation of the end of this scene:

Not as Yaakov/Heel-Sneak shall your name be henceforth uttered,
but rather as Yisrael/God-wrestler,
for you have fought with beings human and Divine
and have prevailed.

It’s that last bit that’s most important I think. Because we’re pretty good at wrestling — we wrestle with thoughts, emotions, language, jar lids, loved ones, outdated habits, fear, generosity, joy, life and death. We’re always wrestling. But we forget to ask for a blessing when we prevail. It’s the blessing that matters, otherwise we’re stuck wrestling, trying to grab on or push away, with the sun just about to rise, forever.

The Torah is reminding us here that our wrestling can be for a purpose, it can open us up to Yisrael — Yashar El — direct connection with the One. Even though we’ll inevitably forget, as Jacob does, and we’ll go back and forth our whole lives between our small self and our true self, once we’ve been given a new name, it can’t be taken away. We are Am Yisrael, which incidentally can also be read as yashir El — the people who will sing to (with?) the One.

What will we sing?

If we open Jacob/Israel’s shoebox and enter into the multidimensional makom, we hear that the song is empty of itself. It’s empty so that it can be full — of El, of blessing, of river water rushing with a force beyond time and space, rising, falling, reflecting.

Water Falls by Jim Jarmusch

Water falls from the bright air.

It falls like hair.

Falling across a young girl’s shoulders.

Water falls

making pools in the asphalt.

Dirty mirrors with clouds and buildings inside.

It falls on the roof of my house,

It falls on my mother and on my hair.

Most people call it rain.

Thanks as always for reading,

Ariel