January/February
Rabbi Steph Breitsman
Last month, we read Parshat Vayishlach. On his way home after twenty years of building a life in exile, Jacob is confronted by his past. His brother, Esau – the brother he tricked into giving up his birthright – is coming to meet him with 400 men. Jacob is afraid. He spends the night on a riverbank, not yet ready to cross. During the night, he encounters an ish, a mysterious figure or an angel, and they wrestle until dawn. By morning, Jacob is changed. He leaves with both a limp and a new name: Yisra’el, “the God-wrestler.”
Rashi teaches that some names, like the names of angels, symbolize the divine task that one is assigned in life. All of Jacob’s names evoke wrestling. Ya’akov comes from akev, “heel” – he was named for holding onto his brother’s heel as they were born. Wrestling is his first act in this world, but now his wrestling takes on a new quality. He has become not just any wrestler, but the God-wrestler, one who wrestles with the divine, or perhaps, one whose wrestling has divine purpose.
Jacob’s wrestling at the river brings him home. It opens the door to reconciliation with his brother. It becomes the foundation for the next generation’s story. We inherit Jacob’s name: B’nei Yisrael, the children of the God-wrestlers. We also inherit his task, to wrestle with purpose, to let our struggles become pathways to understanding, healing, and transformation.
Wrestling is part of being in community. We can’t avoid conflict, but we do get to choose how we struggle – with fear or with purpose; with reactivity or with curiosity; with defensiveness, or with the desire to grow.
As we step into a new secular year, this story meets us at just the right moment. Like Jacob, many of us are standing on a kind of riverbank, looking back at what we’ve carried this year, and forward toward what might come next.
What are we wrestling with as we cross into this new year? What fears, questions, or unresolved things rise up when we find ourselves alone for a moment in the dark? And how might we wrestle not just to survive, but to grow – even if we emerge, like Jacob, a little limping and a little blessed?
As a community called Yisrael, we are invited to see even our disagreements, our questions, and our struggles as sacred opportunities. Not easy ones. But meaningful ones. May our wrestling, this year, be grounded in compassion, curiosity, and purpose — and may it open us, little by little, toward blessing.