I don’t know about you, but for me it’s been a stressful time of late. Not at work so much, but in life. There have been the normal stresses that come with being the “sandwich generation”—parenting kids, caring for aging parents. It’s been oppressively cold in Chicago, which means spending less time outside, and thus feeling more cooped up. And then there’s witnessing what’s happening in my mom’s hometown of Minneapolis, what’s happening in the streets of Iran, what’s happening to big things I—and, I expect you—took for granted, like NATO. So, stress—and understandably so.

It should not surprise you to hear that, despite my regular meditation practice, I’m not perfect. Far from it. While I strive to be a kind, compassionate, and wise person, I have my fair share of short-tempered moments. To be sure, it would be a lot worse without mindfulness. But, human being that I am, I can still get snappy, especially when I’m stressed.

One of the places I’ve noticed that of late has been with our pets. Last summer our cat Trixie (11 years old) had to take liquid antibiotics. The vet gave us a syringe to try to squirt the meds into her mouth. She wasn’t having it. So, while she had eaten dry cat food before, we started giving her wet food, into which we put the antibiotics. That did the trick, but she got hooked on the wet stuff—and she started getting quite vocal about her desires, meowing at us insistently until she got her food. Cats have different types of meows, but frankly none of them are particularly pleasant to my ear. And the behavior has only intensified.

Now, Trixie is just a cat. I could, and probably should, try to “mindfulness” my way to transposing her cries from annoying sounds into something that can evoke my compassion. But I’ve been falling short, and have been kind of pissy with her. (Honestly, I think I’m sharing this with you as a way of making myself accountable to that intention. I’ll let you know how it’s going.)

Similarly with our dog, Phoebe. While I am of hardy midwestern stock, I’m not clueless. When the temperature gets below 20 degrees, I layer up and put on my snow pants to walk the dog. Which makes a dog walk closer to an inpatient procedure than an office visit. Which puts pressure on my time, which causes stress, which comes out in resentment toward the dog. Another opportunity for practice (and again, I’m sharing this in part to keep myself honest).

As Moses angrily tells Pharaoh about the final plague, he includes an intriguing detail: “But not a dog shall snarl its tongue at any of the Israelites, at human or animal—in order that you may know that YHVH makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel” (Exodus 11:9). The Hebrew word translated as ‘snarl’ here is from the root charatz, which means to cut or sharpen, as well as to decide. It would seem the Torah is aiming to evoke the sharp sound of a dog’s bark (like Phoebe’s anytime a siren goes by). 

Rabbi Israel Yitzhak Kalish of Warka (1779–1848) offers a wonderful Hasidic reading of the verse. It plays on the word kelev (dog), which can be revocalized as ka-lev, i.e. “like the heart,” and the word for tongue, lashon, which also means language. Thus: “For the children of Israel there will be no charitz, no division, between their hearts and their words—their language will be like their hearts. When we say in the Haggadah, ‘they did not change their language during their centuries in Egypt,’ this is what we mean, and this is why our ancestors were redeemed.”

One reason I love this teaching is that it reminds us of the truth of dogs, cats, and other animals: they don’t lie. Their expressions are genuine. Phoebe’s happiness when I return home from a trip is unadulterated joy. Trixie’s excitement to be fed—even though the sound of her meow hits me like nails on a chalkboard—is pure. No more and no less.

But a deeper message here is the call to learn from our furry friends: to align our words with our hearts, yes, but also to align our hearts with our words. This is not a merely technical matter of choosing our words carefully. It’s about something more inward: softening our hearts, loosening ourselves from the grip of the external stressors, the meitzarim/forces of constriction, that generate those barriers between our hearts, our bodies, our minds and our words. That is the constant, ongoing spiritual practice of leaving Egypt.

Questions for Reflection & Conversation:

• Is there anyone in your life who has been a model of aligning heart and words? Why are they a model for you? 
• In your own life, how do you experience the relationship between heart and language? What helps you to align them? What prevents you from doing so?

