The Birthright, The Blessing
Polish, David
THE BIRTHRIGHT, THE BLESSING DAVID POLISH I limp only when the terrors of that night return to haunt me, and that is often enough. A good deal of foolishness is told about what happened that...
...What kind of a blessing did I have when I had tricked my father and my brother out of it...
...It was a dream, but can anything be more real than that...
...My wives, my children saw me as blessed, but I saw that fraudulent blessing as my doom...
...Then he came to me, the one who was a man, yet God's messenger, perhaps God Himself, and seized me and grappled with me, and knocked the breath out of me...
...The pursuer, the avenger, was the angel, the godly one, the forgiver, the blesser...
...I saw them on the way to Haran...
...From that night on, I never stopped running, I never stopped dreaming...
...I saw them all during those many years...
...My thigh-smitten helplessness, which warmed me with its protective power, aroused his pity...
...My grandfather was a dreamer and so was my father...
...face with the same events that overtook me at Beth-El...
...When I awoke, I could hardly walk, and I knew that I had come to the end of my running, that I was now entirely at his mercy...
...I carried that doom all through the years...
...But this time, there was nowhere else to run...
...He struck my thigh...
...I knew him, too...
...I felt no pain...
...At the Yabok—how strange that the river's name should twist my own devious name—I came face to David Polish is past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis...
...My heart pounded and then stood still...
...I never stopped seeing the pursuer and the angels...
...What kind of birthright did I have when I had got it by deceit...
...I dragged my way toward him...
...Why do people insist on making everything a fleshand-blood happening, as if nighttime adventures of the soul and the spirit are of no account...
...Again I was on the run, but this time toward, and not from my brother: I could escape him no longer...
...Once more I was terrified...
...I can still hear my voice, as though it were detached from me, shrieking, "Bless me, bless me, I am the unblessed one, bless me, blessed one...
...He knew me and seized me again, in an embrace of love...
...Even during the good years, I carried with me the mark of a cheat...
...He had, at last, conferred a true blessing on me, and he remembered that this was so, because he had shared the dream, even as he had shared the womb...
...It was not what people call a real event...
...I wept, because he no longer hunted me, no longer sought my death, as he had the night before...
...At birth, I had seized his foot...
...So when we met that morning, I said to him, "Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God...
...He was my adversary in the dream, and also the one who alone could have blessed me...
...I am no mean dreamer myself...
...A good deal of foolishness is told about what happened that night...
...I was an unblessed man, and even when my father-in-law tricked me again and again, there was no real retribution in that, because how could punishment at Laban's hands release me from my offense against my brother...
...All I could do was hold on...
...Now mine had been seized...
...When I ran from my brother, I dreamed at Beth-El, and saw God's messengers going up and down the ladder...
...THE BIRTHRIGHT, THE BLESSING DAVID POLISH I limp only when the terrors of that night return to haunt me, and that is often enough...
...His published works include Eternal Dissent and Israel—People and Nation...
...Toward dawn, after a night of fitful tossing, I fell into an exhausted, drugged stupor...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
