Parshah Commentary

Readers of this week’s Torah portion, Vayetzei, will be forgiven if they experience some déjà vu. Just two weeks ago, we read about a man arriving at a well from far away, encountering a young woman, and a betrothal that ensued. Now, a generation later, the scene plays out again, with some variations: Rebecca’s son, Jacob, returns to his mother’s land, following instructions from his father at the end of last week’s portion to seek a bride “from among the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother.” Jacob, encountering some shepherds at the well, inquires about his relative, and is told that Laban’s daughter Rachel is on her way with her sheep. When she arrives, Jacob effortlessly rolls the large stone from the mouth of the well and waters her flock. Then, the Torah tells us, “Jacob kissed Rachel, and he raised his voice and wept.”

Many commentaries take pains to emphasize that this was a chaste kiss, not on Rachel’s lips but elsewhere—perhaps on her forehead or shoulder. It was a cousinly kiss, not an erotic one. Some interpreters add that the nature of the kiss explains why Jacob cried: either because he heard the shepherds’ whispered accusations of lewdness and their aspersions pained him, or because his kiss was an expression of emotion upon meeting a relative in this faraway place. The Zohar, by contrast, explains that Jacob shed tears because his love for Rachel—who would eventually become his wife—was so deep that it hurt: “His spirit so adhered to her that his heart could not bear it, and he wept.” The Zohar, moreover, compares Jacob’s kiss to the kiss requested by the lover at the outset of the Song of Songs: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” Wine, the Zohar emphasizes, is associated with joy. But the kiss of true love is “better than wine,” and thus linked to something beyond ordinary happiness: It is bound up with the breath of life itself, whose profundity finds full expression not in words but in tears.

In the Zohar, biblical characters function both as figures in their own right and as avatars for facets of God’s refracted revelation within the cosmos. Jacob, Kabbalistic texts teach us, is associated with divine compassion, while Rachel is associated with the Shekhinah, the immanent presence of God that descends into the material world. Thus, the verse about Jacob kissing Rachel becomes an account of God’s compassionate love for the facet of the deity’s own being that descends into earthly reality, thereby becoming alienated even from its own self. Jacob’s kiss, then, represents a divine reunion, in which God’s love for the Shekhinah manifests in the place of alienation.

The Hasidic masters teach that each of us are minute embodiments of the alienated Shekhinah. Each of us experiences our own share of cosmic alienation and suffering. Each of us, likewise, has the capacity to open up our own emotions and tap into the experience of God’s infinite love and compassion, encompassing not only our own personal suffering but the cosmic suffering of the Shekhinah.

In this sense, we can share in God’s tears. But as Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812)—the Hasidic master who founded Chabad—teaches, we can also move from acute compassion to a reunion with God that is enacted practically, through thought, speech, and action, rather than only on an emotional or spiritual level. Participation in the mystical kiss of Jacob and Rachel, in “the adherence of spirit to spirit,” Rabbi Shneur Zalman explains, is synonymous with “the adherence of one’s speech to God’s speech, which is halacha, and likewise the adherence of one’s thoughts to God’s thoughts.” He adds that each person can also participate in a bodily “embrace of God” through binding “one’s actions to God’s actions, which is the performance of the mitzvot, especially acts of justice and kindness.” Spirited feelings, in other words, must be channeled into the kinds of embodied practices that reunite this fallen world with the singular radiance of God.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.