Continuing our angel exploration from last week, I’d like to complicate it a bit. Perhaps, although each feeling we have is an angel to be welcomed into our inner home, perhaps we are called to interact with different types of angels in different ways. Some angels require us to receive them passively, as if lying on our back, as Yaakov was in the ladder dream, while other angels ask us to engage more assertively, to stand up and confront them, to meet them with friction, as Yaakov does this week when wrestling with the angel on the night before he meets Esav. It seems there are some angels that require struggle and conflict. The blessings they come to bestow upon us do not come passively, but through direct, almost combative, encounter. In this essay, I will consider how this process works both for Yaakov and by extension, for us.
I want to begin with where Yaakov was before this encounter, with what it meant to be a Yaakov in the world up to this point. It meant to be a heel grabber, to be a person who feels like they are behind someone else, bent over and holding on to the heel, the very bottom of the person in front of them, a lowly secondary position, a feeling of inherent insecurity and neediness, of not really belonging or having a place of one’s own. To be a Yaakov meant to be a person who does not feel sufficiently powerful to ask for what he needs, but tries to wheedle it out of others in backwards ways, hiding and dressing up as someone else, not secure in his own right to exist and to be loved and blessed. It meant to feel small. Katonti (Gen 32:11), Yaakov says to God, just before this encounter – I feel small. A beautiful sentiment, yes, but also a sad one – I feel too small to deal with my brother, too small to deal with my life. I don’t feel powerful and confident.
Perhaps it was out of this cry of smallness that God decided to send Yaakov an angel to fight with so that, somehow through the struggle, he would begin to know his own strength and power and the fullness of his capacity. .
It is partly the struggle itself which teaches us, the experience of standing face to face with some other, whether internal or external, the experience of holding our own while another person holds their own, two people, both standing on equal level, each standing tall and not hiding or collapsing. Yaakov is not lying down this time when the angel comes. He is standing and wrestling, and the Torah emphasizes that for Yaakov what was significant was the face to face encounter – panim el panim. None of this behind the back hiding and manipulating, but instead a direct face to face, full body meeting with another.
Who is this angel that Yaakov – and we – are wrestling with? Going back to Yaakov’s smallness and insecurity, let’s see if we can untangle the child inside him – and us – that feels so insecure. We don’t want to fight this little one. This one needs protecting. What we are doing is fighting on behalf of this one, on behalf of ourselves as children who received the wrong messages, who were hurt in some way. So seeing that young self and then noticing all the voices that made her feel small, all the voices that are now our internal voices of judgment and limitation – “you can’t do that; you don’t deserve the blessing, the attention, the love, the compassion; you aren’t good enough; you don’t have what it takes” – these are voices we internalized from our families and cultures, voices we inherited from the past, voices that made that child feel not totally comfortable and confident in herself, voices that shut her down.
It is these voices of judgment and limitation, it is these voices that are the angel that we fight with, the angel that will, ironically, through this wrestling, help us learn our own strength. So see the angel there – the angel that represents all that judgment that shuts you down and makes you small, makes you hide and collapse, like Yaakov – and stand up to that angel. Don’t collapse. Stand up for the little child inside you. And fight. Wrestle, like Yaakov. Feel your own fierceness. Maybe it has been suppressed for a very long time – it’s ok; it’s nobody’s fault – but the time has come to reclaim it, to know your own God-given power and to own it, to say: Here I am. I will not disappear. I will not be cowed. I am equal to you. I am capable.
Maybe sometimes a strong “no” is required to own our power. Yaakov says “No!” to the angel – Lo Ashalekhakha – no, I won’t send you off just like that (32:27). Sometimes the angel inside us is asking us to learn to say precisely this “no,” to be able to set boundaries, to assert ourselves, to say – stop! I won’t tolerate this. You can’t make me small. I know my own value.
No, I won’t send you off just like that, Yaakov says; I demand a blessing. I demand to be loved and blessed. I deserve it. I don’t have to pretend to be someone else to get it. I can be me and demand it. This is a powerful stance. Yaakov has never asked for anything directly before. He has always had to wheedle his way into it, manipulating and pretending. But now Yaakov stands tall in relation to this magical stranger and he says – No. I won’t let you leave until you bless me. I am asking directly for what I need. I demand to be blessed.
The angel asks Yaakov his name before blessing him just like, a long time ago, his father asked his name before blessing him. Way back then, Yaakov said his brother’s name instead of his own, as if in hiding, as if he himself did not deserve to be blessed as Yaakov. But now the angel asks and Yaakov proudly says he is Yaakov. I am Yaakov and I deserve to be blessed just as I am.
This is what the angel has come to do. The angel inside us, too, the very one who put us down, that very angel – maybe its whole purpose is to awaken in us our fierceness, our strength, to help us know our capacity, our power, our vitality – to help us learn through struggle and conflict who we really are. You are Yisrael, the angel tells Yaakov. You are a sar, like your grandmother Sarah, so much strength and regalness. You are not small and bent over, but tall and straight and whole. Feel your own regal bearing, your largeness. You have striven with angels and people, with internal and external beings – vatukhal (32:29), and you have succeeded; you are capable.
Once we are sturdier in ourselves, maybe we can begin to turn toward this wrestling angel with some greater softness and appreciation. The word for wrestle here is vaye’avek (32:25), and commentaries point out that if you change the alef to a het (letters that are often interchanged), the word becomes vayehavek, meaning not “he wrestled,” but “he embraced.” Indeed, in the incident that follows this one of wrestling, when Yaakov and Esav finally meet, the Torah uses this word for their meeting – vayehavkehu (33:4). “He embraced him.” There is a shift that’s possible. This angel enemy that we wrestled with, that we fought with, that we said no to, maybe, as we grow secure inside ourselves, we can turn towards it with some gentleness and warmth, embracing it and thanking it for helping us get to know our own strength.
This is not a one time wrestling match. We will need to assert ourselves again and again, to practice standing tall and not collapsing or hiding or shutting down. We will, for a very long time, perhaps forever, be both Yaakov and Yisrael, and that is good. We need both energies.
But maybe over time, the darkness of the Yaakov pain can lessen. Maybe over time the darkness of feeling that smallness and insecurity, the darkness of feeling secondary, the pain of not fully mattering, maybe over time that can lessen and gradually dissipate. The Torah says that Yaakov fought the angel until alot hashahar (32:25) which the Ibn Ezra interprets as “until the going up” of the shehor, the darkness. We continually wrestle with this angel until the darkness lifts, until the darkness lifts inside us, and we are filled with the light of morning. Yaakov, stepping out the next morning, saw the sun shining brightly upon him even as he limped– Vayizrah lo hashemesh (32:32). The sun shined for him that morning. When the darkness lifts, we find out that the world was created for us, for each of us individually; we find out how much we matter in this world, that the sun rises for each one of us every morning, and we can, even as we limp from our injuries, walk forward in joy, in the joy of knowing our own vitality and inherent value. Surely the sun does shine especially for each one of us.
Photo by Josh Hild at Pexels
