Dvar Vayetze

A Place for the Secrets of Our Souls

When I was a child, one place that stirred my imagination was Lisbon, or Lissabon, as I was used to calling it then. I didn’t know anything about the place when I first heard the city’s name and located it on a map, or rather on a spinning globe, one of those that also serve as a lamp and turn any room into a magical realm.

The sound of the name, Lissabon, touched something inside me that was part of me without my knowing it – or before my consciously knowing it. I believe that we know more about ourselves at a young age than we are aware of, and we are drawn to places, moods, songs, feelings because our souls are following a thread, a calling, a knowing that unfolds in hiding long before it becomes apparent to us and people around us. Choices that seem random might sometimes be just that, random, but in other instances, they are very much in synch with an inner truth.

A few years after I first happened upon the name of this place, my parents visited Lisbon. I specifically always remember one photo: My mother, younger than I am today, is standing on the main square, the Rossio, next to a strawberry vendor and holds a few strawberries into my father’s camera. There it was again, the pull of that name, Lissabon. It was in the eyes of the farmer, in my mother’s smile, in the yellow facades, blue tiles, and adobe colored shingles, the gray and beige pattern in the pavement. Maybe there were pigeons in the background, maybe even a glimpse of a cable car. Yet all those details are not the point – the photo of a happy tourist on vacation with a south-European city as background is nothing unique. What made it unique for me was that I knew how it felt, would feel, to be in that place.  

When I finally visited Lisbon for the first time, on a scholarship from the Portuguese cultural institution Instituto Camões, that intuition was confirmed. Despite my being tall and not particularly dark-haired, I seemed to blend in, locals often assumed that I was from there, the daughter of some Nordic immigrants, with odd idiomatic choices sometimes, but a local nonetheless.  

It’s been like this with a few other places for me as well. And each of you may have similar experiences with different places that have touched you deeply because they reflect something inside you. When they reveal themselves to you everything makes perfect sense. It is like falling in love. It is like finding home. Some might say the way we experience a place is shaped primarily by moments of human connection. And that may be true on one level. Yet there also is the experience of knowing a physical place as if it were a living being, as if it were THE place, in a way that turns the earth-bound experience of being in a physical place into an inexplicable encounter with the divine.  

Place, haMakom, of course is one of the names of God, and Judaism is a religion in love with, well, God -- but also with place, the notion of place.  It’s fair to say that at the core of the religion is a land, a place – the place, the land. And inside that land, there are many significant places – the Torah has a tendency to list and specify place names, to describe an exact location, to detail what’s in the east (the hills), what’s in the west (the great sea), and what name a place is called now or once was called. It is a tribal, visceral, intimate way of rendering the geography tangible, familiar, of situating the reader and saying: You know the place, too.

In Bereishit 28:10-11, we read:

וַיֵּצֵ֥א יַעֲקֹ֖ב מִבְּאֵ֣ר שָׁ֑בַע וַיֵּ֖לֶךְ חָרָֽנָה׃                                                                                 

Jacob left Beer-sheba, and set out for Haran.

וַיִּפְגַּ֨ע בַּמָּק֜וֹם וַיָּ֤לֶן שָׁם֙ כִּי־בָ֣א הַשֶּׁ֔מֶשׁ וַיִּקַּח֙ מֵאַבְנֵ֣י הַמָּק֔וֹם וַיָּ֖שֶׂם מְרַֽאֲשֹׁתָ֑יו וַיִּשְׁכַּ֖ב בַּמָּק֥וֹם הַהֽוּא׃

He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.

Abraham Ibn Ezra comments quite laconically that “one of the stones of that place” means – just that: one of the stones of that place. Nothing more. There is nothing special about that place, haphazardly chosen while the sun is setting and because Jacob, who hastily left home and didn’t plan his journey, didn’t book a proper lodging. Explaining that Jacob stopped there to pray because it was a holy place -- that the place WAS God – is letting one’s imagination flow too freely, says Ibn Ezra: “According to the plain meaning of the text, וַיִּפְגַּ֨ (‘and he happened upon’) is not to be translated as ‘and he prayed,’ because we never find in the entire Bible the word makom meaning God. Do not pay any attention to the Midrashic interpretation that explains makom, in makom acher (Esther 4:14), as referring to God, because it most certainly does not.

HaMakom is indeed one of the names the Rabbis, not the Torah, coined for God. Ibn Ezra seems eager to highlight that it was in a random place where God appeared to Jacob, like he did to Abraham: in a dream. And like he reassured Abraham, God reassures Jacob that he will protect him and that the ground on which he is lying will belong to his descendants.

וַיִּיקַ֣ץ יַעֲקֹב֮ מִשְּׁנָתוֹ֒ וַיֹּ֕אמֶר אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יְהֹוָ֔ה בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי׃

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!”

This famous verse in Bereishit 28:16 is quite enigmatic and at the same time conveys a feeling many of us might be familiar with: We sensed a divine presence and only realize it later. We visit a place and are suddenly overcome by a feeling of déjà-vu. We didn’t know that we knew. Even the stern grammarian Ibn Ezra succumbs to the power of such a sensation: “Surely God is present in this place,” he says means “that there are places where miracles are seen. I cannot explain why this is so because it is a deep mystery.”

So, what is it? A random place or a divine place? Did Jacob stop there for the night haphazardly, or did he know without knowing that the place was going to be called Bethel -- the House of God – and no longer Luz. (As an aside, “luz” means “light” in Portuguese - a random coincidence but beautiful.) Is it a place of stones, pretty uncomfortable if one wants a good night’s sleep, or a place of divine appearance? Ibn Ezra’s two different comments seem to point to a probably unresolvable ambivalence: A random place can be the place. God can appear everywhere – yet that doesn’t mean that there is not a secret in our soul, mysterious like the light of a globe lamp in the dark -- a certainty that leads us to one and not to the other place. Where God appears to us, in whatever way that might be, will be forever a unique place that shows us what we knew all along.

Shabbat Shalom!