Parashat Vayetze: On Restlessness and Yaakov's Dream

We are restless. Whatever we are doing is not enough. Where we are is not good enough. We think we should also be somewhere else, doing something more.

I think that Yaakov’s ladder dream is an answer to this restlessness. He, too, had a restless spirit, a need to grab and try to be where he was not even invited to be, and now he is running, fleeing from an angry brother.

The dream has these angels moving up and down the ladder. They aren’t getting anywhere. They are just going up and down in place. They are like our breath, in and out, in and out, no matter where we are.

The root yatzav, which means “stand” in a very solid, stable way is used here a few times. The ladder is mutzav and God is nitzav and then later, Yaakov builds a matzevah (statue) Even as he starts on his journey, he is learning something about standing and staying put.

What he learns is that “Behold God is in this place and I was not aware of it.” What he learns is that God is right here. You don’t have to run around all the time, running after your brother or running after the next professional or personal opportunity. God is right here, where you are. In fact, the only way to reach God is to stop for a moment and be present here. All that running is just running away.

And if you do stop and stand as still as a matzevah, a statue, and notice the angels of breath that connect you to heaven at each moment, in and out, in and out, the miracle of being alive, if you do stop, then what you realize is not just that God is in this place, but that actually everything -- all of time and all of space – are also in this place. Right here and right now contains inside it all of the world.

There is a beautiful midrash that God folded up all of the land of Israel underneath Yaakov’s still, sleeping body. The whole land is literally right here. We don’t need to go anywhere; just stop and notice and be present; the whole world is contained in any place that we are truly present . All of space is contained – vertically, the angels go up and down, and horizontally, God promises Yaakov the east, the west, the south and the north.

In such a moment of presence is also contained all of time. To be present in the present strangely also means to become part of an eternal time that includes the past and the future as well. Yaakov stopped in this place and felt God’s presence and so entered into God’s time, across time. God says to him – I am the God of your ancestors – the past – and your descendants will be numerous and inherit this land – the future. Standing still in the present means entering a time that is beyond time and connects you to all of space and to all of history.

Yaakov is understood to be the original inheritor of Shabbat and I think it is related to this dream, to this sense of perfect stillness that contains all. On Shabbat we inhabit a time and a place that are somehow beyond time and place, because we are connected to “The Place,” hamokom, God.

We get glimpses of this feeling – of a stillness that opens up into everything, where we can feel all of time and space collapsing and uniting and it is perfectly clear to us that it is all intimately interwoven into oneness. We probably do still need to run around most of the time. I assume the restlessness, too, has some purpose in goading us to action. But it is nonetheless helpful to remind ourselves as we set out on our journeys, like Yaakov, that if we are really present right here and right now, the whole world is here and we need run nowhere else to seek it.