There’s a classic Yogi Berra-style Jewish joke that goes something like this:

A woman walks into her local butcher shop and sees a sign for chicken at $1.50 a pound. (Note: You can tell just how old this joke is by the prices mentioned here.) She looks at the butcher indignantly and says, “A dollar-fifty? The butcher across the street is selling chicken for only 30 cents a pound!”

The butcher shrugs and says, “Nu? Go buy it from him.”

“I can’t,” the woman replies. “He’s out of stock.”

The butcher smiles and says, “Lady, when I’m out of chicken, I sell it for 10 cents a pound!”

One of the things that makes the joke work is the brutal honesty (perhaps it’s chutzpah) of the butcher. But deeper than that, I think, is that it brings into high relief the insincerity of the marketplace. After all, what does it mean to charge money for a product you don’t actually have? And yet, any of us who has ever bought something that turned out to be a fraud can probably relate. So we laugh at the joke because we can recognize something of ourselves in it.

On an even deeper level, I think the joke is going further and can take us to a place that might be helpfully understood by—wait for it—the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 20th century Jewish philosopher of language. 

A little refresher in case you haven’t thought about him recently (which is totally fine—most of us have probably had other things on our minds recently): One of the most famous aspects of Wittgenstein’s work is the change in his thinking about language between his early and later periods. In his earlier thought, Wittgenstein posited that language should fundamentally work like a map: for a word or a sentence to mean something, you must be able to point to something that it’s trying to signify. When we can’t do that—for instance, if we’re talking about concepts like God or love—then there’s a gap between the signifier and the signified. At that point, we’re in the world of the mystical, and we should enter it through silence rather than speech.

Later in life, Wittgenstein came to the view that this focus on the concrete versus abstract was misguided, perhaps because these kinds of gaps are ever-present. Language rarely works perfectly like a map. A better way to understand it, he argued, was to think of it as a game, or collection of games. Words don’t have fixed, inherent meanings. Instead, they work based on the social rules of the context in which they’re deployed. For instance, “chicken” in the joke above means a kind of meat the woman wants to prepare. But “chicken” as uttered by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future (“Nobody calls me chicken!”) means something very different. His focus shifted from minding the gap between signifier and signified to swimming in the stream of language. 

Commenting on Moses’s self-assessment in Parashat Vaera that he is of “uncircumcised lips” (Ex. 6:12), Avivah Zornberg, invoking Nachmanides, observes, “There is no escape from the imperative of language, because only [Moses] has seen and heard. The burden of revelation lies directly on him: only he can speak of what he knows. This means a project of translation: he must make God’s words heard by others. This is the essential role of the prophet.” Yet, Zornberg continues, “To speak always means to translate, to transform; even the most faithful translations are betrayals: il traduttore e traditore—’To translate is to betray.'” (The Particulars of Rapture, 94)

“Translation” here does not mean merely expressing one idea in another language. Zornberg is saying something far deeper: translation is the basic act of communication itself, even within a language nominally shared by the speaker and the listener, or the writer and the reader. (For instance, at this very moment, though I’m quite sure you’re understanding the English I’m writing, I’m understandably concerned that you may not be getting what I’m trying to say!)

Zornberg goes on to analyze Moses as potentially wracked by a fear of shame inherent in speaking, “a fear of being despicable in the eyes of Pharaoh” (who was, she reminds us, a family figure to Moses). She sums him up at this stage as experiencing “a continuing resistance to language, to entering the world of others… resisting the embarrassments of language.” For this reason, God assigns Aaron, who has not directly experienced the revelation that Moses has, as a kind of press secretary to aid him in the work of translation and communication.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this challenge of language, the enormity of trying to express fully and honestly the totality of an experience or an idea, resonates deeply. I feel like I experience it all the time. Like the early Wittgenstein, I have found, especially in recent years, wisdom in the idea that it is often better to remain silent, particularly when speaking is likely to generate more heat than light. To speak or write these days, especially in public, always requires a high degree of trust: that one’s listeners or readers will engage in good faith; that our words will be given the benefit of the doubt (provided we are, in fact, communicating in good faith). That trust often requires a great deal of courage. And if Moses had a hard time mustering that courage, then I’m willing to be a little more compassionate with myself if I don’t rise to the bar.

