Rabbi Yosi ben Halafta was once asked what God has been doing since the time of Creation.
His answer: "Making ladders for people to ascend and descend."
Midrash, Leviticus Rabbah 8:1
The Patriarch Jacob falls asleep, and he dreams of a ladder. This ladder is so tall, so enormous that its top reaches into heaven. Upon the ladder are angels, says the text, "ascending and descending".
What is this stairway to heaven? And who are those creatures upon it? Generations of readers have wondered about the meaning of this powerful, beautiful dream. Some scholars suggest that Jacob wasn’t dreaming at all, but rather having a blockquoteine vision, seeing God’s chaperones who will accompany him throughout his travels. Others teach it is a prophecy – the angels are symbolic of the nations who would, throughout history, persecute the Israelite people – each one has its rise but each one is also destined to fall. Still other Sages suggest that the dream is about God’s intimate role in our lives. In the words of the commentator Ibn Ezra: "It teaches that nothing is hidden from God and that what happens below is contingent on a decree from Above. There is a ladder, as it were, linking heaven and earth…"
The language of this text points us up to heaven (the ladder reaching shamaim; God’s pronouncement and promise to Jacob). But it also sends us scrambling back to earth (emphasis on "place"; rocks; land). Like Jacob, we spend so much of our life with our heads gazing high upward – pleading with God for intervention or staring up into the sky, looking for answers. But we also spend much time focused on the ground – noticing the dirt, eyeing the skid marks, myopically looking no farther than our own feet.
But parashat Vayetze has a message for us: don’t gaze all the way up, but don’t drop those eyes to the ground. Feel the earth beneath your feet, and trust in the sky above, but stay focused on what’s in between. Because what is at eye level for Jacob is also there for us.
Looking straight ahead, he comes eyeball to eyeball with angels.
And so do we. On Friday evenings tradition has us sing: Shalom aleichem, malachei ha-sharet – "Welcome to you – ministering messengers, messengers of the Almighty" – welcome, angels. But in those moments of song, whom are we greeting? Who are the messengers of the Almighty? Midrashic tradition tells us that each one of us is accompanied around by an angel on Friday nights. A crowd of celestial beings – are those who we greet?
Yes – but they are angels of flesh and blood. After the dream, Jacob awakes and declares, "God was here! In this place…and I had not known it". And at the very end of the parsha – after years of stress, passion, arguing, deceit, love, jealousy and fear (and all the other emotions that arise every day in every family) – Jacob understands it again. At the end of the parsha, Jacob is again visited by angels, and when he sees them, he cries out, "This is God’s camp!"
The challenge is not in "looking up" and seeing God. Nor is it difficult to look down and see the earth. The hard work is in standing in place – looking into the eyes of others, those closest around you, perhaps even the ones sitting right next to you at the dinner table – and realizing: these are the angels. These are the messengers of the blockquoteine. Often, the messengers are the most difficult ones, the ones who make it hardest to hear the message. But those are our malachim—our holy visitors – our holy challengers.
In the words of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner:
The angels did not reside in heaven at all. They lived on earth. They were ordinary human beings. And, like ordinary human beings, they shuttled back and forth between heaven and earth. The trick is to remember, after you descend, what you understood when you were high on the ladder.
(God Was in this Place and I, I did not know)