Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
December 10, 2005

I recently was given the opportunity to review a book called “Their Heads in Heaven.” It is a collection of essays written by Rabbi Louis Jacobs over the course of his career on aspects of Hasidism. Hasidism is a movement, a revivalist movement, that was founded by Israel Baal Shem Tov, the Besht, in eighteenth century Podolia (South Eastern Poland) and later spread throughout Europe and beyond with adherents throughout Israel, North America, France, England and many other countries. Hasidut denotes piety or saintliness and is characterized by an extraordinary devotion to the spiritual aspects of Jewish life. Rabbi Jacobs introduces the mission of Hasidut by way of G.K. Chesterton’s famous distinction between the work of a philosopher and that of a poet. “A philosopher,” Chesterton says, “tries to get the heavens into his head, while the poet tries to get his head into the heavens.” The basic aim of Hasidic masters, like that of the poet, is to get their heads into the heavens. Ultimately, the prism of human is inadequate when it comes to the divine mysteries. Hasidic Torah, therefore, rather than seeking to explain the mystical through the prism of reason, seeks to unearth the sublime and secret lore and lessons embedded in Jewish sacred texts and traditions.

This morning I want to take a brief stroll with you through Hasidic Torah on one biblical scene, one narrative, perhaps the most famous, mysterious and enigmatic narratives of the entire bible – the story of Jacobs’ ladder. This morning, let us hear what some Hasidic interpreters have to say and, empowered by those interpreters, I want to conclude by offering my own explanation.

We know the story well, we have known it since our youth, and have seen it painted by the masters, from the medievals to Chagall. Jacob is on the run, having stolen the blessing, and is heading for Haran. As night falls, he gathers the stones and places one beneath his head. He has a dream, a sulam, in which a ladder reaches to the sky and the angels of God ascend and descend it. God stands beside Jacob and states, “I am the Lord, God of your father Abraham and Isaac, the ground on which you are lying will be assigned to your offspring. Your descendents shall be as the dust of the earth. You shall spread out to the west and to the east, the north the south….I am with you and will protect you wherever you go…” Jacob wakes up from his sleep with the famous statement: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!” He calls the place the House of God – Beit El – designating it as the gateway of Heaven. He anoints the rock upon which he slept, vows that if God protects him, he will return to God an offering and continues on his journey eastward.

For many of the Hasidic masters, the ladder came to symbolize the act of prayer itself. R. Elimelech of Lizansk (1717-87) taught that anybody offering prayer must be mindful of the gap between his own unworthiness and God’s tremendous majesty. The ladder is set here on earth, where we dwell, and the top of the latter ascends to God. The prayers of the Tzaddik ascend to heaven and return down to earth. He suggests a very powerful concept that prayer is not unidirectional, only ascending upwards, but a two way street. Proper prayer, like the angels, goes up, is received and descends back to us, following the rabbinic dictum: Words that come from the heart enter the heart.

Rabbi Moshe Teitlebaum offers a lucid interpretation in his work Yismah Moshe, which was published in 1861. According to Teitlebaum, the ladder is not a ladder of prayer but a ladder of knowledge. He explains that there are two levels to the human thought processes: the realm of human knowledge, in which we human beings exist, and the higher stages, which are beyond all comprehension – it is a kabbalistic sphere called the Eyn Sof. The ladder is set up on earth in the sense that human beings can have “some faint apperception of the Divine.” It reminds us that there is always a connection between the two.

Perhaps of all the Hassidic interpretations I have come across, my favorite was that of R. Moshe Hayyim Ephraim, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov and the author of the Degel Mahaney Efrayim, sometimes referred to as the Degel. The Degel picks up on the constant movement of the angels, reminiscent of a verse in Ezekiel (1:14), which refers to angels running to and fro. We, as humans, seek to understand God, but because God is beyond comprehension, our language itself will always prove inadequate. And so a life of faith is the back and forth of seeking to aspire to grasp the Divine dimensions, trying to affirm God’s presence but immediately recoiling from the mental picture we create. It is a constant shuttle back and forth from smallness (katnut) to greatness (gadlut). And it is in this back and forth, from both being close and remote to God, that religious vitality is to be found.

This morning, I want to suggest the following proposal. For a rationalist like me it is slightly edgy, but, given the company of the other interpretations, I think you will find it pretty straightforward-a literary psychological, and perhaps slightly mystical, approach.

Jacob is on the run. From a person described in his youth as a tent dweller, a homebody, he has left his parent’s house, fleeing from the wrath of his brother and perhaps the disillusionment of his father. His journey is to Haran, and the close reader will remember that this is where his grandfather Abraham came from. He is totally without provisions in a desolate countryside. This is the power of being told the mundane detail that he put a rock under his head; after all, you would put a rock under your head when you have nothing else. And maybe-just maybe- in all this desperation and drama, the reader is supposed to reflect on the similar near-death experience of his father Isaac.

But Jacob’s isolation isn’t just geographic, it is generational as well. He has been cast out of the house of his father, a sharp contrast to Abraham’s journey years ago. His estrangement is familial, and he has no idea of when he will see his home again. He is filled with guilt and fear. At the counsel of his mother, he has used trickery to receive a blessing, but instead of the blessing offering him assurance, it only served to sever his ties with his family. And so, with the geographic isolation also comes a generational dislocation. He is also spiritually alienated. He has grown up in a household imbued and infused with a profound sense of God’s presence and promise. Growing up with a grandfather like Abraham and a father like Isaac, your spiritual inheritance is not taken lightly. And here he is on this night, totally alone-not just alone but lonely- in every sense that one can be lonely.

