Vayetze - One important part of anger
Genesis 28:10 - 32:3 | Hosea 12:13 - 14:10
Summary: Though anger is not generally seen as a positive trait, there are times when it’s expression is essential in order to move through certain blocks and obstacles. Ya’akov is our teacher in this kind of anger.
***
From the earliest age, we are encouraged - required, even - to sublimate our anger and to express our needs and wants through more acceptable means of delivery. That is certainly wise - the anger of children is often an expression of unreasonable demands and indulging tantrums does not set a good precedent.
But by making anger so forbidden, so fully and completely unacceptable, we risk severing our children - and the adults they will become - from their deepest feelings and strongest convictions. A person might find themselves thinking “I am angry, and being angry is not OK, so the feelings I am feeling, and the intensity with which I am feeling them, are also not OK. Not only should I calm down, I should not be feeling what I am feeling.”
If this path is fully followed, we will soon be left with neutralized people, whole families and communities and clans of people who are simply alienated from their deepest passions and convictions. Who’s to say if the very intensity that was truncated because anger has been deemed unacceptable will definitely be available through other, more “acceptable” means? When words are supposed to replace the outburst measure for measure, it is quite likely that they won’t measure up. Yes, those words are more civilized and tolerable, but it is important to acknowledge what they may lack.
When anger is fully neutralized, a person might not be able to muster the clear sense of justice that they will need in order to fight against injustice. They may be unable to establish, assert, and defend the clear boundaries that are the starting point for mutually respectful relationship. They might live a life with passion and intensity because passion and intensity were always seen merely as antecedents of anger.
Of course anger should not be unleashed as rage. Of course it needs to be expressed in the best possible way. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be felt before it is channeled into those best possible ways. In many cases, it shouldn’t be simply nipped in the bud. Rather, it should be seen for what it is - a resource. That bud should not be nipped before a person gets to say “I feel strongly about this. This is really, really, really, REALLY important to me.”
***
So, yes. Ya’akov is leaving Be’er Sheva (literally, the ‘well of satisfaction’) and going toward Haran - literally, ‘anger.’ He needs to find his ‘no’, his frustration, his refusal to be deceived and manipulated, his ability to stand up for himself, for his wife, for his kids. He is leaving a place where he has been powerless, moved around like a pawn by his mother. Perhaps in contrast to his intense, red, volatile, angry, crying, hungry hairy hunter-brother Eisav, Ya’akov had to be the nice, pliant boy who sat up straight and paid attention in school. He may have had to balance an emotional household with stoic stillness.
So Ya’akov leaves home and starts moving toward anger. But it will take him a long while to get there. In the meantime, he will stand by as his father-in-law swaps sister Leah for the promised wife Rachel. He will allow his father in law to rip him off time after time, unilaterally switching the terms of their agreements again and again. He will be passed around by his four wives like a stud bull, a producer of seed with no will of his own, no choices. And then he will try to take his family and run away in the middle of the night, like a thief. God won’t have it, and gives father-in-law Lavan a miraculous capacity to leap across space and time to catch up with Ya’akov - all so Ya’akov will be forced to find that anger, that ‘no,’ and let it out. Perhaps this was his mother’s wisdom - seeing Ya’akov emotionally stunted, she may have known that some time with her troublesome, manipulative brother Lavan would push his buttons and do the trick.
Ya’akov had been drawn to Rachel immediately. She is the one who makes him feel - a passionate kiss the moment after he meets her, followed by tears. A superhuman capacity to lift the rock off the well. And also anger. Her own passion, which he admires so much, also evokes anger in him. “Rachel saw that she had not borne children to Ya’akov, and Rachel was jealous of her sister. And she said to Ya’akov, ‘give me sons! And if not, I am already dead.’ And Ya’akov got angry at her and said, ‘Am I in place of God who withheld from you the fruit of the womb?’” The sleeping beast of Ya’akov’s anger awakes - and is unfortunately misdirected toward the woman he loves more than anything, the woman who models anger and passion and the fulness of life, who dares to be jealous, to want what she doesn’t have, to not want what she has, to imagine more, to feel her lack and be upset about it. Is his anger actually jealousy of his wife’s ability to express her anger and her ‘no’?
It is this very Rachel who takes her father’s chotchke-idols before her husband Ya’akov steals away with his family in the night. She, who lives passionately, will try to change her father if she can. She is angry at her father’s stupidity and does not accept it.
When Lavan, from miles away, hears that Ya’akov has left, he sets off after him. God makes a kevitzat haderech - a leap in space-time, and Lavan catches up. “Where are my chotchke-idols?” Ya’akov invites Lavan to look for them, and look he does. In what I always imagine to be an embarrassing and violative search, Lavan opens every bag and looks in every nook and cranny to find them, and comes up empty-handed. Something about this moment brings the sleeping anger in Ya’akov to life. ‘And Ya’akov got angry and quarreled with Lavan, and said to Lavan, ‘what is my sin? What is my iniquity, such that you have chased after me? You have searched all my bags. What did you find, from among your possessions? Place it here before my people and yours, and let them adjudicate between us.’” Now he has started, and it all comes out. “These 20 years I have been with you. Your cattle were taken care of… I took responsibility for anything that happened… and you switched my wages ten times!” Lavan tries to regain the upper hand: “Your children are mine. Your wives are mine. Your wealth is mine.” But he knows he has lost, because Ya’akov is finally in touch with his anger, and he will not back down. “Let us make a covenant…"
As we will see, Ya’akov has now found his ‘no’, his anger, and he is ready to use it. In the very next Torah reading, Ya’akov calls for a meeting with Eisav, the brother whom he has feared for so long. He will no longer be afraid. He has figured out how to listen to his anger - not always to let it out, but to find it, to learn from it, to be fueled by it, to find energy and intensity in it, to honor it when it comes.