“It is not good for the human to be alone” (l’vado). (Genesis 2:18)
“Jacob remained alone” (l’vado). (Genesis 23:25)
“Blessed is the Lord God who alone (l’vado) does wondrous things.” (Psalm 72:18)
“Names, like titles, are given. Persons cannot name themselves any more than they can entitle themselves. However, unlike titles, which are given for what a person has done, a name is given at birth at a time when a person cannot yet have done anything. Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning.” (James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games)
The English language has many words for the different flavors of aloneness—loneliness, isolation, solitude, singularity, apartness, marginalization, exclusion, distinction, difference, exceptionality, inimitability, etc. In Biblical Hebrew, the same word—lavad—encompasses all of these meanings. While in English, we tend to differentiate between the pleasant and productive forms of being alone and the painful and debilitating ones, the Torah uses the same word for both—implying, perhaps, that we can’t so easily separate them. To be a singular being created in the divine image is to be both gifted and burdened with a nature that can’t be assimilated into a group. To be human is to stand out.
The Jewish people throughout the Torah and throughout Jewish history embody the quality of being alone—we are a people persecuted and excluded as well as a people divinely elected and culturally defiant. Does being an outsider make one a contrarian, or does being a contrarian make one an outsider? Does not caring about the (wrong) judgments of others earn wrath and punishment, or does being the victim of others’ (wrong) judgments eventually benumb one to them, setting one’s sights not on the whimsy of the contemporary world, but on God and a higher plane of consciousness? Yes. Antisemitism can reinforce a sense of mission (“they must hate us for a reason, let me find out what that is”); and a strong sense of mission can also provoke antisemitism (“What makes them think they’re so special?”/“It’s not fair that they’re special.”)
Thus, the same word, l’vado, describes something that is not good about our existence (Gen. 2:18) as well as a divine attribute (Psalm 72:18). If we read Psalm 72 poetically, the verse states not simply that God is differentiated in that God does wondrous things, but rather that God’s capacity to do wondrous things is grounded in God’s being singular. The ur-wonder is singularity itself. No aloneness, no miracles—because our aloneness (the fact that something could be its own category) is the greatest miracle of all.
This week’s parasha, Vayishlach (Genesis 32:4-36:43) describes a pivotal moment in Jacob’s life—and thus, in Jewish history—as one in which he is described as alone for the first time. (He’s been alone before, in the technical sense. But in the existential sense, he’s never enjoyed what Arendt calls “the dialogue of the self with the self.”) Remember that Jacob is born a twin. He comes out of the womb holding Esav’s heel. He wins a blessing and a birthright through trickery, that is, by pretending to be someone other than himself. Jacob says the words, “I am Esav,” to his dying father.
If you think about it in contemporary terms, the young Jacob is the archetype of the insecure person who is constantly measuring himself against others (through no fault of his own). He goes to all the right schools, gets good grades, has the right resume, etc., but he’s hollow inside because there’s no Jacob in any of it. He’s winning at some external, social, finite game, but losing the infinite game of the self. Vayishlach presents the moment where something snaps and Jacob becomes individuated. In Peter Thiel’s terms, this is the moment where Jacob realizes that “competition is for losers,” stops imitating others, and becomes, as it were, a monopoly (in the positive sense of “unable to be copied”). By detaching himself from the shadow of Esav and the notion that he must outcompete him for some scarce resource (blessing, birthright, etc.), Jacob can reconcile with him.
I am speaking, of course, of the moment in which Jacob wrestles all night with a mysterious man or angel—and prevails. Jacob receives a new name (Yisrael), but he is also injured in the process. The injury differentiates him and symbolizes the lasting painfulness of becoming a self. You can’t get a new name without battle scars. Moreover, the injury is the only thing besides the new name that lasts, the only proof the fantasy was real. Jacob didn’t have to pinch his cheeks, because he had a hip socket that was out of whack.
The Torah emphasizes the transformation of Jacob’s wrestling match with irony. When Jacob is organizing his camp in preparation to confront his hostile and aggrieved brother, he separates out different droves of animals that he’s going to give as an attempt to ameliorate Esav. The text uses the word l’vadam to describe how the different droves are to be separated (Gen. 32:17). Jacob who hasn’t been existentially alone before is trying to game his brother—to make his brother sense that he—Jacob—is stronger and more powerful than he is. He’s puffing. It’s ironic, because the animals are separated into groups at the very moment when Jacob should be the one separating himself. The aloneness that Jacob needs to discover is not the kind to be found in the collective power of a horde, or what Marx calls “species-being,” but in himself. The animals are l’vadam. Only Jacob can be l’vado.
One way to read the story of Jacob’s confrontation with the angel is as his “dark night of the soul,” in which he can no longer run from his own thoughts. It’s a meditation retreat for someone who’s every thought goes something like this: “When will this be over?” “Why am I so bad at this?” “Why do I hate myself?” To prevail (but notably not to win) through such a practice means not that Jacob achieved a perfect meditative state and achieved “no mind,” but on the contrary—that he was present to his anxiety. As Shunruyi Suzuki teaches, the person who has an easier time meditating is not having a better practice or more desirable experience—from a Zen point of view—than the one who suffers the whole time. The practice is beginner’s mind, not expertise (which often obstructs humility). Jacob gets his name change not when he graduates, but when he begins. His breakthrough moment occurs the moment he allows himself to be an amateur and not an expert.
James Carse argues that names signify our future potential whereas titles signify our past accomplishments. The former demonstrate our dignity, regardless of what we’ve done (and preserve our infinity); the latter limit us to the accolades we’ve racked up (and entrap us in a vortex of objectification). To get a new name in the midst of one’s life is powerful precisely because it means that one should be forward-looking rather than beholden to the past. Infants have no historic past of which we can speak, but middle-agers do, and so to receive a new name after already living life contains a subtle critique of Jacob, as well as an invitation to a fresh start: You are to define yourself by what you can be, not what you’ve done. For someone who has lived his life inauthentically this is an amazing offer. Israel means not just that we wrestled with an angel in the past—but that the angels and demons of our past can’t determine us. We are fundamentally free.
If being l’vado, alone, were truly only a bad thing, it would be unthinkable that Jacob would become who he is precisely in such a moment of solitude. Instead, we should appreciate a dialectic—the Torah wants us to be in authentic relationships with others, and to authentically participate in community, but we can only do so by cultivating a robust, thoughtful and honest sense of self. Otherwise community and relationships become inauthentic hotbeds of dysfunction as people project their unworked-through inner conflicts onto one another. For Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism originates in the human tendency to use the crowd to fill a void in oneself, a void that we would be better off accepting, acknowledging, and wrestling with. The crowd which should help us feel a sense of belonging actually breeds more loneliness in its totalitarian mode, because it forces us to hide our differences. Only a community that invites and welcomes difference can be one where the solitary and divine nature of the human is preserved.
In practice, building relationships that maintain difference rather than unify everyone into one conformist mixture (a la the Tower of Babel) is difficult. The question, in practice, is never one of absolutes, but rather limits—which differences can we tolerate, which can we not? Jacob and Esav are twins and yet could not be more different. If there is to be peace and brotherly love between them, the Torah suggests, each must make his own way. Alikeness breeds envy, says Rene Girard. To overcome the enmity that caused Cain to kill Abel and that led Joseph’s brothers to sell him into slavery, we must find new names.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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