And he goes to sleep, and he has a dream and all of a sudden he isn’t so alone anymore. There are angels busying themselves around him, going up and down a ladder. Now, I am not entirely sure why angels would need a ladder, so either these angels aren’t angels or the ladder must be more than a ladder. Taking the Torah at face value, I opt for the latter view of the ladder. The ladder becomes a symbol, a powerful reassurance of the interconnectedness of heaven and earth, a cosmic axis between the theosphere and the biosphere, up there and down here. It is a signal to Jacob that the link between heaven and earth remains secure. And so it makes sense that it is exactly at this point that Jacob receives God’s assurance that he will be a recipient of the same promise, the same land and the same blessing that his father and grandfather received. Moreover, Jacob is given the promise of future descendants; in fact, there is a comforting irony in the scene that, as he lies there on the ground, Jacob is told that his offspring shall be as numerous as the dust of the earth, that the land upon which he slept is promised to him and his offspring. Finally, Jacob is granted an extraordinary promise from God, that God will not leave him until the Divine promise is fulfilled.

And so it makes perfect sense that Jacob wakes up and declares, “The Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it,” and that he calls the site Beit El the “House of God.” Where there had been only absence before there is now presence. Where there had been a rupture in the generations, there was now a promise of future descendants and where there had been acute spiritual dislocation, there was now profound connectedness. The text tells us that, from this point, Jacob continued on his journey, but the Rabbis pick up on the literalness of the Hebrew expression Vayissah et raglav, meaning, “And he lifted his legs” heading eastwards. Following his nocturnal encounter, there was a buoyancy to Jacob, and, significantly, he became the first Biblical figure to head eastward with confidence. He still has problems, but there is a quiet self-assurance about him. He is still Jacob, still making deals with God, but at least it isn’t over a bowl of soup anymore. He is wandering, but at home, as the Hasidic saying goes: “He who has no place anywhere-has a place everywhere.” It does not surprise me that the next scene also begins with the thematic link of a stone, a big stone over a big well, that Jacob rolls off easily and, as a result, winds up engaging in the supreme act of confidence – falling in love. From the stone under his head to the big stone over the well, we see just how far Jacob has come in a short time.

I don’t have a clear sense in my mind of what precisely happened that night with Jacob. It is a dream, and as such, the fine details are perhaps supposed to remain a bit elusive. In real terms, nothing actually changed: his circumstances were just as dire, and he neither reconciled with his family nor addressed or atoned for his past actions. However, I can tell you this: The essence of Jacob as a person changed that evening. The particulars of his life, his transformation from Jacob to Israel and his reconciliation with Esau, would not happen for another 20 years, yet it was on this night that his spiritual posture and perception changed forever. What had been isolation became comfort, what had been anxiousness and insecurity became quiet confidence and stability.

Ultimately, I think the power of Jacob’s ladder is not so much a single interpretation but the fact that that we can all, on a certain level, identify with the figure of Jacob. There is not one of us who hasn’t spent a night adjusting and readjusting a pillow under our head as if that exercise itself will serve to solve some crisis we face. Each of us in this room has had a “Jacob moment” of isolation and loneliness in our own way. I call it the “couch moment” – that’s when you sit on the couch with a blanket covering you because you are unable to make sense of the world in which you find yourself. It can result from a professional, personal or familial issue that appears to be intractable and beyond solution. A rupture in the family unit, a sickness, a death, or a professional setback that sends us on a journey into a spiritual wilderness. The assurance of the dream is not so much the notion that anything can be solved over the course of an evening – though the psalmist does suggest that a tearful night need not preclude a joyful morning. Rather, the promise of Jacob’s ladder is more basic, the idea that even at these moments of despair, even when we stand estranged from everything dear to us – ourselves included, the potential for holiness is still there. We may go to sleep and wake up alone, but we need not be lonely. No matter how dark the night, we must all allow for the possibility that the light of dawn will come. There is nothing more frightening than staring at a world when you are unable to turn back the clock and have no discernable pathway for the future. And so, we are asked to gently close our eyes and look within, to remember that holiness can and does present itself both around us and within us. Our world is one that always bears the possibility of discovering God’s presence unexpectedly, like a flask of oil tucked away ready to give light. By definition, holiness will always be elusive but it need not be unattainable.

Perhaps most of all, and it is here that I will close, the message of Jacob’s ladder is one of dynamic movement. There is no life lived that isn’t without its ups and downs. A ladder, if nothing else, denotes constant activity, and it follows that if you are standing still on a ladder for too long, odds are that you are doing something wrong. There is no reason to believe that one night, one dream, one Shabbos will heal the profound ruptures in our souls and our world, but we must opt for the dynamic, not the static, we must always look towards the forward momentum of the oncoming dawn. A ladder, and perhaps even a life, is only significant insofar as we use it to go up or to go down. And, you know what, if angels need to pull themselves up and down a ladder, how much more so do we need to do that ourselves.