And yet, as our tradition makes equally clear, the liberation of the Exodus is not merely a political one. The midrashic and Hasidic traditions make much of the idea that just as the Jewish people were in exile in Egypt, so was their language. The redemption was not only of Israelite bodies, but of our words, our Torah, our culture. As Zornberg, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, writes elsewhere, “Between silence and speech, silence is the more dangerous: its very safety endangers the self.” She sums up, “Between finitude and infinitude, possibility and necessity, the human being struggles for an authentic freedom.” (15)

Particularly in an age when each of us has access to a megaphone, and when, despite countervailing forces, we still have deep connections to the idea of speaking out in the public square, these are more than academic or aesthetic ruminations. How and when we choose to speak, to listen, to engage with one another through our words—these are still the questions of the Exodus, and they are still the questions into which our spiritual practice is meant to help us live.

Questions for Reflection & Conversation:

When you think about “speaking up” these days, what sensations arise for you? What, if anything, do you find helps you speak when you might rather be silent? What, if anything, helps you be silent when you might have an urge to speak? 

Natalie has wanted to do this for a long time. All of her grandparents were survivors of the Shoah and/or Russian gulags during World War II. And while many folks are interested in tracing their genealogy, Natalie has always been particularly eager to gather as much of the stories of her lost relatives as possible–not just knowing their names, but who they were and how they lived. That’s what she’s helping other people to do too.

For one client, she has spent dozens of hours learning about the family’s history through archival records, and she has uncovered some amazing things: The names of lost aunts and uncles, and post-Shoah testimonies about the town they lived in; a footnote in a memorial volume that mentioned a cousin’s best friend; an oral history in which a survivor recalled that the way they used to evaluate whether a celebration was really great was by how good the sponge cake was.

What Natalie is doing with her clients is helping them push through some of the veil that historical narrative can place over the lived experience of our ancestors: Yes, bubbie’s citizenship was stripped by the Nuremberg Laws; she also made a fabulous sponge cake that used 16 eggs. In the former telling, Bubbie becomes something of a heroic symbol; in the latter, she was a woman who wasn’t so different from us. Both are important to know, remember, and relate to. (And one is much more delicious than the other.)

“And because the midwives revered God, God established households for them.” (Exodus 1:21) Shifra and Puah, who the midrash identifies as Yocheved and Miriam, Moses’s mother and sister, are heroic historical figures. Their resistance to Pharaoh is pivotal to the survival of Israelites–and because their story is retold in this way, they are symbols for all who resist tyranny and oppression.

But the language of “God established households for them” invites questions. What’s going on here? Rashi comments that the “households” refer to literal lineages: Yocheved becomes the ancestor of Moses and Aaron (and Miriam); Miriam, through her marriage to Caleb, becomes the ancestor of King David.

In his Mei Hashiloach, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz offers a less historical, more spiritual reading: “It is human nature that when we fear other human beings, we don’t experience yishuv hada’at, a settled mind–for fear is the opposite of a settled mind. However, with the fear or reverence of the Holy One, one experiences menucha, rest and comfort. ‘And God made them houses,’ teaches of this, for ‘houses’ symbolizes an organized, settled mind. It follows that when they had a settled mind, in awe and reverence toward the Holy One, they had no fear from the decree of Pharaoh.”

