Parshat Vayishlah

In this week’s parashah, Vayishlah, Yaakov receives his new identity as Yisrael, the one who struggles with God. Yaakov’s willingness to wrestle with the divine, to keep God in this world and not allow God to withdraw to heaven, defines him as the father of the Jewish people. As heirs to Yisrael, we do the same thing each time we perform a mitzvah, a sacred deed. We wrestle God to earth. We make the transcendent, the ultimate mystery, a tangible presence in our world.

On Shabbat, we come to shul to seek peace, to escape the struggles that preoccupy us during the rest of the week. But the peace that we seek is not a static, lazy peace. It is a peace that makes it possible for us to engage in a different kind of struggle. the struggle to grow, to search, to seize the divine.

May the quiet of Shabbat enable us, like Yisrael our ancestor, to bring heaven down to earth.