¹⁰Jacob left Beer-sheba, and set out for Haran. ¹¹He 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. ¹²He had a dream; a ladder was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. ¹³And the Lord was standing beside him and He said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac: the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your offspring. ¹⁴Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants. ¹⁵Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

¹⁶Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!” ¹⁷Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” ¹⁸Early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. ¹⁹He named that site Bethel; but previously the name of the city had been Luz.

²⁰Jacob then made a vow, saying, “If God remains with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, ²¹and if I return safe to my father’s house—the Lord shall be my God. ²²And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God’s abode; and of all that You give me, I will set aside a tithe for You.”  (Genesis 28)

There is so much to ponder in this week’s opening passage.  Jacob, the young man, finds himself alone with his dreams.  And the first dream that he dreamt was this image of a ladder touching heaven and earth, the bridge between the two realms of existence.  And the angels, the link between man and God, are ascending and descending, as prayers ascend and blessings descend.  And God speaks to Jacob in his dream and reaffirms the promise that he made to his father and his grandfather, and He promises to protect him throughout his journeys.  Jacob, startled, acknowledges God’s presence for the first time. (Isn’t it interesting that Jacob gets real with God not in hearing his grandfather and father’s stories, not in learning about theology from others, but in experiencing God in a real and direct way?  Only then does he know that God is real.)

And Jacob makes a promise, a conditional promise.  He says, “If God does the things He says He will do, if God takes care of me, if He keeps me safe, if He returns me to my homeland and my birthplace, then and only then will the Lord be my God.  And then, if everything turns out alright, then I will set apart a tenth of what I own and earn for You.” 

Jacob, the young man, is arrogant and foolish.  He makes his faith and his covenant with God conditional upon the future successes he hopes to achieve.  He makes his faith and his covenant with God dependent upon his happiness and his joy.  He makes God a limited partner in his life, a passive investor, an outside interest.  He sets up the criteria by which he will judge his life and God’s providence.  And he sets up the terms of the payback, as though God, the master of the universe, needs or desires Jacob’s paltry tenth, based upon future earnings, that Jacob offers him.  Of all the chutzpah!  And this chutzpah can only be the chutzpah of youth, the certainty of one’s rectitude and the unspoken fear of the unknown.

Jacob’s life imposes some wear and tear on his joints and limbs, and on his soul.  When he has his moments of glory, these are the moments of Israel.  When Jacob is Israel, he is victorious.  When Jacob is Israel, he can overcome God and wrest a blessing from Him.  When Jacob is Israel, he passes on to his children and their descendents a blessing of strength and fortitude and courage.

When Israel is Jacob, he limps.

Jacob lives until the age of 147, and he dies in the land Egypt, far away from his homeland.  By the time he meets Pharaoh, Joseph’s boss, he sees his life as one of travail.  Despite his material success and his abundant family, his life has been torn apart by petty jealousies, loss, sadness, and fear.  The happiness that should have been his was largely missing.  The angels, like our joys in life, ascend and descend the ladder.  Our joys are fleeting.  And for those who are unhappy, who are of a discontented disposition, their sorrow and disappointment can be overwhelming, and they can overwhelm the joys that we experience.   It can be so hard for some people to find joy after hardship and satisfaction after sorrow.  As it turned out, Jacob was largely that kind of person.  When he is finally reunited with his son Joseph, and is presented to Pharaoh, Jacob laments as follows:

 ⁸Pharaoh asked Jacob, “How many are the years of your life?” ⁹And Jacob answered Pharaoh, “The years of my sojourn [on earth] are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my fathers during their sojourns.”

Jacob becomes a man beaten by life.  The next 17 years he lives modestly in Egypt, sustained by his son Joseph, who comes to visit now and then when he get some time away from his busy schedule.  As Jacob dies, happiness eludes him.  And Jacob never gives God that ten percent that he promised him.

Thursday is Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is a profoundly religious holiday.  It is more than turkey and stuffing and football and shopping.  Thanksgiving is a profoundly religious holiday that permeates the fabric of American consciousness.  For some among us, Thanksgiving is hard.  For some of us, it is hard to be grateful because some of us hold on to our sadness.  It is hard to be grateful when we nurse our little bitternesses year after year.  Some of us have a little too much of the Jacob within us.  We focus too much on the angels who are descending, and not on the angels that keep pushing their way up the ladder.

Some of us are frightened, or if not frightened, then at least a bit worried about the future.  We worry for ourselves, for our community, for our nation and for our world.  And there is a lot to worry about.  There is always a lot to worry about.  People are never 100% happy and secure, and every generation has its challenges.  I remember growing up with the Cuban Missile Crisis; Vietnam, the Civil Rights struggle, inflation, and stagflation; gasoline lines and the burgeoning Federal Budget deficit, the Cold War, looming environmental catastrophe, and impending nuclear holocaust.  My parents worried about the depression and the war against the Nazis, the Japanese and the Fascists, and later the North Koreans and Red China.  So this year we worry about our war in Iraq, Iranian nuclear proliferation, global warming, and the falling dollar.  So nu?, every generation has its worries and concerns, which keep us up in the middle of the night.  That is why Thanksgiving is so important.

In the Bible, we are told to be thankful.  God commands us to be thankful.  God insists on gratitude, even when we don’t feel grateful.  God tells us to rejoice, regardless of whether we are happy; to appreciate even if we are bitter; to revel in the blessings of life even if we feel ourselves not blessed at the moment.  The Torah doesn’t tell us to rejoice only if we feel happy.  The Torah commands an attitude of gratitude.  Our thankfulness cannot be conditional based upon whether things are going well for us, or not.  Our thankfulness cannot be based upon whether we have what we want or whether we are where we want to be.  Our thankfulness is based upon our being human.  The Torah teaches us that people can be thankful without being happy.  Our Torah tells us that people be grateful, even if they don’t have what they want or feel they deserve.  Our Torah tells us that people must be grateful if their angels are ascending the ladder, or coming down in a hurry.  No place in the Torah are we told to pity ourselves.  Instead, we are told to be thankful, and that is why I love Thanksgiving so.

When the Mayflower arrived on these shores in 1620, her passengers had already endured a miserable trip.  Among the 110 passengers, there were many different interests and different kinds of people who put themselves on the Mayflower that embarked from Plymouth, England on September 6, 1620.  The 62-day journey was long and arduous.  One of the passengers in the cramped and miserable vessel died during the voyage.  They landed in a harbor in what would become Massachusetts in November, and they faced a cold and relentless winter.  By the time they would come to sit and celebrate the harvest in October, only 50 of the Mayflower passengers were still alive.  Sixty of them had died.  Still they celebrated.  These poor unfortunate souls, trying to eke out a living on New England’s rocky and swampy soil, still found it within themselves to be thankful to God and thankful to each other for having survived.  They had suffered, to be sure.  They had buried their friends and their loved ones.  They were facing another winter.  They had lots to worry about, lots.  But they still found it within their souls to be thankful, to offer to God their gratitude for being alive.  Psalm 115 tells us, Lo hameitim y’halleluya, the Dead shall not praise you, nor any who go down to silence.

Like those survivors in Plymouth, Massachusetts, regardless of where we are in our lives, up the ladder or down below, we can turn to God with gratitude that we are among the living and not the dead, that we can raises our voices with full thanksgiving what we have not gone down to silence.

May all of us realize our blessings this Thanksgiving, and render thanks to God who has, perhaps not given us everything we want, but who has for sure given us everything we need—to be alive and to be grateful.

May your Thanksgiving be filled with true thanks, and may the cornucopia of your blessings continue to flow,

Amen

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