To me, this is a deeply perceptive reading on the workings of fear and confidence–one I find to be true in my own spiritual practice. When my mind is scattered and unsettled, I find my breath is shorter, my adrenaline is up, and I am much more susceptible to the unhealthy ways fear can operate within me. That’s true whether I’m walking on a busy street or reading the news on my phone. But when I take the time to enter a state of yishuv hada’at, to settle my mind through meditation or other conscious effort, I generally experience a sense of calm, comfort, and confidence–and, ultimately, a sense of yirat Hashem, reverence for the Creator.

To bring us back to Shifra and Puah, or to our closer ancestors whom we might treat at a historical distance, I find it a wonderful invitation to imagine how these very basic forces of fear, reverence, breathing, adrenaline, attention and awareness operated within them. What kind of self-confidence must they have had to do what they did? What kind of fear might have operated within them, and how did they manage it? When I ask these kinds of questions, I find greater insight in the story than when I treat the characters as heroes on a pedestal.

One of the fundamental teachings of Hasidism is that yetziat mitzrayim, the Exodus, was not merely an historical event. The forces of constraint–physical, psychological, political, spiritual–regularly press inward towards constriction. Egypt, mitzrayim, is that constricted place, and thus, simply to stay alive and able to serve the Holy One, we are constantly leaving Egypt. To be truly, deeply at home is to experience spiritual liberation. And so, to borrow the word of our passage in the Torah, our spiritual practice is here to help us experience ourselves as babayit, at home–in our minds, our bodies, the planet, and the cosmos.

For reflection and conversation:

• Do you have an ancestor, biological or spiritual, who is a hero to you? What, if anything, do you know about their spiritual life? What, if anything, do you imagine they might have done or experienced to enable them to take heroic action?
• In your own life, does your spiritual practice help you feel more settled and at home? If so, how? If not, why not–and is there anything you might want to shift as a result?

In the last few months, my wife Natalie has launched a new business called The Story Archivist. (This is not meant as a promotional email, I promise–you get plenty of those from me for IJS courses already!) Natalie is a journalist by training, a published author by experience (five young adult novels), and an educator by career. Her work today brings that all together by helping families preserve and tell their family stories: interviewing elders, doing archival research, and writing it up in a way that will allow future generations to know who they are and where they come from.

Natalie has wanted to do this for a long time. All of her grandparents were survivors of the Shoah and/or Russian gulags during World War II. And while many folks are interested in tracing their genealogy, Natalie has always been particularly eager to gather as much of the stories of her lost relatives as possible–not just knowing their names, but who they were and how they lived. That’s what she’s helping other people to do too. 

For one client, she has spent dozens of hours learning about the family’s history through archival records, and she has uncovered some amazing things: The names of lost aunts and uncles, and post-Shoah testimonies about the town they lived in; a footnote in a memorial volume that mentioned a cousin’s best friend; an oral history in which a survivor recalled that the way they used to evaluate whether a celebration was really great was by how good the sponge cake was.

What Natalie is doing with her clients is helping them push through some of the veil that historical narrative can place over the lived experience of our ancestors: Yes, bubbie’s citizenship was stripped by the Nuremberg Laws; she also made a fabulous sponge cake that used 16 eggs. In the former telling, Bubbie becomes something of a heroic symbol; in the latter, she was a woman who wasn’t so different from us. Both are important to know, remember, and relate to. (And one is much more delicious than the other.)

“And because the midwives revered God, God established households for them.” (Exodus 1:21) Shifra and Puah, who the midrash identifies as Yocheved and Miriam, Moses’s mother and sister, are heroic historical figures. Their resistance to Pharaoh is pivotal to the survival of Israelites–and because their story is retold in this way, they are symbols for all who resist tyranny and oppression. 

But the language of “God established households for them” invites questions. What’s going on here? Rashi comments that the “households” refer to literal lineages: Yocheved becomes the ancestor of Moses and Aaron (and Miriam); Miriam, through her marriage to Caleb, becomes the ancestor of King David. 

