First Reading: Missions
“And Jacob sent messengers to Esau.”
SENDING MESSENGERS
We start our meditations on this week’s parashah with the observation that there are three parashot in the Torah whose name stems from the verb “to send” שלח: Vayishlach (וַיִּשְׁלַח), our parashah, Beshalach (בְּשַׁלַּח), in the Book of Exodus, and Shelach (שְׁלַח) in the Book of Numbers. All three of these Torah portions begin with a mission. Though the simple meaning of the verb “to send” is to send away, in the Torah it is most often used in the context of sending someone as an emissary or as a messenger on some kind of mission.
Who is doing the sending in each of these parashot?
In Vayishlach it is Jacob who is sending messengers on a mission to placate his brother Esau. In Beshalach it is Pharaoh who sends the Jewish people out of Egypt. And, in Shelach it is Moses sending spies on a mission to the Land of Israel.
MESSENGERS OF COMPASSION
Now let us begin to interpret these three missions and the spiritual meaning behind them by first understanding why the first mission in the Torah is Jacob’s.
In Kabbalah, Jacob is considered the exemplar of the sefirah of beauty. Beauty (tiferet, in Hebrew) is the source of mercy and compassion in the psyche and, like Jacob himself, is likened to the crossbeam running through the central axis of the sefirot, connecting all the sefirot on the central axis, from crown at the top to kingdom on the bottom. Whenever we wish to awaken our own feelings of mercy, we need to connect vicariously with our patriarch Jacob. Then the spiritual mechanism of mercy begins to function.
EFFECTIVE COMPASSION
To be effective, compassion must go through 3 stages, which correspond to Jacob, Pharaoh, and Moses. First, one’s sefirah of beauty must ascend to (i.e., connect with its source in) the supernal crown to arouse great mercy (a synonym for compassion) from the source of true mercy and true loving-kindness. The supernal crown symbolizes God’s mercy for all His creatures. In the Zohar, Pharaoh is associated with the supernal crown, given that he, like the crown, holds the infinite energy that can be released once the Israelites will be released from Egypt.
Once mercy has been aroused in the supernal crown, one must exercise one’s sefirah of knowledge, one’s consciousness to draw the mercy down until it reaches the sefirah of kingdom. The sefirah of knowledge is most often associated with Moses, who is conscious of the Divine nature of reality. The sages say that it is forbidden to feel mercy for anyone or anything that has no appreciation of the good. Therefore, exercising our own knowledge means awakening that receiver’s knowledge by helping him or her first appreciate the good.
From knowledge, the energy of compassion is ready to descend into the lower realsm of reality, all the way down to the sefirah of kingdom, which descends through the three lower Worlds of Creation, Formation, and Action. Now compassion can be passed on as bountiful abundance to the object of our compassion.
In everyday life, the sefirah of kingdom in our psyche most often appears as the power of expression. Thus, in practice, this third stage corresponds to appointing our messenger with his or her mission.
It follows then that the first mission (as far as the names of the Torah portions goes) in the Torah—Jacob’s sending of emissaries to his brother Esau—is one of compassion and mercy. Following the sages’ dictum that “everything follows the lead of the first time,” this indicates that the motivation behind all the missions in the Torah is compassion and mercy to others. This also bears on us, teaching us to send people only on missions where it is clear to us that our motivation is one of mercy. Sometimes, a person has mixed reasons for sending someone to perform some action on their behalf. In such a case, he should strive to elevate his heart to see things from the perspective of the supernal crown, the source of all compassion and mercy, before appointing a messenger to carry out the mission.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
For all the compassion they contained, all three missions failed. Jacob’s messengers came back to him and reported that, “We came to your brother Esau, and furthermore, he is coming to meet you and four hundred men are with him.”
As a result: “Jacob was tremendously fearful and distressed.” The same is true of Pharaoh sending the Israelites from Egypt; he could not hold back and decided to pursue them and bring them back. The spies sent by Moses did not perform their assigned duty and convinced the Israelites not to enter the land.
What is the moral of these stories then? The sages tell us that normally, “It is more of a mitzvah to do something yourself than to send a messenger on your behalf.” Or, in the colloquial: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
Indeed, we see that in the end Jacob himself placates his brother by bowing down seven times before him. God Himself takes the Israelites out of Egypt by drowning the Egyptians. Moses spends 38 years preparing to take the Israelites into the Land of Canaan himself.
(from Sha’ashu’im Yom Yom on Vayishlach)
