As I stand here today, in front of all my family and friends, about to give my drash, I'm thinking to myself, wow! This is actually happening. There is so much going on in my life right now, and some of it even relates to my parsha Va' Yetze.

This is a story of siblings, Rachel and Leah, their father Lavan, and Rachel's and Leah's husband, Yaakov. Whew! Fathers, daughters, sisters, husbands. Basically, Yaakov falls madly in love with Rachel and wants to marry her, but Lavan, Rachel's dad, wants Yaakov to marry Leah, Rachel's older sister, first.   Lavan tricks Yaakov into marrying Leah, and Leah, who participates in the trick, ends up deceiving her own sister.

 When Lavan hears from Rachel that Yaakov, who is his nephew, is in town, he runs to greet him, and says:

"You are truly my bone and flesh."

 I find this interesting because Lavan later tricks Yaakov, and who tricks their own bone and flesh? Rashi, one of my favorite commentators, brings up an important fact about this verse. Before Yaakov, Eliezer comes to the same well to find a wife for Isaac, but he brings gold with him. When Lavan sees Eliezer's riches, he is excited. Much later, when Yaakov comes to the well, Lavan thinks he might have wealth too, but he soon finds out that he doesn't.

  Rashi says that when Lavan tells Yaakov  , àê òöîé åáùøé àúä he might be thinking "Even though I'm disappointed that you don't have gold, like Eliezer had, you are my family and so I am going to do the right thing and take you in." A rabbinic midrash has a different theory. This midrash suggests that Lavan is using the verse as a way to compare himself to Yaakov. Yaakov deceived his father, Avraham, and Lavan is going to deceive him. It's almost as if Lavan is telling Yaakov that their relationship is based on how selfish they both are, which is very sad.

These words, àê òöîé åáùøé àúä    also make me think about the different layers of feelings brothers and sisters have for each other. Leah and Rachel are sisters, "bone and flesh," and before them, Yaakov and Aisav, sisters and brothers who deceive one another just like Lavan deceived Yaakov.

Sibling stories really interest me;  how our wonderful, complicated and sometimes annoying relationships with our brothers and sisters put us into conflict with our parents, follow us around, influence the choices we make in our lives, even haunt us, until we figure out a way to make peace with each other and ourselves.

If I look at my own arm, I see just the flesh, or as I like to call it, the outer layer. What I can't see is the bone or inner layer. Sometimes the feelings we show on the outside are false. Siblings often fight, and when people see them fighting, they get the impression that the two (or three) don't really get along, and sometimes they're right, but often it's the exact opposite. In my family, I fight with my brothers, but I also play basketball with Jordan, or watch wrestling or the Real World with him. EB gets on my nerves when my friends are over, but most of the time, we never stop laughing. We play on the computer, run around in the backyard, sing songs from the play "Wicked", or just act totally goofy together!

A lot of times, one of the inner feelings that siblings have is jealousy, and jealousy can lead us to do and think some pretty awful things. In Va-Yetzei, Leah and Rachel let their jealous feelings for each other get the best of them. Leah is jealous of Rachel because Yaakov really loves her and she wants to be loved, too. Rachel then gets jealous of Leah because Leah can have children easily and she can't. They compete with each other in this terrible way for a long time over who will give Yaakov the most children. Rachel even says:

                         "A fateful contest I waged with my sister; yes, and I have won."

I hope I never get to that point with my brothers. To me, it means that even though brothers and sisters fight, they know that the fight has to stop at some point, because they are family, bone and flesh.

And anyway, when I entered the names of Rachel and Yaakov, and Leah and Yaakov, into www.lovecalculator.com, a website that my friends and I get a kick out of, Dr. Love predicted that both couples had the exact same chance of having a successful relationship, 54%.  

 

Shabbat Shalom.