In his Mei Hashiloach, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz offers a less historical, more spiritual reading: “It is human nature that when we fear other human beings, we don’t experience yishuv hada’at, a settled mind–for fear is the opposite of a settled mind. However, with the fear or reverence of the Holy One, one experiences menucha, rest and comfort. ‘And God made them houses,’ teaches of this, for ‘houses’ symbolizes an organized, settled mind. It follows that when they had a settled mind, in awe and reverence toward the Holy One, they had no fear from the decree of Pharaoh.”

To me, this is a deeply perceptive reading on the workings of fear and confidence–one I find to be true in my own spiritual practice. When my mind is scattered and unsettled, I find my breath is shorter, my adrenaline is up, and I am much more susceptible to the unhealthy ways fear can operate within me. That’s true whether I’m walking on a busy street or reading the news on my phone. But when I take the time to enter a state of yishuv hada’at, to settle my mind through meditation or other conscious effort, I generally experience a sense of calm, comfort, and confidence–and, ultimately, a sense of yirat Hashem, reverence for the Creator. 

To bring us back to Shifra and Puah, or to our closer ancestors whom we might treat at a historical distance, I find it a wonderful invitation to imagine how these very basic forces of fear, reverence, breathing, adrenaline, attention and awareness operated within them. What kind of self-confidence must they have had to do what they did? What kind of fear might have operated within them, and how did they manage it? When I ask these kinds of questions, I find greater insight in the story than when I treat the characters as heroes on a pedestal.

One of the fundamental teachings of Hasidism is that yetziat mitzrayim, the Exodus, was not merely an historical event. The forces of constraint–physical, psychological, political, spiritual–regularly press inward towards constriction. Egypt, mitzrayim, is that constricted place, and thus, simply to stay alive and able to serve the Holy One, we are constantly leaving Egypt. To be truly, deeply at home is to experience spiritual liberation. And so, to borrow the word of our passage in the Torah, our spiritual practice is here to help us experience ourselves as babayit, at home–in our minds, our bodies, the planet, and the cosmos.

For reflection and conversation:

• Do you have an ancestor, biological or spiritual, who is a hero to you? What, if anything, do you know about their spiritual life? What, if anything, do you imagine they might have done or experienced to enable them to take heroic action?

• In your own life, does your spiritual practice help you feel more settled and at home? If so, how? If not, why not–and is there anything you might want to shift as a result?

Earlier this week we held a beautiful celebration of IJS’s first 25 years. Below is a recording of Rabbi Josh Feigelson’s speech from the event.

Many years ago, during my first job out of college, I wound up at a meeting in the Fifth Avenue apartment of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It’s a long story for another time. But this was roughly 2000, and according to the internet that means they had been married for 42 years.

The meeting was with Joanne (she was the board chair of the Westport Country Playhouse, and I was on a consulting team helping them with a business plan). Fresh-squeezed orange juice was served.

At some point during the meeting, the apartment door opens and in walks Paul Newman, just returning from a run in Central Park. He had a towel around his neck.

But what I most remember is the buzz of electricity that visibly passed through the air as their eyes connected. They gave a cute little wave to each other that felt like a kind of intimate sign language. After four decades, it certainly felt like they were still very much in love.

My wife Natalie and I are coming up on our 25th wedding anniversary this spring. For as long as we’ve known each other, we have had different biorhythms. I have always been an early riser (I’m writing this reflection, as I often do, before 6 am), which means I also like to go to bed early. Natalie is the opposite.

This means that many mornings, after I’ve been up, had my coffee, done my morning routines, and am now ready to get dressed, I come back to our bedroom to find her waking up. At which point I say, with a delight that is both genuine and a little playful, “Look who’s here!” Our own daily Paul and Joanne moment, perhaps.

