Parshat Vayetzei 5769: The Lord Was In This Face and I, I Did Not Know.

This week we begin Jacob’s journey to Padan Aram and his adventures there. After a divine encounter with a ladder, he meets his beautiful cousin Rachel, and instantly falls for her. After a bit of deception on his father in law Laban’s part, he ends up not with one, but two wives. With a good grasp of genetics, Jacob grows rich and eventually sneaks away from him. His now rather large family of two concubines, two wives, soon-to-be thirteen children and lots of livestock goes with him. But as he starts home, he realizes something: he will have to eventually confront Esau once again.
After his divine dream of the Ladder, and God’s assurances about his journey,

16. Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I, I did not know. 17. And he was afraid, and said, How awesome is this place! This is no other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. [Genesis 28]

According to the Rabbis, this event happened on the Temple Mount. Jacob was given a taste of where Jerusalem would eventually stand. That spot did become the gate of Heaven not just for Jews, but other faiths as well. Is that the only gate to heaven however? Can we understand there is another, far more portable gate?
I tend to look for that gate in one of my favorite teachings. I learned this from R. Arthur Waskow many years ago while I was on retreat in upstate New York. He was leading the morning minyan, praying in a circular tent known as a yurt. He gave us a rather fascinating teaching about a very interesting parable:

To proclaim the greatness of the Holy One, Blessed be He: For if a man strikes many coins from one mold, they all resemble one another, but the supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, fashioned every man in the stamp of the first man, and yet not one of them resembles his fellow. [Sanhedrin 37a]

Of course in Genesis we read.

27. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female He created them. [Genesis 1]

Therefore every face is the image of God, yet all are different. Reb Arthur had us stand in a circle and do the Barchu while looking into the faces of the other people in the circle. We blessed the Lord while looking into the Lord’s face – each others. It was non-traditional certainly, but it was a powerful experience I don’t think I’ll forget.
I don’t think Reb Arthur is the first to notice this. Two thousand years ago lived two rather famous rabbis, Hillel and Shammai. Their rivalry was legendary, only to be shadowed by the rivalry of their students. The classic story of Hillel and Shammai’s differences concerns the prankster who asked first Shammai then Hillel to teach them all of Torah while standing on one foot. Shammai wacked him with a ruler, and Hillel taught him the Golden Rule. Given that context, it is surprising to find this saying in the Perkei Avot:

Shammai used to say: Make your [study of the] Torah [a matter of] established [regularity]; speak little, but do much; and receive all men with a pleasant countenance.[Avot 1:14]

Shammai receives everyone with literally a beautiful shining face, which I often loosely translate as a smile. Note Shammai says all men, not just your fellow. All humans have a divine shine to them, including you. Where is this shine found the most? To understand that, let us look at a case where the shine is seen the least in this week’s portion. One of the sadder characters in this week’s text is of course Leah, who is continually trying to attract Jacob’s attention. Reuben Simeon and Levi are named with the idea that Leah will be loved once she bears children. [Genesis 29:32-34] Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to help. What made Leah loved so little? One answer is that Rachel was just so attractive, her sister couldn’t compete. The other is the one the text gives:

16. And Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. 17. Leah had weak eyes; but Rachel was beautiful and well favored. [Genesis 29]

What exactly is meant by weak eyes is not clear. Rabbinic thought [B.B. 123a, Gen R. 70:16] believes she cried so much believing she would have to marry Esau, her eyelashes fell out. In a more literal exegesis, Leah’s eyes may have not been weak in vision, but in the range of expression. Much of our inner emotions are expressed by the eyes. As a painter, it is why I find eyes so hard to paint; the smallest change in shape gives a different expression. The window to the soul, as the expression goes, is the eyes. When Leah’s eyes didn’t work properly, it was difficult to look at her or pay attention to her.
I thought of this a lot last weekend when I tried a little exercise. In the summer of 2006, I began a self improvement program to turn the shy man I was into a more dynamic, social person. I even took an on-line course, with plenty of exercises to break my old patterns. Some were very unpleasant due to my fear of walking up to a stranger. That resistance translated into taking a lot longer to complete the course, with results far short of the expected outcome. In my frustration, I added one exercise to the curriculum. In the online discussions, I suggested it to people with even bigger shyness issues than me: Say hello to a certain number of people. I started with ten, then twenty five. By the end of the summer I could easily smile, look someone in the eye, say “hello” or “good morning” a hundred times a day.
Since then I haven’t really done that exercise. Recently, I’ve noted in myself a return to much of the isolation of my past. I thought re-doing this exercise would be a good idea. So I set the goal of greeting a hundred people over the weekend, primarily strangers. Depending if I count everyone in my synagogue, I either missed my goal by a handful, or exceeded it. It was once again hard to catch someone’s eye and say “Hello.” But something weird happened too, which didn’t happen last time. On a few occasions, I’d just say hello and a conversation would break out, whether I wanted it or not. In some restaurants, all of a sudden I got preferential treatment. All of the servers were congregating around me like I was some kind of movie star. Thinking about this later, I’ve realized what happened.
Since 2006, this has gone from exercise to habit, and I, I did not know. This exercise, which ended up as rather interesting social experiment, has yielded some very unexpected results. I greet people all the time and open myself up to be receptive to them. Some, I’ll admit are scared and suspicious of me and won’t look me in the eye. But most find a cheerful, open person who greets them in a friendly way and doesn’t mind listening to whatever they want to say. A lot of these people are counter help or customer service people or restaurant servers. Because I do it so often and naturally, people react openly to me.
I saw the opposite yesterday, in the throes of a bad head cold. Both with the lack of energy to keep up a good attitude and my eyes watering, I was not at my best. So with the weak eyes of a rhinovirus or just a busy day, both times it took a long time for the server to come over and take my order. I noticed two things in those interactions at lunch and dinner. One was internal to me. When my existence was not acknowledged, I got angry and started treating the server as an object with a specific function. The same thing happened at dinner. I realized what I was doing and decided I’d try a little flirting. Strangely enough the service improved from that point on.
We read about the divine connection of heaven and earth in Jacobs’s dream, with Angels going up and down the ladder. We each have a divine face, each face a rung on that ladder between heaven and earth. When we acknowledge a face, we acknowledge God, and that person can also acknowledge it in us. This builds up from a small interaction to the attraction of keeping this relationship going. The conversation ascends like the angels heading up the ladder of Jacob’s dream. There can be something special, maybe even holy, in this conversation about the mundane. On the other hand, this connection breaks down and people spiral downward into alienation when we don’t acknowledge them and they don’t acknowledge us. As social creatures we want to connect to others, and have others connect to us. Through fear of the unknown, we often don’t and isolate ourselves. Being so isolated, we no longer pay attention since there is seemingly nothing to pay attention to.
All it needs to start the process is for one person to come up, look into the other’s eye, smile and say “hello!” Both Hillel and Shammai understood this. Both said hello to the stranger. Shammai, when confronted with a silly question, lost his openness. The connection that Hillel made inspired more connection and study. If one is open to connection, one gets connection and one builds connections which reach toward heaven like Jacob’s ladder.
God is not just on the Temple Mount. The gate of heaven is in Target and Wal-Mart too. Not in the merchandise lining the shelves, but in the faces of those around us. Sadly we don’t often think or see that. In the most obscene examples, people are injured or die because of it. In a rush-rush stress of December, indeed all year round, remember to say a friendly “hello” to that counter help and your fellow shoppers. What was once a stressful mundane task may just become a beautiful holy one.