Jacob’s Destiny, Israel’s Name
The two previous essays reflected on Jacob’s nighttime struggle with the angel. In this essay I want to look at the aftermath, for it was as a result of this encounter that the Jewish people acquired its name, Israel, meaning “one who has struggled with God and with men and has overcome.” It is, by any standards, a strange, unconventional, thought-provoking name.
Jacob is not, at first glance, the most obvious figure in Tanakh to represent and epitomize the Jewish people. There are other compelling alternatives: Abraham, who began the journey; Isaac, the first Jewish child; Moses, who took the people from slavery to freedom and gave them its most precious possession, the Torah; David, Israel’s greatest king and poet; even Isaiah, its greatest visionary of hope.
Nor is the phrase “one who has struggled with God and with men and has overcome” the most natural characterization of Jewish identity. We can think of others. In Exodus God summons Israel to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Isaiah speaks of Israel as “a covenant for the people and a light for the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). Zechariah gives one of the most concise summaries of the Jewish experience: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord Almighty” (Zechariah 4:6). So why Israel, with its implication of ceaseless struggle?
A fascinating possibility is raised by the writings of a critic of Judaism, Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev (1874–1948) was a Russian intellectual. Initially a Marxist, he broke with the movement after the Russian revolution and its aftermath, the death of freedom. He became an unconventional Christian – he had been charged with blasphemy for criticizing the Russian Orthodox Church in 1913 – and went into exile, eventually settling in Paris.
In The Meaning of History, Berdyaev wrote one of the most remarkable tributes to Judaism:
I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint…. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.1.Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History (New Jersey: Transaction, 2006), 86–87.
Yet Berdyaev believed that Jews and Judaism were profoundly wrong about the central question of human life. They were, he says, “obsessed by the passionate idea of justice and its terrestrial fulfilment.” They believed that redemption could be achieved on earth. The “intense Jewish striving after truth, justice and happiness” was responsible for the perennial restlessness of the Jewish spirit and its often revolutionary expression. Berdyaev regarded Marxism as a secularised version of the Jewish belief in the messianic age.
His own view was that this is an error and an impossibility. Human destiny, “whose pains and torments can in no wise be redeemed within the narrow limits of a single life, finds its fulfilment in another life.” Truth, justice, and happiness belong to heaven, not earth; the world to come, not this world; the immortal soul, not the mortal body. “He who believes in immortality ought to look soberly on terrestrial life and realise that it is impossible to achieve a conclusive victory on earth over the dark irrational principle; and that sufferings, evil and imperfections are the inevitable lot of man.”2.Ibid., 87–107.
Berdyaev, I believe, framed the alternatives sharply and correctly. The classic function of religion throughout history has been to reconcile people to the random brutalities of fate, the injustices of society, the triumph of might over right, the brevity of life itself and the pains and disappointments with which it is fraught. In a thousand different ways, religion has represented an alternative reality, a “haven in a heartless world,” an escape from the strife and conflict of everyday life into the quiet spaces of the soul, or the thought of life beyond death. Religion, faith, spirituality – these words conjure up ideas of peace, serenity, inwardness, meditation, calm, acceptance, consolation, bliss.
Judaism is, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally, the great exception.
For we believe that sufferings, evil and imperfections are not the inevitable lot of man; they are not woven into the fabric of the universe that God created and pronounced seven times “good.” Justice, freedom, human dignity, equality of respect, integrity and compassion are to be fought for here, not in heaven. The sages said that when Moses ascended to heaven to receive the Torah, the angels objected. How could God entrust His most precious possession to mere mortals? Are there murderers among you, said Moses to the angels, that you need the command, “You shall not kill”? Are there adulterers among you that you need to be told, “You shall not commit adultery”?3.Shabbat 88b-89a.
The Torah was not given to the ministering angels, but to humans, because humans need it. And in giving human beings freewill, God expressed His faith that one day they would learn to use it responsibly and morally and thus create a world of societal beatitude.
Berdyaev’s view represents the perennial temptation known as Gnosticism, a complex doctrine that can nonetheless be summarized as “this world, bad; the world to come, good.” Ultimately Gnosticism is incompatible with monotheism, for why would a good God create a universe in which “sufferings, evil and imperfections are the inevitable lot of man”? Why create a species, Homo sapiens, in His own image and likeness, only to subject it to inescapable pain? Gnosticism played a considerable part in the early life of the Church; many previously lost Gnostic Gospels were rediscovered among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, found in Egypt in 1945, two years before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Gnostics in fact held that the physical universe was created by a demiurge, a lesser god, and that the true God, the God of the spirit, has no place on earth. It is a form of dualism – probably what the sages were referring to when they spoke of people who believed in shetei reshuyot, “two [divine] domains.”4.On Gnosticism, see Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (London: Routledge, 1992); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Penguin, 1990). On shetei reshuyot, see for example, Berakhot 33b.