Naturally, perhaps, the approach of this anniversary leads me to reflect on our marriage and, more broadly, what supports longevity in relationships. Yes, there’s Tevye and Golda (“After 25 years it’s nice to know”), and there is a great deal of literature on the topic. In my own experience, there is some alchemic combination of both familiarity and freshness, routine (we have many) and spontaneity, known and unknown, that seems to have served us.

That, of course, can describe not just marriages, but other kinds of long-term commitments—including the ones we have with Jewish prayers, texts, rituals, mitzvot. As my father’s yahrtzeit approaches this coming week, I remember how supportive the framework of Jewish mourning practices was for me when he died, providing an infrastructure in the chaos of emotional quicksand. And yet at other times in my life that same Jewish infrastructure has felt like a straitjacket.

Rabbi Avrohom Bornsztain (1838-1910), the first Sokachover Rebbe, offers a beautiful reflection on this theme in connection with a verse from our parasha this week. He bases it on a midrashic understanding of the verse, “And he [Jacob] sent him Joseph] from the valley of Hebron” (Gen. 37:14). Rashi, quoting the midrash, reads emek not as valley, but as “depths” (amok means deep). “He sent him out from the deep wisdom of the one who is buried in Hebron (Abraham), to fulfill what had been promised to him… ‘Your descendants will be strangers’ (Gen. 15:13).”

The Sokochover elaborates: “Abraham realized that, unlike him, his descendants would grow up with an awareness of the Divine sanctity in the world. He was concerned that they would eventually lose the sense of freshness in their service of the Holy One, and that little by little they would cool off and leave the holy path. Thus he had the insight that his progeny should experience exile… so that the sense of desire for holiness would renew and grow within them” (quoted in Itturei Torah).

This is potentially a provocative comment, particularly in light of some deep debates happening now about Zionism and diasporism (if this is new to you, a Google search will yield plenty). Because I expect you’ll ask, I’ll summarize my own view as: 1) the Jewish people’s cultural homeland is the land of Israel; and, 2) in the very same breath, there are clearly deep creative possibilities in diasporic life, which is a great deal of Jewish history; and, 3) still in the same long breath, the precariousness of Jewish life in the diaspora is painfully real, and, 4) finally, the possibilities and challenges of Jewish sovereignty are enormous, as the contemporary state of Israel demonstrates on a daily basis. End breath.

But that isn’t really where I’m aiming this reflection. There are plenty of other people and organizations whose work focuses on those kinds of historical-political questions. For our purposes, I’d like to bring us back to the more everyday, personal, embodied ways we experience the Sokochover’s Torah. That moment of, “Look who’s here!” after 25 years; that bolt of spiritual lightning that passed between Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman; the feeling of (with apologies to Kellogg’s) “tasting it again for the first time”—these are personal moments of leaving and coming back, of galut and teshuva. They are moments of hitchadshut, renewal, or “beginner’s mind.” They are daily lived enactments of this Torah.

Hanukkah is about many things, but one of them is certainly this experience. The simple act of lighting a candle in the darkness, and of sharing that light with others—that itself is miraculous. As we begin the holiday next week, my blessing for all of us is that we might attune ourselves to the miracles that abound within our lives, that we be able to taste and savor and appreciate them. Nes gadol haya sham—a great miracle happened then and there, and, as Israeli dreidels say, nes gadol haya po—a great miracle happened, and happens, here too.

Last Shabbos was a snow day in Chicago. A big storm moved through and dumped nearly a foot on us. The weather folks said it was the biggest November snowfall in a decade.

On Sunday I dug out the snow blower from the back of the garage (we’ve had pretty light snow in recent years) and joined the lovely civic ritual wherein neighbors say hello to one another, commiserate a little bit, and help each other keep our driveways clear as the city trucks plow us back in while clearing the streets.

