Parshat Vayeitzei
What is the meaning of the ladder in Jacob’s dream? The chasidic sage Simchah Bunim teaches that in spiritual pursuits we have to go step by step. We cannot leap past a step. The work is slow and gradual with each step of our personal development following ineluctably from the previous step.
He adds that simchah-joy is a requirement for the ascent. Joy? Jacob is heading into years of suffering. He will be tricked into working for twenty years for his deceptive uncle, he is deceived into marrying a woman he does not love. His two wives are jealous of one another, and one will suffer childlessness for years. And to top it off - in the coming week he will confront a brother who he thinks wants to kill him. What kind of happiness is this?
What do we do when we see the world around us broken into little pieces? What do we do with the hurt and suffering? What is Simchah Bunim pointing towards with this?
As we survey the wreckage around us. Not only our personal hurt, but the hurt that we have caused to other, of a world broken and twisted, we are sometimes offered a ladder. We can’t skip a step, as Simchah Bunim points out, of our ascent. The pain might be that critical next step. Our own mistakes are not incidental to the ascent, then, they are part of it. The world’s pain is not in the way - it is on the way.
And this understanding reminds us that there is a ladder to climb, and that we can choose to ascend if we wish. Maybe this is what Simchah Bunim alludes to in his teaching this week.
