Parshas Vayishlach, Yud Tes Kislev, & Chanukah: Where We Live and Why We Travel

As Rabbi Ben and I travel, we meet many new people, everywhere we go.  For most people, meeting someone new is a novel thing.  You move around in the same circles, see more or less the same people day in and day out.  When you meet someone new, it’s interesting, maybe even exciting.  But for us, it happens all the time because we are always the ones moving.

Now, when you meet a new person, the first thing you do is to get to know them.  How do you do this? By asking questions, of course! And people ask Rabbi Ben and I a lot of questions, which is great. But there is some questions we really dislike, like “What kind of job do you do?” or the very worst one, “Where do you live?”

It’s frustrating because we don’t really live anywhere.  In our entire marriage, we have never stayed anywhere for more than a month.  We are just always on the move.  “No fixed address.”

So it’s interesting when we read this week’s parsha and Yaakov approaches his brother Esav for the first time in over 28 years.  Yaakov then tells Esav where he’s been for such a long time, saying, “I lived with Laban.” (“Im Laban garti.”) Laban was a wicked fellow and so we’d expect Yaakov to say something different, perhaps that he sojourned there.  This leads us to ask, why does Yaakov choose to say he lived (garti) with Laban?

Rashi answers this somewhat by pointing out that “garti” (“lived”) has the same letters as “tar yag,” the Hebrew abbreviation for 613.  What Rashi seems to be saying is that Yaakov wanted to make sure Esav understood that although he lived with Laban (who was wicked), he still kept the 613 mitzvot.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggested another interesting association with the word “garti” – that it is related to the word “ger,” or “foreigner.” (Remember that the original Torah doesn’t include any vowel letters!)  The Rebbe then asks, “How does this relate to Rashi’s explanation of the reason for the word garti?

Simply put, in order to keep the 613 mitzvot while living with Laban, Yaakov had to make himself a foreigner in Laban’s home.  Laban was too wicked for Yaakov to truly immerse himself in the lifestyle there and still keep the mitzvot.  So Yaakov made boundaries for himself.  He made the physical things and wealth foreign to him and focused instead on the spiritual.  He and his family would live in a nice, protected home, but he would put all of his physical belongings and wealth into a rickety makeshift tent outside, something that barely protected it.  The physical just wasn’t important to him.

This is the lesson we have to take with us as we go through our lives and as we travel.  We live in each place we visit, but everywhere we go, we must strive to keep the 613 mitzvot.  In order to do this, we have to put the physical and superficial to the side, ignore it, and focus on the spiritual.

This week will be the Chabad holiday of Yud Tes Kislev, which is followed by Chanukkah.  How fitting that we should be celebrating these two holidays after just learning this lesson from the weekly parsha.  After all, Yud Tes Kislev celebrates the birth of chassidus in the world, as the Maggid of Mezrich told the Baal Shem Tov that moshiach will come when his teachings are disseminated throughout the world, and on Yud Tes Kislev the Alter Rebbe, whose Tanya made these teachings accessible to all Jews (educated or not) was released from prison, free to spread chassidus throughout the world.  Similarly, Chanukah celebrates freedom to be Jewish.  And as we learn from the concept of gelt (coins or money) given on Chanukah, we are free now to spend our money on spiritual pursuits.  Unlike being under Greek rule, when we were free to own plenty of physical possessions, but were not free to spend them on spiritual pursuits, now we are free to follow in Yaakov’s footsteps.

So as we travel, a much pleasanter question to be asked by people we meet is, “Why are you traveling?”  Well, we’re traveling for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is simply that there are a lot of sparks of holiness out there in the world and we are out collecting them. How? By keeping the mitzvot and observing the Torah, everywhere we go.  And how do we do that? By distancing ourselves from the physical temptations of the world around us and focusing on the spiritual.  It is something every one of us can work on every single day.

Shabbat Shalom!