The year was 2171 (1589 B.C.E.), and the 63-year-old Jacob was fleeing from his parents’ house, his childhood home, everything that was comfortable and familiar, to escape his twin brother Esau’s murderous wrath. He planned to be away for no more than a matter of days: he took with him no more than the clothes he stood up in and a wooden staff.
Little could he yet know that he would never see his mother again, that he would only return from his exile after 36 years, that ahead of him lay fourteen years of study in the Academy of Shem and Ever (Megillah 17a, Genesis Rabbah 68:5) followed by 22 years of labour and exploitation at the hands of his devious and mendacious uncle Lavan, and that he would eventually return as a wealthy patriarch with two wives, two concubines, twelve sons and a daughter, hundreds of goats, sheep and camels, and servants and maidservants.
But as our Torah reading opens, Jacob was a destitute fugitive, looking for a place to rest his head for the night while on his lonely journey to Paddan Aram. On his way northwards from Beer Sheva, “he encountered the place” (Genesis 28:11), meaning the Place, the Place on which the Holy Temple would one day stand (Rashi, based on Hullin 91b).
The Talmud picks up on a seeming discrepancy in the text here: as Jacob lay down to sleep for the night, “he took from the stones [plural] of the place, and put them around his head” (Genesis 28:11). After dreaming his famous dream of the ladder linking earth with heaven and G-d’s promise to protect him, he “awoke from his sleep…and he took the stone [singular] which he had put around his head” (vs. 16-17).
So did he use several stones or one single stone as his pillow? – “This teaches that all those stones were gathered into a single place, every single one saying: Let this Tzaddik [righteous man] rest his head upon me! As a Tanna taught, all the stones thereupon were merged into one” (Hullin 91b).
“Jacob had taken twelve stones from the stones of the altar upon which Isaac his father had been bound, and he put them around his head in the same place, to symbolise that twelve tribes were destined to arise from him. And they all became one single stone, to symbolise that all were destined to become ‘a single nation in the Land’ (1 Chronicles 17:21)” (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 35; compare Genesis Rabbah 68:11).
The Targum Yonatan has a different view, and renders Genesis 28:11: “He took four of the stones of the holy place, and put them around his head”. The Midrash explains: “He said: Abraham married two wives, and begat two sons – one righteous and one evil. My father Isaac begat both a righteous son and an evil son from one wife. If I will marry four wives, how many sons will I beget?
"He took four stones, saying: If they unify with each other, then I am assured that my marital life will be perfect” (Yalkut Shimoni, Job 899). That is to say, according to this Midrash, the unification of the four stones indicated the unity of Jacobs four wives (or more precisely, his two wives and two concubines) – Leah, Zilpah, Rachel, and Bilhah, the women who gave birth to the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
In any event, the unification of the stones under Jacob’s head represented the destined unification of his future family. When he awoke and saw that the stones had become united into one, “he erected it as a pillar and he poured oil on its head” (Genesis 28:18).
The word Tzaddik means a righteous person. The same word, tzaddik (or tzaddi) is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and in most printed editions of the Torah there is a Masoretic note, calling our attention to the peculiarity that the word “va-yitzok” (“he poured”) is spelled here without a dagesh [dot placed in letters, according to grammatic rules, and emphasizing a letter's sound] in the letter tzaddik.
It seems to me that the Torah gives an ever-so-subtle hint about Jewish unity here. The letter “tzaddik” here is missing the dagesh, and the mirror image, so to speak, is that there are two places in the Torah where the “tzaddik” has a dagesh even though there is no grammatical reason for it.
Both occur in the phrase, “Kumu tze’u” (“Arise, get out”). The first time is when Lot in Sodom warned his two sons-in-law: “Arise, get out of this place, because HaShem is destroying the city” (Genesis 19:14). The second time is when Pharaoh, devastated by the final Plague, the Slaying of the First-born, called to Moshe and Aaron that night, with the words “Arise, get out from among my nation” (Exodus 12:31).
