Vayishlach. What does Israel mean?

We are moving into the heart of December, and already next Sunday we will light the first candle of Hanukkah!

I look forward to seeing you on Zoom for our special Chanukah gathering on Sunday, December 14th!

This week my health didn't enable me to send you the newsletter before Shabbat, but I wanted to share a thought with you about the parasha.

In our torah class this week, we read Vayishlaḥ, the parasha in which Yaakov fully becomes himself and our spiritual father: Israel.

What does Israel mean?

What does the name of a tribe, a people, and a country mean—a name that has inspired fascination, inspiration, and hatred for thousands of years, mean to us?

This week we studied a commentary by Rabbi Yitzhak Levi of Berditchev, one of the great Hasidic sages of the late 18th century.

He suggests a meaning of the name Israel based on a tzerouf—a combination of the letters that make up the word ישראל.

He chooses to read ישראל as לי ראש:

Literally: “There is for me a head” or “I have a head.”

Why the head?

Because, he says, we are meant to connect to the Source of Life not only through our emotions (lev, the heart) or our emunah (faith/trust), not only through our actions (raglayim, the legs), but also through our sechel—our intelligence, our capacity of discernment.

This is how he understands Yaakov’s evolution, whose name comes from the word ekev (heel), into Israel: one who also has a head, and who does not limit himself to the concrete concerns of daily life or the impulses of the senses.

If I am called to connect to the Source of Life that shines silently beneath the surface of appearances—whether through the clementine I have just tasted or the cup of tea that warms me, the tree in front of me and that thin cloud in the sky, or the Divine light reflected in the face of the person sitting across from me writing at the table —if I am called to see the Divine light through the tangible world, it is not meant to be in an impulsive or blind way.

The human of Israel, the Jews says the Kedushat Levi, is meant to use their own discernment, their critical thinking, and personal observation of the world, rather than following the current blindly.

At a time when forms of obscurantism (others’ as well as our own) seem to cover so much of human experience across the globe, here is another invitation to wake up, and to choose an enlightened consciousness—one that in turn will help illuminate the world. Is this not, in the end, the task of the Jew in the world?

As we move toward the Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, here is an invitation to connect to the Source through the tangible world.

That, ultimately, is the purpose of spiritual practice:

A chosen gentle self-discipline we give ourselves to on a regular basis in order to refine our consciousness. We do it through study, contemplation, reflection, and perhaps most of all through listening—to Life Source that whispers to me via the world or my own intuition, to connect to the beauty of this life, and to choose the light of clarity even when the world feels dark.

So I look forward to seeing you to meditate and study this week.

Come as you are.