Gnosticism sounds ancient and arcane, yet its appeal is timeless and powerful. It is not easy to reconcile the existence of God and the commands of faith with the world as we know it, fraught with tension and tragedy. Far easier intellectually and psychologically to think of religion and God as belonging to a different dimension altogether: in heaven, not earth; somewhere else not here; in life after death or the immortal soul, in meditative calm or mystical withdrawal. So religion can make us indifferent to the world or reconciled to it: indifferent because this is not where God is found, or reconciled because in some way human suffering is the will of God for which we will be rewarded in the world to come. That is what Karl Marx meant when he wrote his famous line, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people [das Opium des Volkes].”
Because we are so used to it, we forget how rare and difficult the Jewish approach is. Indeed Europe did not develop an activist approach toward poverty and suffering, freedom and democracy, industry, economic growth and the beginnings of a classless society until, in the seventeenth century, Christians began reading Tanakh again, made possible by the invention of printing and the availability of Bibles in vernacular translation. This gave rise to Calvinism, the closest Christianity came to Judaism, and it was responsible for the English revolution and the faith of the pilgrim fathers who created modern America.5.See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1971); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1994).
Berdyaev was right to see that the belief that redemption lies in this world, not the next, was responsible for all the features we associate with Jacob/Israel and the people who bear the name of one who struggled with God and with men and prevailed. If you believe that truth, justice and happiness are to be pursued in this world, then you must struggle with this world. Sometimes this meant wrestling with idolatry, superstition, paganism and the whole lexicon of ancient beliefs. Now it means wrestling with secularism, materialism and consumerism. There were times – until the nineteenth century – when much of Europe was illiterate and Jews alone practised universal education. There were others – the twentieth century, for example – when Jews became the targets of Fascism and Communism, systems that worshipped power and desecrated the dignity of the individual. Judaism is a religion of protest – the counter-voice in the conversation of mankind.
And it means struggling with God, as Moses and Jeremiah and Job struggled with God. In no other religious literature – certainly not Christianity or Islam – do human beings argue with God. Recall that it is not heretics who do this in Judaism, but the exemplars and role models of faith. They did so in the name of justice – recall Abraham’s “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” For if justice belongs on earth, not just in heaven, then we may not accept seeming injustice, we must protest it. Indeed, it was God Himself who empowered Abraham and Moses to do so.
Judaism is not an escape from the world, but an engagement with the world. It does not anaesthetise us to the pains and apparent injustices of life. It does not reconcile us to suffering. It asks us to play our part in the most daunting undertaking ever asked by God of mankind: to construct relationships, communities, and ultimately a society, that will create a home for the Divine Presence.6.See, for a fuller treatment, Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World (London: Continuum, 2005; New York: Schocken, 2005).
And that means wrestling with God and with men and refusing to give up or despair.
No one exemplifies this condition more profoundly than Jacob. Abraham symbolises faith as love. Isaac represents faith as fear, reverence, awe. But Jacob lives faith as struggle. Often his life seems to be a matter of escaping one danger into another. He flees from his vengeful brother only to find himself at the mercy of deceptive Laban. He escapes from Laban only to encounter Esau marching to meet him with a force of four hundred men. He emerges from that meeting unscathed, only to be confronted with the rape of his daughter Dina and the conflict between Joseph and his other sons. Alone among the patriarchs, he dies in exile. Jacob wrestles, as his descendants – the children of Israel – continue to wrestle with the world.
Yet Jacob never gives up, and is never defeated. He is the man whose greatest religious experiences occur when he is alone, at night, and far from home. Jacob wrestles with the angel of destiny and inner conflict and says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” That is how he rescues hope from catastrophe – as Jews have always done. Their darkest nights have always been preludes to their most creative dawns.
The ideals of Torah are high, and the story told by Tanakh and Jewish history is all too often suffused with failure and shortcomings. Yet Judaism produced generation after generation of prophets, sages, philosophers and poets, who never relinquished the dream, abandoned the ideals, or lowered their sights. They kept going, as Jacob kept going. There is grandeur in this refusal to abandon the struggle, this sustained reluctance to accept the world as it is, conforming to the conventional wisdom, following the herd. Jews have always been pioneers of the spirit, disturbers of the peace.
The path chosen by Jacob/Israel is not for the fainthearted. Zis schver zu sein a Yid, they used to say: “It’s hard to be a Jew.” In some ways, it still is. It is not easy to face our fears and wrestle with them, refusing to let go until we have turned them into renewed strength and blessing. But speaking personally, I would have it no other way. Judaism is not faith as illusion, seeing the world through rose-tinted lenses as we would wish it to be. It is faith as relentless honesty, seeing evil as evil and fighting it in the name of life, and good, and God. That is our vocation. It remains a privilege to carry Jacob’s destiny, Israel’s name.