VA-YETZEI (3rd part of triennial cycle)
Bereshit (Genesis) 31:17 - 32:3
Eitz Hayim 181-187; Plaut 210-213; Hertz 114

The third section of Va-Yetzei has all the qualities of a cowboy movie – one of the old fashioned ones with a happy ending.  Our parashah begins with the decision of Jacob and his two wives, guided by God’s explicit direction, to go back to Canaan and his father Isaac.  By this time, Jacob has become wealthy from his operations as a senior shepherd, and he quite logically expects adverse reactions from Laban, his employer and father-in-law for the past 20 years. Therefore, Jacob and his family together with his flocks and herds leave when Laban is several days journey away at sheep sheering, a time that is said to involve a lot of drinking and carousing. The stage is set for a confrontation – not gunfighter against gunfighter but trickster against trickster

Jacob and his family have a head start, but they are travelling on camels and with animals.  Laban and the other men in his family have horses and easily overtake Jacob.  Laban’s posse is clearly the stronger, and could damage Jacob’s family.  However, Laban, who seems to have some respect for God (and likely also for other local gods, as we will see below) had received a warning from God not to harm Jacob.  Laban must have reasoned that this warning does not preclude him from getting back some of the sheep and cattle, possibly also his two daughters who might be sold off a second time.

Fortunately, Laban is no match for Jacob when it comes to debate.  What does ensue when Jacob and Laban come face-to-face is an angry exchange of words. Cleverly, Jacob holds back until Laban had shot all his verbal ammunition, and then, in front of men who must have known who was speaking the truth, he shoots down each of Laban’s arguments. Indeed, Jacob establishes that he has been cheated by Laban, and that he had no alternative but to flee.

But Laban has one more bullet in his gun, and this one he fires accurately.  His  house-hold idols – teraphim – disappeared at the same time as Jacob left Laban’s camp.  Teraphim are a form of idol, most likely small carved objects roughly in the shape of a human being.  They are presumed to create some link between their owner and nearby gods, which makes them useful for divination and possibly prediction. Their loss is serious, and to charge someone with their theft is sufficient for Jacob, in yet another of his poorly thought out but dramatic reactions, to say that whoever is found with them will be put to death.  To indicate his confidence that no one in his camp is the thief, he then invites Laban to search his tents.  In this case, Jacob really is innocent of Laban’s charge, for the text says clearly that he did not know of Rachel’s theft (31:32).

We readers of this text have to gasp at this point, for we know from the text just a few verses earlier that Rachel does have  those teraphim with her.  Back in verse 31:19 we read that, while Laban was off at that sheep sheering,  “. . . Rachel stole  her father’s household idols.”  It seemed like an insignificant prank at the time, but now it has life-threatening consequences.  Worse yet, Rachel and Jacob are a true love match, one of the few in Abraham’s family line.  Is our cowboy story about to have a sad ending?
No, not at all.  The author of the text is a great story teller, and he or she knows how to create suspense, prolong it, and then resolve the dilemma.  As we know from reading further in the text, Laban sets out to search all the people and their tents.  Logically, he searches Jacob’s tent first, and, presumably to prolong our suspense, all other tents are searched before that of Rachel without finding any of the missing teraphim.  When Laban comes into Rachel’s tent, she plays the dutiful daughter role that she has played before, and says apologetically that she cannot rise to bow before him because “the manner of women is upon” her (31:35)--that is, she is menstruating and quite obviously sitting on the camel saddle.  What Laban does not know is that Rachel had hidden the teraphim in the camel saddle, which uses a lot of padding to make it comfortable.  Now, back then (and even for some people today), menstrual fluids were thought to contaminate anyone who touches them, or anything that has been touched by them.  Clearly this exempts Rachel from a body search, and no one, at least no man, is going to muck around in the cloths that soften her camel saddle.

We have reached a draw in the confrontation.  The issue of the teraphim is unresolved, and Laban recognizes that he is not going to gain much from further argument with Jacob.  Therefore, playing his last but futile card, Laban restates his claim to everything from sheep to daughters, but settles for a non-aggression pact with Jacob.  They share a meal, Laban kisses his daughters good-by (32:1), and Laban returns to his home.  To close this nearly perfect cowboy story, we may not have the typical sunrise landscape on the screen, but we do have angels appearing to Jacob (32:2), which is about as good as it gets.  Of course, Jacob must still confront his brother Esau, but that can be left to the next Parashah.  For now, we have had an exciting story with the good guys winning!

Not so fast: We readers of this text a couple of millennia after it was written are not going to be satisfied just because it ended peacefully.  As so often in Torah, there are questions that remain unanswered and it is on them that I will focus the rest of my dvar:

•	Did Rachel really steal the teraphim, or were they perhaps given to her?
•	Why did she take them at that seminal point in her life?
•	Did she completely escape Jacob’s vow for death to the thief?

Let’s start with the only question that can be answered definitively: Did Rachel really steal the teraphim?  Yes, she did.  The root of the verb used both times the theft is mentioned is בנג — gimel, nun, vav – which in both ancient and modern Hebrew means to steal.

Why did she steal the teraphim?  Here there is no end of answers.  Taking notes from the Soncino chumash: Rashbam says that it was to prevent Laban from using them to divine where Jacob was heading.  Rashi says that it was to prevent Laban from idolatry.  Ibn Ezra says that some teraphim could speak and they would tell all that they had overheard while Laban was away.  In contrast to some commentators, I do not believe that Rachel took them for herself.  Jacob had no doubt made it clear that, regardless of what Laban might do, he would tolerate no idols in his monotheistic home.
I suggest that the first explanation is sufficient: Rachel took the teraphim because she feared that they did have some power and that Laban could use them to divine the direction of their flight from his home. A second rationale stems from the belief that teraphim were highly local gods, and may have indicated ownership of the land where they were created, and thus protection from anyone who tried to take the land away.  By taking the teraphim with her, Rachel may have been trying to demonstrate her husband’s right to some of Laban’s possessions.  

Finally, was Rachel exempt from Jacob’s vow of death to anyone in his camp who was found to have the teraphim?  For a time, it appears that she was.  She went on to live with Jacob as his favoured wife.  Though she was barren for much of that time, she finally gave birth to Joseph, but then died giving birth to Benjamin.  It is a stretch but many commentators see her premature death as the fulfilment of Jacob’s vow.

The authors of Eitz Hayim	do not seem to be very interested in Rachel’s theft of her father’s teraphim.  In contrast, R. Plaut devotes a whole page to it in his chumash.  He emphasizes that teraphim, which for centuries had found a place along the fringes of Jewish monotheism, were not entirely expelled until the first century BCE.  Most importantly, we know that Rachel can be charming but determined in getting what she wants.  Perhaps we should see her as the first truly independent woman in Torah.

However, perhaps because the authors of the Torah (or Rabbi Plaut) were not entirely comfortable with such an independent woman, or perhaps because they were influenced by Greek dramatic irony, Rabbi Plaut writes (Chumash, 214) writes:

For while theTorah passes no explicit judgment on Rachel’s behavior, its tragic consequences will all too soon become evident.  . . . Jacob’s oath . . . is exacted–not by Laban, as expected, but by God himself. Rachel dies in her next childbirth and is buried by the roadside.  She is the only Matriarch not interred in Machpelah, the grave site of the other Matriarchs and Patriarchs.  She died at a young age because she had been disloyal  to her father, which to the ancients was a cardinal sin.

My view is different.  Yes, she was disloyal to her father, but, when a choice had to be made, she was loyal to her husband – metaphorically loyal to the future rather than the past.  Perhaps that is the more relevant lesson for us today.

Shabbat shalom!