This week’s Torah reading, Vayishlach, found in Genesis 32:4 – 36:43, includes the well known story of Jacob wrestling with….what the Torah call “a man”, many classical commentaries label an angel, and what others have suggested may have been God or even Jacob himself. Whoever it was and all four possibilities have something to recommend them, what is clear is that Jacob emerges both victorious and wounded.
In a culture which seems to either celebrate winning or woundedness, but rarely holds on to both simultaneously; this story is at least as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago. What does it mean to be a wounded victor? What does it mean to unapologetically celebrate a real victory while still maintaining the awareness of the cost of achieving it? What does it mean to carry a wound without allowing it to become the centerpiece of one’s identity? What does it mean to live with a measure of brokenness and experience that bit of brokenness as a part of what makes us whole?
Without celebrating the bad things which happen to us, or pretending that in most cases we would rather not be wounded, no matter how great the accompanying lessons, there is something to be said for learning from, and trying to find some measure of meaning in, whatever happens to us. That is where a teaching of Rebbe Nachman may help us to better understand both Jacob and ourselves.
Rebbe Nachman teaches that there is nothing as whole as a broken heart. Powerful words. They come perilously close however, to celebrating brokenness in ways that make me a little uncomfortable, which is why I deeply appreciate the words of my teacher Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, who translates the teaching as there being nothing as whole as a broken open heart. It’s the not brokenness which we celebrate, but the openness which can come with each new level of awareness brought about through living out our lives, including the more painful and complex parts.
Perhaps we can extend this perspective about the heart to all of life, saying that there is no life, no faith, and no journey as whole as the one which is broken open. Jacob walks more firmly and more securely after he is wounded than he does before. His life and his body are broken open, and as a result he is more whole. At the end of a particularly difficult week, I pray that it may be so for all of us.