Parashat Vayetze | Rabbi Roly Matalon | November 29, 2025

Shabbat Shalom.

Esav

seethe with resentment

against Yaakov

over the blessing his father had blessed him.

And Esav

said in his heart, as soon as the time for mourning,

my father comes around, I will kill Yaakov, my brother.

And Rivka was told

the words of a son, her eldest son,

and she sent

and summoned Yaakov her younger son,

and said to him, look, Esav

Your brother is consoling himself with the idea that he will kill you.

So now, my son,

listen to my voice and rise

flee to my brother Lavan in Haran,

and you may stay with him a while

until your brother's wrath subsides,

until your brother's rage against you subsides, and forget what you did to him.

And I shall send and fetch you from there.

Why should I be bereft of both of you in one day?

This scene, of course, is

from the end of last week's

parasha, parahshat toldot

has this week's parasha.

Vayetze opens.

Yaakov is a fugitive

who comes upon a certain place and stops there to spend the night.

Because the sun has set.

He takes some of the stones of the place,

sets them at his head, and lies down to sleep.

There he has his legendary

dream of angels ascending and descending a stairway

which set on the ground, and whose top

reaches to heaven.

He experiences

a vision of God standing above the stairway, who reaffirms to him

the promises made to Avraham, and he took

namely, that

the land will be his and his descendants

who will be as numerous as the dust of the earth,

and who will spread far and wide,

and that all the families of the earth

shall bless themselves by them.

God promises to be with Yaakov,

to protect him, and to bring him back to the land.

It is an extraordinary passage.

Yaakov.

Dream has a mystical quality.

It is lofty and majestic.

But in this whole narrative,

Yaakov does not appear lofty or majestic at all.

He's rather unremarkable.

He's born second.

Holding on to the heel of his twin brother.

Is love.

He is a follower, not a leader.

As a young man, he is described as thumb

you shave or a limb, a simple men, a dweller, tents.

The word thumb

suggests integrity, but also innocence.

He seems introverted, fragile and passive.

He's obedient and easily manipulated by his mother.

It is his mother, Rivka,

who tells him to dress up as a servant, trick his father to get the blessing.

It is referred to, tells him to escape and stay away for a while.

Rivka, who instructs him who he should and should not marry

Yaakov, appears weak and vulnerable

in her wonderful book reading Genesis.

The writer Marilynne Robinson observes

other words, like feckless, hapless

can be applied to Yakov, and then, in time, words

like pitiable and tragic.

That night,

on his journey to Haran,

Yaakov falls asleep and dreams

of the stairway.

This is what the Midrash tells us about the angels

who are going up and down the stairway.

When the angels ascended to heaven,

they found the image of Yakov

carved in the worlds above.

Illuminated by the divine splendor.

And they admired it.

But when they descended to look at the original,

they found him asleep.

He looked so ordinary and unimpressive.

They were completely disillusioned, so they pushed

him, jumped over him, and mocked him.

And they quoted the words of the prophet Isaiah,

adding a question mark at the end.

You are my servant Israel, in whom I glory.

Up in heaven.

He was luminous, a luminous hero down on earth.

He was disappointing.

A pale man who had fallen asleep.

Another midrash,

the angels going up and down the stairway,

were the rulers of different empires.

When they were up, they were important and powerful.

But eventually each would have to come down.

First, the ruler of Babylonia,

then the ruler of media, then the ruler of Greece,

and finally the ruler of Adam.

Are descendants of Asav representing Rome.

The Holy One said to Ya'acov, come up.

But Ya'acov was afraid, and said,

they all have to come down.

I will have to come down to

the Holy One, said to Yaakov Ultegra of the Yaakov.

Do not be afraid. My servant Jacob.

If you come up now, you will never go down.

But Ya'acov said the Midrash did not believe God,

and he hesitated, unable to conquer his fear.

So the Holy One said to him,

if you are trusting me, and had come up,

you have remained, you would have remained up until the end.

But since you could not trust me and did not come up,

your children will be in exile

and will serve these four empires.

Yaakov was even more afraid

and asked,

Will it last forever?

No, said the Holy One.

It will not last forever.

Yaakov

woke up from his dream and said again, Yesh, Adonai.

