The Jewish Journey. Why is Jacob the father of our people, the hero of our faith? We are the

congregation of Jacob, the children of Israel. Yet it was Abraham who began the Jewish journey

and Isaac who was willing to be sacrificed. It was Joseph who saved his family in the years of famine, Moses who led

the people out of Egypt and gave it its laws. It was Joshua who took the people into

the promised land, David became its greatest king, Solomon who built the temple, and the

prophets through the ages who became the voice of God. The account of Jacob in the terror seems to fall

short of these other lives. At least if we read the text literally, he had tense relationships

with his brother, Issa, his wife, his wives, Rachel and Leah, his father-in-law Laban,

and with his three eldest children, Ruvan, Schumann and Levy.

There are times when he seemed full of fear, others when he acted or at least seemed to act with

less than total honesty. In reply to Pharaoh, he says of himself, the days of my life have been

few and hard. This is less than we might expect from a hero of faith.

That's why so much of the image we have of Jacob is filtered through the lens of midrush,

the oral tradition preserved by the sages. In this tradition, Jacob is all good, evil, all bad.

It had to be this way, so argued Rabbi Tzvi

Herschaias in his essay on the nature of midrashic interpretation, because otherwise we'd find

it hard to draw from the biblical text a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad.

The Torah is an exceptionally subtle book, and subtle books tend to be misunderstood.

So the oral tradition made it simpler, black and white, instead of shades of grey. Yet perhaps

even without Midrash, we can find an answer, and the best way of so doing is to think

of the idea of a journey.

Judaism is about faith as a journey.

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