The Ba’al ha-Turim (Rabbi Ya’akov ben Asher, Germany and Spain, c.1275-1343) notes that these are the only two places in the entire Tanakh where the phrase “Kumu tze’u” (“Arise, get out”) appears: “This teaches that Israel were divided into factions, and those who did not want to leave [Egypt] died in the three days of the Plague of Darkness” (Commentary to Genesis 19:14).
Just as Lot’s sons-in-law died in Sodom because they did not want to leave the doomed city, so too those Jews died in Egypt because they did not want to leave the doomed country.
And having seen how the missing dagesh in the “tzaddik” of “va-yitzok” (“he poured”) in Genesis 28:18 is balanced by the seemingly extraneous dagesh in the “tzaddik” in Genesis 19:14 and Exodus 12:31, we can discover a far more profound moral: Lot’s sons-in-law decided not to unify with Lot, the one tzaddik in Sodom – and therefore they were killed together with all the other evil people there. Those Jews who decided not to unify with their nation in Egypt and leave, were likewise killed together with all the other evil people there.
In the words of the Malbim (Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michael Weiser 1809-1879), commenting on Genesis 28:18: “‘he took the stone’ which symbolised the unity of Israel, which was why ‘he erected it as a pillar and he poured oil on its head’, symbolising that because of the unity that would be between them, He would pour over them the precious oil which flows down on the head – the holy Oil of Anointing which has influence in the Highest”.
Similarly, the Recanati (Menachem ben Binyamin Recanati, Italy, 1250-1310), with his typically Kabbalistic approach, says: “The meaning of ‘he poured oil on its head’ is that he poured on it literally ‘the precious oil on the head which flows down on the beard – Aaron’s beard, which flows down over the hem of his robes’ . It is ‘like the dew of the Hermon, which flows down on the mountains of Zion – for there, HaShem has commanded the blessing of life everlasting’ [ibid. v.3]. So understand the mystical secret of the mountains of Zion: that is where the precious oil, which is life everlasting, is”.
Those Jews who decided not to unify with their nation in Egypt and leave, were likewise killed together with all the other evil people there.
Both these commentators – Malbim and Recanati – identify the oil which Jacob poured over the pillar with the precious oil of anointing which King David lyricised in Psalm 133 – the Psalm which begins with the oh-so-famous words, “Hinei ma tov u-ma na’im, shevet achim gam yachad” (“Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity”).
As the stones (whether twelve, representing the twelve Tribes of Israel, or four, representing Jacob’s four wives) became united under the Tzaddik, so Israel as a nation is to be united around its Tzaddikim. This unity around and with Tzaddikim – and the implicit rejection of evil – is what brings G-d’s blessings pouring down on us as the precious anointing oil.
Thirty-six years later, as Jacob was returning home to the Land of Israel, he recalled that “I crossed this Jordan only with my staff” (Genesis 32:11). If this was all he had when he left home, then how did he have oil to pour over the pillar he had erected? – “Jacob set about collecting the stones, and found them to have become one single stone. He erected it as a pillar in the midst of the Place, and oil flowed down for him from Heaven, and that was what he poured upon it” (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer ibid.).
The Jews who remained unified with the nation were the ones who were redeemed from Egypt at the end of the first exile – the exile that began 67 years later when Jacob left Israel for the second time to go down to Egypt (Genesis 45:28-46:7) – and so too in our days.
The final Redemption is approaching swiftly, the final exile is inexorably drawing to its end.
The warning to every Jew to “kumu tze’u” (“arise, get out”) of the exile grows clearer and more ominous day by day. The skies over England, Europe, South Africa, even the USA grow darker and more threatening, and whatever may flow down from the heavens for the Jews there, it will certainly not be precious oil of anointing.
The tocsin rings loud and clear: Gather around the Tzaddik, “kumu tze’u” (“arise, get out”) of the exile. Your father Jacob, your nation Israel, awaits you longingly.