But my loyalty.

Surely God in this place.

And I did not know.

The Torah tells us Vira Yako was afraid.

And he said.

Manorama

Ntseki in Beit Elohim.

Visit Shara sometime.

How fearsome is this place?

This can be none other than the house of God.

And this is the gate of the heavens.

Early in the morning, Yaakov rose

took the stones he had placed at his head

and set them up as a pillar, poured

oil over its top, and called the name of that place.

But in the house of God.

Yaakov could not free himself from his doubts, his anxiety, and his fear.

He wanted to go up the stairway,

but he simply could not.

Perhaps the stairway symbolizes

the alcoves divide itself.

He has the potential for spiritual greatness.

He has his father's blessing.

He has God's promise.

But he's not ready to rise.

He stays down here.

He reaches Laban's house eventually

and occupies himself with the ordinary, practical, down to earth.

Matters of life.

He falls in love.

He works hard.

He marries. He has children.

He becomes wealthy

and she seems always to be afraid.

Always afraid of his wives.

His children.

His father in law.

Until one day,

some 20 years later,

God speaks to Ya'acov again in a dream.

Yaakov.

And Yaakov says, here I am.

God says, I am the God who appeared to you

at Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and made me a vow.

Now rise, leave this land and return

to the land of your birthplace.

Some 20 years have passed,

and God gives him a second chance.

I am the God who appeared to you at Bethel,

the place where you could have risen

but did not trust me or yourself.

You were timid and afraid,

like the stairway.

You remained on the ground,

though you could have reached heaven.

You were a fearful fugitive,

and yet

you were also a dreamer.

You could have embraced spiritual greatness,

but your fears held you back.

Now Yaakov has the opportunity

to confront himself, to face what has long terrified him,

to take a risk, to make a change, and to rise,

not merely to live an

unremarkable life in this world down here,

but to step into his full destiny and his greatness.

For that will have to

wait until next week for best advice left

when you are cold.

Struggles with the angel and becomes

distracted.

In the meantime.

Let me say that we have been living

for far too long as Jews in this lower

down here dimension

preoccupied, if not obsessed,

with our growing fears about anti-Semitism from the right

and the left, stranded and fixated on October 7th,

consumed with questions of who loves us,

who hates us, who hates Israel.

On the mayoral election, before or after, on Mamdani,

and so on and so forth.

And in the process,

we have largely neglected

addressing anything else.

Just listen to the discourse

in Jewish publications, on the internet, in synagogue pulpits,

and in other Jewish institutions and communal spaces.

We have been so focused

for decades on our material well-being

now, and our fears and our safety

so focused on those things.

We have not paid enough attention to our spiritual

and more or less operations to a Judaism.

That is a pathway to holiness, to wisdom

and morality, to a state of Israel

that strives to live up to its ethical ideals.

Of course, this is not an either or binary.

The stairway rests on the ground.

It is entirely natural and necessary and important to be concerned

for our well-being and our safety, to protect ourselves and our communities.

That is not the problem.

The problem arises when those concerns consumers

to the point that we neglect the spiritual

and moral dimension of our lives as Jews and as a Jewish community.

Yes, the

stairway is set on the ground, but it stops,

reaches to heaven.

If we neglect to dream,

if we are hesitant about rising and nurturing moral vision,

we will not ascend.

And if we do not ascend,

we risk coming further down.

Ultimately,

the challenge before us is to shift,

to enrich and elevate

our communal conversation.

We have to move beyond fear and preoccupation

with safety and survival alone,

and place our spiritual in more or less separations at the center

of our communal discourse.

The past two years since October 7th

have brought tremendous loss and disruption.

A lot in Judaism also has been severely damaged.

Judaism has been discredited as a tradition that upholds

the sanctity of life, that seeks holiness, nobility, justice and compassion.

There is urgent work to be done

to rebuild the Judaism that is honorable,

and that can guide us toward spiritual depth

and moral vision.

It is imperative and urgent

that we embrace this opportunity now

and make the cultivation of a moral and spiritual,

vibrant Judaism central to our conversations,

our aspirations, and our pursuit.

May we there to dream again

and to rise.

Shabbat Shalom.