Turn It Again: Torah Wisdom for Today
In Pirkei Avot, a book of maxims in the Mishnah, an ancient rabbi, Ben Bag-Bag said about Torah study, “Hafokh bah, va’Hafokh vah, d’khola bah.” Turn it over and over, for everything is in it. For two thousand years, that’s what Jews have done. Here is another turning.
Parshat Vayeitze 2024
Ambition and Spirit: A Case Study of Jewish Values in Law and Action
History doesn’t repeat, not really, yet historical motifs are repeated endlessly, highlighting what we share with the past, even as they also indicate the uniqueness of a given epoch. The Bible often explores motifs by utilizing parallel stories; oftentimes, the later story is meant to provide us a more evolved set of lessons. For example, while the fissure in Jacob and Esau’s relationship is ultimately resolved, theirs is a cold peace. Moreover, Jacob’s many offerings of gifts to his brother seem motivated by fear and strategic thinking; he wishes to placate Esau, not achieve a more meaningful rapprochement.
The narratives of Joseph and his brothers, in contrast, highlights a similar story of betrayal and fracture, but in this case the siblings show genuine remorse and psychological growth. In this way, the Bible emphasizes an essential motif of rupture and repair in family relationships while showing us a more mature manner to heal our differences. Our tradition has a preference for the latter retelling, as it forms the foundational text which outlines how to engage in teshuvah.
This, by the way, is one of the major differences between law and literature, which are two of the categories that the Torah utilizes to transmit deep Jewish values. Law lays it out, telling us our duties. Yet the limitation of law is that while it instructs us in our obligations, merely acting in accordance with its demands doesn’t mean that we have internalized the embedded values. Law is operational, based in the world of specific actions, of “shoulds” and “should-nots.”
Stories work on us in a different way. Often we can emotionally identify with a character’s dilemmas; in this way, we can “write ourselves” into the Biblical narrative. Stories are also all about process, allowing us to discern character development, which can encourage us in our personal growth. This aliveness is why people seem to remember stories far more easier than many other types of knowledge.
Yet there is a risk to this approach, for without the clear guidance of law, we might misinterpret a story, or find it too subtle to grasp. Especially when we are dealing with parallel stories in scripture, we need to be well-versed in the entire Bible or we might not even realize that the Torah is retelling a story. This is most likely why we find both law and narrative, as they reinforce the transmission of our values.
In this week’s parashah of Vayeitze, the incident of the Tower of Babel is retold through Jacob’s dream of a ladder ascending to heaven. As a reminder, in Genesis 11:4, the people building the Tower of Babel declare, “Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens” (עִיר וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם). This phrase implies an effort to bridge the earthly and heavenly realms through human effort.
When this is retold in Genesis 28:12, Jacob dreams of a sulam (ladder) that “was set on the ground, and its top reached to the heavens” (וְרֹאשׁוֹ מַגִּיעַ הַשָּׁמָיְמָה). The imagery is strikingly similar, with both narratives involving a structure connecting earth and heaven.
Additionally, both stories employ the Hebrew word rosh (רֹאשׁ, “head” or “top”) to describe the apex of the structure: the tower’s top (11:4) and the ladder’s top (28:12). It is this shared vocabulary that reinforces the conceptual link between the two narratives
Moving beyond the linguistic echoes, God plays a decisive role in both versions. In Babel, God descends to “see” the tower (11:5) and disrupts the project, symbolizing divine judgment. In the sulam narrative, God appears to Jacob, offering a blessing and reassurance (28:13–15).
This is the central difference between these two parallel stories, which highlights the contrast between human and divine initiative. In Babel, the human desire to scale the heavens is viewed as the hubris of human ambition run amok. It is a tale of fascism that wants to eliminate human diversity; as such, God puts an end to the project.
In the sulam story, however, it is God who provides the connection between heaven and earth, through the vision of the ladder. Jacob is a passive recipient of divine revelation. On the one hand, we might take this to mean that access to the divine realm comes through God’s grace, not human effort. Yet the deeper moral lesson is found in the purpose of these two gateways to heaven. The sulam represents divine promise and covenantal reassurance. It symbolizes Jacob’s connection to the divine mission and his role as a carrier of the Abrahamic covenant. It is other-centered, not self-centered.
What the sulam narrative preserves, however, is the fact that we do need to care for ourselves if we are to care for others. Jacob is willing to engage in the other-centered task of the covenant, so long as his basic safety and needs will be attended to by God. This is a typically Jewish perspective on ambition, for it indicates how we must have our feet planted on the earth even as our heads and hearts aspire to heaven.
How do you navigate or temper your desires so that you don’t fall prey to blind ambition? Are you able to balance and develop your spiritual and material sides? Your personal needs and communal needs?
