Parshah Commentary

A conquering king demolishes ancient Israel’s shrine. Not even the dead are safe from the enemy, who ransacks nearby sepulchres, burning both ancestors’ bones and attending priests on the altar, in the act of ultimate defilement. Although the story may sound familiar, I am not speaking of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but the Judean King Josiah’s vandalism of Beit-El, the preeminent worship site of the neighboring Northern Kingdom of Israel. The sacking of Beit-El was merely one prong of Josiah’s iconoclastic purge: abolishing local altars throughout Judea and Israel, incinerating and pulverizing cultic images, extirpating divination and necromancy. The narrator of 2 Kings celebrates this destruction, concluding, in words that echo Devarim’s praise of Moses, “There was no king like him before who turned back to God with all his heart and soul and might, in full accord with the Teaching of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.” Thus, when the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar razes the Jerusalem Temple only two chapters later, the story of the destruction is uncannily familiar; the reader can hardly maintain the narrator’s opposition between Josiah’s religious regime change and Nebuchadnezzar’s imperialist desecration, which becomes religious Judaism’s primal trauma. (Indeed, technically the Temple’s dismantling begins with Josiah himself, who tears down chambers that had housed queer, deviant practices.) The final chapters of 2 Kings, when read in sequence—which they rarely are by religious Jews—portray successive waves of violent centralization; the crackdown on unauthorized altars boomerangs on the Temple itself, as first an ambitious local monarch and then the emperor himself suppress rival ritual practices. Despoiling cult sites, it seems, starts at home.

Signs of these later ruinations can be detected in Beit-El’s initial sanctification, with which Parshat Vayetzei begins. Jacob, on the lam from his vengeful brother Esau, is headed for Haran, far north of Canaan, the promised land. While Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, and father, Isaac, left Canaan only for brief business trips, Jacob is driven abroad by the threat of violence, and has no idea how long he will be gone or whether he will return; his departure thus anticipates the open-ended, long-term exile of later Israelites. When Jacob, during his journey, dreams of a stairway on which “messengers of God were going up and down,” Rashi reads the image as a kind of cosmic passport control, where the angels accompanying him in the Land go off shift and are replaced by diasporic counterparts. Jacob’s vision occurs when he “came upon a place” a strikingly simple expression that forgoes the familiar toponyms of the Land in favor of the abstract geography of a common noun; to witness the vertiginous migrations of divinity, one must be oneself displaced, a wanderer with a stone for a pillow. No one is more surprised by the nameless place’s mystical properties than Jacob, who exclaims upon waking, “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it . . . How awesome is this place! This is none other than the House of God [Beit Elohim], and that is the gateway to heaven.” Jacob names the site (if “God’s House” counts as a name) and consecrates the stone on which he slept as a cultic monument. Thus is born Beit-El: refugee’s shrine, gateway to exile, stepping stone to infinity.

Beit-El’s indefiniteness means that, like Godzilla growing through the absorption of destructive nuclear radiation, the site paradoxically feeds on its own attempted erasure. The Rabbis, who inherit 2 Kings’ image of an idolatrous, decadent Beth-El and Josiah’s cultic centralization, sideline the former site from its own etiology story, improbably transforming it into a story about Jerusalem, Beit-El’s southern competitor in 2 Kings. They notice (with implicit consternation) that on his route to Beit-El, Jacob must have passed through what would become the site of the Temple and did not stop there. To solve this omission, Rashi insists that Jacob’s vision occurred at the site of the future holy city, glossing Jacob’s description of the place as “Beit Elohim” (House of God) as referring to the Temple, which Rashi imagines as the midpoint of a celestial freeway en route to Beit-El. Yet in his reading, Rashi ironically reinforces Breishit’s motifs of disorientation. Indeed, he even imagines that Mount Moriah was “uprooted” and temporarily relocated to Beit-El; to be centered, the future site of the Temple must itself be displaced. Similarly, commenting on Jacob’s arrival in the “place” mentioned in our parshah, Rashi explains, “The text does not mention which place, but by writing ‘the place,’ it refers to the place mentioned already in another place—Mount Moriah, of which it is stated: ‘And [Abraham] saw the place from afar.’” Topography is levelled into literary topos, the placeless abstraction of language, through which all places are seen as if from afar.

A melancholy power, to haunt would-be obliterators with one’s absence, like the spectral anomalies of a censored photograph. But of course, such is the fate of the Temple itself, which, a midrash in Breishit Rabbah explains, Jacob saw at Beit-El, “built, and destroyed, and built”—here less an orderly historical sequence than a strobe light’s flashing oscillation, like a burning bush reduced to ash and regrown in each moment. In fact, our parshah bequeaths us just such a bizarrely contranymic symbol. On the night of Tisha B’av, the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, there is a custom to sleep on a stone. The Tisha B’av stone is, as the social geographer Dolores Hayden remarks of socially contested place generally, “a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid.” It inflicts discomfort, yes, but it also nods to Jacob’s similar behavior at Beit-El and consequent vision, which, as the medieval scholar Mordechai ben Hillel HaKohen, the earliest source I know for the practice, notes, included “the destruction.” Jacob, however, saw far more than that, and one wonders if this dreaming-stone invites the pious mourner to parallel epiphanies, to the revelations of exile. Perhaps, like its original in Breishit, the stone can become a new altar, reinstantiating the ancient, ad hoc erection of cult sites that preceded Josiah’s “reform.” Or perhaps Josiah’s iconoclastic glee fuses with the traditional lamentations for the Temple, merging into a sharp ambivalence toward sacred place, the loss of which, one might feel, cleanses the doors of perception, as the myth of ancient ruins haunts and enchants every pebble in the world.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.