_(I gave this drash at my shul, Sof Ma’arav, yesterday. Exactly as predicted, Littman did point out the inaccuracies in tracing the patrilineal connections between Laban and Jacob so if you see an error, feel free to comment but remember…. most shortcomings have already been reported!)_
This is my first drash at Sof, and I’m very happy and excited that I have this opportunity, but I have to admit that I was also nervous as I sat down to figure out what I was going to say. I mean, _Sof Ma’arav_: as the horizon line has rolled slowly across the planet, Jews all over the world have gotten up, gone to shul, and then taken all the good ideas for drashes. And now here I am, all the way at the other end of Greenwich mean time, trying to come up with something to say without totally hogging all the remaining ideas left for the guy in Fiji who’s on deck to go in a few hours from now. What’s a nice Jewish boy to do?
I’m kidding course, but it is true that its hard to find something to say about this parshah. Its not that there’s nothing to talk about, its just that it seems like everything has been said. In this portion we have Jacob’s Ladder/Stairway/Ramp, an image that has echoed across the generations to inspire not only the spooky 1990 Terry Gilliamesque thriller starring Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Pena, but also Led Zeppelin’s immortal rock anthem. As a commentar on this text, how could my drash compete with Jimmy Page’s face melting solos? We have the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel, which is obviously really important and I thought at first I might talk about that but its actually really confusing and seems to have been like edited to the point where it no longer makes sense and I didn’t want to say something and have Littman come up to me at the oneg and say “you know if you read the crypto-Byzantine translation of the Septuagint…” and all that so then, ok, there I decided not to talk about that. And of course we have Laban — the person who generation of Bar Mitzvahs have taken as the example of how not to be Jewish despite the fact that, when you come right down to it, he and Jacob are both equally proficient practitioners of the art of the con.
No, instead what I want to give today is what I call the ‘B’ drash. I call it the B drash because its about one of the moments that aren’t talked about so often — the flip side of the LP that we’re reading today. What really caught my attention was the story of Rachel’s theft of the idols, the terafim, from Laban. Why does Rachel steal the terafim? And why doesn’t she tell Jacob that she has them?
Some commenters have said that Rachel has stolen Laban’s idols because she wanted what was best for him — namely, to stop worshiping false gods. Now, this is a very nice thing to say about Rachel but it is a little like saying Jacob stole Laban’s flock because he was afraid there was too much protein in his diet and wanted to encourage him to eat more leafy greens.
What if we treated Rachel as the equal of Jacob? What if we assumed that she acted in the same way that he did — taking valuable and important things that she wanted to keep from a household she was leaving. Why, if we assumed this, did she steal the terafim?
One possible answer comes from Nancy Jay’s book “Throughout Your Generations Forever”. Jay’s book is a close analysis of the similarities between the religions of ancient Israel and pre-contact Hawaii. For reasons that I can’t go into here Jay’s analysis of Hawai’ian religion is maybe off a little for the way that it relies on the work of Valerio Valeri which is you know maybe not quite right or whatever, but I do think her analysis of ancient Israel is interesting. Jay points out that biblical scholars have spent centuries trying to figure out the complicated family relationship between Laban and Jacob. Why did Laban take Jacob in? Did he adopt him? Why does Laban call Jacob ‘his own flesh and blood’ when Jacob is actually only his in-law and not related to him by blood. Its all really complicated and requires extremely muddled and unelegant solutions.
But, says Nancy Jay, what if the patriarchs were not really patriarchal? What if it wasn’t just us who trace Jewish descent through the mother’s side, but the patriarchs did as well, and then edited it out of the torah in order to make the men feel better? Well, anthropologists like myself know how such ‘matrilineal’ societies work. ‘Matrilineal’ doesn’t mean, alas, that women are in charge. It means that men are in charge but women carry on the family name. So for instance in a patrilineal system me and Kate’s kids would be Golubs, and they’d have to listen to what I say and watch me carve the turkey at thanksgiving and all this, and Kate’s brother’s kids would grow up to inherit the Lingley name and I’d get to be their crazy uncle who lives in Hawai’i and spoils them with too many chocolate covered macademia nuts on their birthday.
In a matrilineal system, on the other hand, me and Kate’s kids would be Lingleys, they’d be watching Kate’s brother carve the turkey, and I would spoil them silly. Meanwhile, I be worried about maintaining the Golub family home, which was going to be inherited by my sister’s children.
This is exactly what we find in this parshah. Jacob is Rebbeca’s son, and Rebecca is Laban’s sister. _That’s_ why Laban treats him like his own flesh and blood and not his inlaw. And its also why Laban is so nervous about Jacob. Laban’s sister lit out of town with this Isaac guy leaving him to take care of the family estate and with no clear inheritor. Now Jacob shows up, a cousin who is eligible (in this system of marriage) to take control of the estate, and Laban starts wondering how long its going to be before he wants to sit in the Big Chair.
These idols, these terafim, are ‘family gods’ — the deities worshipped by members of Laban’s family. Owning them is a way of showing control of a family, or being in charge of it.
So often when we read this parshah we tell ourselves the ‘A’ story — the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob story, the story of patriarchs and their sons. Its the story of page 115a in our prayerbooks, the amidah without matriarchas. But what if we read this parshah in spirit, as it were, of page 115b? What if the story of Rachel and the terafim was not about a woman fleeing her homeland to become part of a foreign house? What if it was a story of woman deciding, literally, to take her life and her inheritance into her own hands?
We Jews like to tell ourselves stories of continuity, inheritance, tradition, and antiquity. We tell ourselves stories of exile and diaspora and survival, too of course — but most of the time thesestories are about what were done to us, not choices we made. One of the reasons I got really into Rachel in thinking about the parshah this week is that it made me imagine the matriarchs as really proactive: people who chose a new life while simultaneously preserving their ties to the pass. This is an image of a Judaism that is modern, innovative, nurturant, and cunning. These are not the typical adjectives we pile together to describe who we are, but I’d here in Hawai’i, with Shabbat just beginning for us and almost over for everyone else, on an island whose native people have so much to teach us about both commitment to the land and the empowerment that comes from long-distance voyaging, perhaps now is the time that we should all try, at least a little, to be as daring as Rachel.
