Escape Monotony
Jacob's Path to Self-Discovery
For I have known them all already, known them all:/ Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/ I have measured out my life with coffee spoons (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alred Prufrock)
Now, my son, listen to me. Flee at once to Haran, to my brother Laban. Stay with him a while (yamim achadim), until your brother’s fury subsides… (Genesis 27:43-44)
So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days (yamim achadim) because of his love for her. (Genesis 29:20)
Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words (d’varim achadim). (Genesis 11:1)
We speak effortlessly of tens, hundreds, and thousands, but do any of us speak of ones? To pluralize the number one seems a kind of contradiction, for one is a different kind of number than others. In Hebrew, as in many languages, the word for one—echad—connotes not just numerical oneness, but a range of other meanings, such as unity, singularity, and sameness. The word echad, in the plural—achadim— occurs rarely in the Torah. In the Five Books of Moses it appears only three times. Two of those times it modifies the word yamim, days.
It’s ironic: when Rebecca tells Jacob to flee his brother Esau, having just “stolen” his blessing, she tells him to go to her brother’s home for some unspecified number of days, yamim achadim. After seven years there, Jacob feels that he’s completed his mother’s prophecy, her injunction. Having found a wife in Rachel, he believes his term is up. His yamim achadim are over. In fact, he will have to work another seven years to get Rachel. The duper has become the dupe. The man who left the scene of deception has arrived at another scene of deception. Yamim achadim is the literary bridge that makes this point.
But once Jacob is working for Rachel a second time, he’s no longer in a state of yamim achadim. He’s looking at the clock. Where his initial sense of time had a purpose and therefore felt unified—achad—his next term of seven years drags on. Yamim achadim has a kind of stunning effect, it’s the way we rationalize our time, gathering our days into a larger unit or unity. When Jacob loses his sense of purpose and progress—when his plans are thwarted—so, too are the unity of his days. Now, he must take each day as it comes. For the first seven years, Jacob is excited. For the second set of seven, he is disheartened.
The sequence of seven good years followed by seven lean years also appears in the Joseph cycle. But while you can store up grain in a warehouse to protect against a coming famine, you can’t store up good days to save against the tedious ones to come (except perhaps in the form of memory).
Is it good to have yamim achadim? On the one hand, we might think of such days as days of “flow.” It’s a kind of meditative state. The clarity of having a specific goal allows one—paradoxically—to be in the moment, in a state of suspension relative to the goal. But yamim achadim can also be a kind of blinder, a way of relating to time that is so hyper-focused that you lose the ability to be open to new things. There can be a ruthlessness to living life in a state of yamim achadim, whereby all of one’s days must be fitted to a single, overarching plan.
In fact, the Torah connects the word achadim to totalitarian tyranny the first time the word appears—in the Tower of Babel Story. The tower builders have one language and one way of talking or thinking (dvarim achadim). The pluralized form of echad has intrigued commentators. Some suggest it refers to a kind of speech censorship or else, mind control. Individuals aren’t allowed to express their individuality. The city of Babel was a place where, despite being unique—echad—everyone had to be the same, achadim.
Sameness and difference are the poles around which human society and human conflict turn. A world in which we are all the same is a world in which we are bots. A world in which we are all different, with nothing in common, is a world of atomization, loneliness, disconnect. Political and cultural conflicts turn on the question of who is “us” and who is “them”; who is the same as us, and how much difference should we afford and desire. What kinds of deviance are the right kinds? And which threaten our sense of cohesion? Nowhere are these kinds of questions most poignant and immediate than in the case of Jacob and Esau, who are twins. Precisely because twins are similar their differences are striking. It is the case of twins that most intensely highlights the Torah’s teaching that our individuality is what makes us in the divine image. Our ability to see twins as two related individuals and not as two parts of one individual is a litmus test for our ability to create a world in which the individual is not simply subsumed by the system or the “body politic.”
The Tower of Babel story is fundamentally a story of a group of people seeking to escape the Torah’s summons to be individuals. Their scattering—which is a punishment—also doubles as a kind of reward. It says don’t even try to be the same. The rejection of one globalized, imperial humanity in favor of the creation of different languages and, therefore, different city-states moves us from the realm of d’varim achadim, the focus-grouped word, the cliché, to one in which we each have a new word to share.
In her controversial essay, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt proposed that totalitarian subjects like Eichmann cannot think. Becoming a totalitarian functionary is much easier than being a lascivious tyrant. Anyone whose minds become benumbed through propaganda and repetition can become one. Eichmann lived in a world of d’varim achadim, and perhaps, too, of yamim achadim. His fixity of thought, and fixity of mission, inured him to self-consciousness.
Jacob flees just after he’s pretended to be his brother. He leaves for the yamim achadim, the same days just after he’s tricked not only his father, but possibly himself, into thinking that he is someone else. The price of his blessing is the pretense he must adapt to the detriment of his self-knowledge and self-transparency.
But the spell of his same days, of his “passing”—his passing time, his passing as someone else—is broken when he is deceived in turn. In realizing that Leah is not Rachel, he realizes that he is not Esau, that he is Jacob. He realizes that his days are not just empty vessels of days and minutes, but as singular as leaves of grass. In his disappointment, Jacob is positively disturbed.
Jacob’s beloved—Rachel—is scattered and confounded the way the people’s language is after the Tower of Babel. All Jacob wants is Rachel. And all the people want is a tower in the sky, a name in which to hide. But were Jacob to obtain his goal immediately, he would remain shutdown to himself and the world. It is wrong of Lavan to deceive him. It is tragic for Jacob’s family that they will be a broken one from the start. It is terrible for the sisters that they will live as rival wives. And yet on a macro-level, the swap is also a kind of reward, a way of saying that too much focus on one thing, too much obsession with one goal or one way of looking is not good. To become ourselves we must not conflate ourselves with our goals and our tasks.
Jacob, a twin who leaves his brother, looks to find a replacement twin in his future wife. But he is not afforded this without serious complication. For no relationship can or should absolve us of confronting ourselves. Leah is not the person Jacob wants, but the person he needs. Just as the days of difficulty are not the ones we would choose—as compared to the days of flow—and yet it is in crisis and challenge that we become most fully ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—I’ve just written 100 tweets on Michel Foucault.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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