Returning home, Yaakov sends angelic messengers to appease his brother Esav. The messengers return, telling Yaakov that Esav is approaching with an army 400 strong. Yaakov takes the strategic precautions of dividing the camps, praying for assistance, and sending tribute to mollify Esav. Yaakov is left alone that night, wrestles - and defeats - the Angel of Esav, yet emerges with an injured sinew in his thigh, which is why the Torah prohibits eating the sciatic nerve of a kosher animal. The angel tells Yaakov that his future name will be Yisrael, signifying that he has prevailed against man (Lavan) and the supernatural (the angel). Yaakov and Esav meet and are reconciled; but still fearful of his brother, Yaakov rejects Esav’s offer to travel together.

Shechem, a Canaanite prince, abducts and violates Yaakov’s daughter Dina. In return for Dina’s hand in marriage, the prince and his father suggest that Yaakov and his family intermarry and enjoy the fruits of Canaanite prosperity. Yaakov’s sons feign agreement, yet they stipulate that all the males of the city must undergo brit milah. Two of Dina’s brothers, Shimon and Levi, enter the town and handily execute all the males, who were weakened by the circumcision. Their action is justified by the city’s tacit complicity in the abduction of their sister. G-d commands Yaakov to go to Beit-El and build an altar. His mother Rivka’s nurse, Devorah, dies and is buried below Beit-El. G-d appears again to Yaakov, blesses him and changes his name to Yisrael. While traveling, Rachel goes into labor and gives birth to Binyamin, the twelfth of the Tribes of Israel. She dies in childbirth and is buried on the road to Beit Lechem. Yaakov builds a monument to her. Yitzchak passes away at age 180 and is buried by his sons. The parsha concludes by listing Esav’s descendants.

PARSHA INSIGHTS

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

“And he said, ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and you have prevailed.’” (Bereishet 32:29)

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, the National Theatre in London,1967: I’d never seen anything as witty, brilliant and funny in my life.

The playwright, Tom Stoppard, has died at age 88. Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation, garlanded with honors. His brain-teasing plays ranged across Shakespeare, science, philosophy and the historic tragedies of the 20th century. Five of his works won Tony Awards for best play.

Stoppard was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlín, then Czechoslovakia. His stage breakthrough, “Rosencrantz…” reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters. It was a mix of tragedy and absurdist humor.

Some critics found Stoppard’s plays more clever than emotionally engaging. But many of his plays contained a “sense of underlying grief.” His biographer Hermione Lee said, “People in his plays… history comes at them… They turn up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know whether they can get home again. They’re often in exile, they can barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully incarcerated. They may have some terrible moral dilemma that they don’t know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And over and over again I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny, witty plays.”

I was thinking, how very Jewish!

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead turns this world into a corridor of entrances and exits — characters stepping into scenes without knowing from where they came or to where they go. We appear suddenly, we depart abruptly, and in between we stumble through meaning, laughter, fear, absurdity. But a Jew understands what the play suggests beneath the humor: what looks like disappearance is transition. What feels like exile is corridor. This world is the backstage, not the stage.

Yaakov crosses the river at Yabok and wrestles with the angel of Eisav till dawn. Yaakov is struck by the angel, yet the angel is forced to crown Yaakov with a new name. The exit from “Yaakov” becomes the entrance into “Yisrael”. The wound becomes covenant. The night becomes the morning.

So, too, our lives. We think we are leaving. In truth, we are entering. Stoppard, son of a people who have crossed more rivers than any nation in history, unwittingly gave expression to that quiet truth: behind endings stand beginnings. Behind loss — birth. Behind this world — the next. Never remotely religious, Stoppard’s unwitting world view was summed up in his immortal line which could have been, l’havdil, a quote from our Sages:

"Every exit is an entrance somewhere else."

May we walk like Yaakov with the courage to cross, with the faith to see doorways where others see walls, and with the knowledge that every exit is only the first step into forever.