The days since have been cold, so the snow is still on the ground. And I’ve noticed that on my walks with the dog, I am drawn to keep the air pods out of my ears and just listen. It’s quieter when there’s snow, almost like there’s a blanket muffling the usual noises of cars and wildlife. Most of all, my ears are drawn to the sound and sensation of snow crunching under my boots. Combine that with the special kind of air that can follow a snow storm, the smell of a winter hat on my head and a scarf around my neck, and it transports me right back to being a little kid walking to elementary school in Ann Arbor. It’s fabulous.

As it happens, I spent my Shabbat snow day reading Rodger Kamenetz’s new book, Seeing Into the Life of Things. (I was cramming for the exam: I interviewed Rodger about the book on Wednesday night, ahead of his teaching an online IJS course about the book next month. I’ll be taking it, and I hope you will too.)

While I read plenty of books, and while many of them are wonderful, this one stood out. Why? I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.

It’s a smart book, for sure: There are discourses on Wordsworth (the source of the title) and Freud and Einstein. The Ba’al Shem Tov and Rabbi Isaac Luria make appearances, alongside Rumi and the Dalai Lama and other deep wells of insight. I like that kind of intellectual stimulation. And as one who writes myself, Rodger’s writing is like a cup of chamomile tea with honey on a cold day—warm and smooth and sweet, the kind of thing you drink in slowly and savor. (He said Wednesday he’s much more of a “re-writer”—revising and sculpting and crafting every page over and over again. I wish I had that kind of patience.)

But ultimately I think what drew me in was what Rodger invites us all to do: be present with our experiences without rushing to label and analyze them with words right away. When we do that—when we slap a label onto something or someone, when we reactively move to interpret a dream rather than lingering with the ineffable sensations it beckons us to dance with—we forfeit something precious: our imaginative capacity. As Rodger writes in his introduction, “The sacred takes place in the imagination. A poetic state of mind is the ground of visionary experience.” (Like I said, tea with honey.)

This week we reach the climax of the Jacob and Esau story, a story that is so much about this human challenge of knowing and not knowing—and how to hold, or even embrace, the not-knowingness. We sensed it in Isaac’s not-quite-knowing encounter with Jacob-dressed-as-Esau last week, and this week we touch it again with Jacob’s profound uncertainty about Esau’s intentions as he approaches with a small army.

“And Jacob feared greatly, and it troubled him, and he divided the people who were with him… into two camps.” (Gen. 32:8) Rashi, in one of his most famous comments, says: “He feared—that he would be killed; and it troubled—that he might kill others.” This is an ethical reading, highlighting what I certainly like to think of as a classically Jewish approach. It holds the fullness of the stakes without minimizing the positions.

Yet Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz, the Chozeh or Seer of Lublin (d. 1815), offers a different reading: “And Jacob feared—he experienced fear because of Esau, but immediately ‘and it troubled him’—the fact that he was fearful, particularly after the Holy One’s promise, ‘and I will protect you wherever you go’ (Gen. 28:15).” Jacob’s initial fear is a perfectly understandable one: It seems like his brother is coming to kill him. Yet the Chozeh turns the “troubling” of the verse into something like the “second arrow” in Buddhist teachings: Jacob is aware of his fear, and the fact that he’s afraid makes him even more upset—because he should be trusting in God.

I didn’t ask Rodger, so this is just me, but I sense an opening here to understand Jacob as struggling in the space between reactivity and wisdom, which might also be the space between analyzing and being-with, or between the illusion of knowing and the reality of not-knowing. Yes, Jacob needs to make a decision, and he needs to be careful—mindful, even. Can he do so in a non-reactive state?

I think that’s what the Seer of Lublin is asking of Jacob—and of we who are his descendants. As Rodger and I discussed on Wednesday, the age and world we live in is built on so much reactivity. (Jane Eisner told me this week that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year is “rage bait.” Q.E.D.) But we are so much more than that. So maybe stay close to your breath a little more. Linger with the taste of your coffee or the light of the Shabbat candles. And maybe take out the air pods when you’re walking and listen to the sound of the snow under your feet.