Parsha Vayishlach וַיִּשְׁלַח

Parsha Vayishlach

There’s a lot of drama in this week’s parsha, as you’ll hear, and I want to focus on one particular confrontation, concerning Jacob’s wrestling match.

​After Jacob sends goats, sheep and cows to appease his brother’s anger, Jacob finds himself alone at night and wrestles with a mysterious attacker. From his adversary, Jacob receives a blessing and a new name, Yisrael, at the cost of a lame thigh. Ambiguity surrounds the encounter with the mysterious attacker and for good reason: it was night. The Torah describes the assailant at first as a man, but, later, when Jacob becomes Yisrael, we are told that he is given that name because “you have striven with beings divine/with God and with humans and you have prevailed.”

When Jacob names the place where this incident occurred, he invokes the common theme that one cannot see God and live. Jacob says “I have seen a divine being face to face yet my life has been preserved.”

So: Who is the attacker? What is the purpose of the attack? What does Jacob’s new name mean?

Addressing the last question, Rashi comments that the point of his new name is to make clear that it is no longer true that all of Jacob’s successes have come through deceit and trickery but rather through “noble conduct and n an open manner.” Others argue that the mysterious attacker is a stand-in for every person Jacob has struggled with -- Esau, Isaac, Laban – but that seems a little strange, because that means that Jacob—Israel—is claiming a divine encounter when perhaps there wasn’t one. Could it somehow be both?

Another view is that the wrestler is actually Satan. In the below-the-linecommentary in our Chumasch, Rabbi Kushner Z”L mentions that most commentators think that the mysterious stranger is malevolent. In any case, the fact that Jacob is victorious, despite his permanent injury, is evidence, scholars say, that Jacob defeated not only evil itself but also the Yeytzer Hara, the evil inclination, in himself. Or we could call it his conscience. In either case, Jacob emerges cleansed morally and psychologically, and that makes the new name make a lot of sense.

Rabbi Jonathan Waxman has a really interesting take on this story. In fact, he ties the wrestling match to Jacob’s later encounter with Esav, and the reason Esav forgives him. As we will soon read, Jacob entreats his brother to accept his gifts, even though Esav initially declines. But Jacob then says, “I pray you, if you would do me this favor, accept these gifts for to see your face is like seeing the face of God, and you have received me so kindly. Waxman suggests that when Jacob looked at Esav’s face, he thought that he saw in it a reflection of the face of the mysterious stranger that he had wrestled with all the night efore. But Waxman doesn’t stop there. He hypothesizes that, the night before, Esav HAD THE VERY SAME EXPERIENCE. And he imagines Esav saying to himself...

“Could it be that my brother wrestled with a mysterious stranger last night, just like I did? And could it be that he has been transformed by this experience,  just as I have been? Is that why he seems to be limping today, just as I am?”

And that’s why Esav forgives Jacob, even without all the gifts.

Of course, this is all Midrash. But I thought it might be interesting to hear some of these ideas as a way to consider how to understand this beautiful reconciliation.