emma

  Joseph and Judah and Benjamin and all the rest And me I’ve got mine too so I know what anyone knows if they came from a womb that some other human also           inhabited   That there is no escaping where you came from; That family reunions are never simply […]

  Lately I have been walking in Joseph’s shoes. I too came to be a stranger in a strange land through circumstances not completely of my       choosing making the best of the cards dealt to me by life and hoping God had a plan.  I couldn’t quite see it but I was being

  After a hard life all Jacob wants to do is settle           down in the Land of his hard-won inheritance but he can’t escape destiny its seems or family patterns Despite all he should know of favouritism he favours And so begins the dominos that will fall One    

  God says           Go           Find Yourself           Go to the Land           Come to the Mountain   And we go And we come And we find ourselves           trembling   Revelation comes with

  The poet writes about our names            Each of us has a name given by the moments in our lives and Given by God   Jacob is renamed by God and renames his son Both renamings happen in a moment of           crisis God gives Jacob

  “Come on up!” God shouted to Jacob as S/He revealed the ladder, which had of course, always been there             But Jacob stepped back   noticing that the angels climbing all over it went down, and not just up.   Midrash records Jacob’s thinking. He tells God: If I come

The commentator says, When Esau is down, Jacob is up and when Esau is up,  Jacob is down; Like some kind of divine barometer where our enemy (who used to be our brother)’s fate is reflective of God’s will      somehow As if God would want our enemy, our brother, to suffer just to

We revere Abraham So much that he is always the central character even when the chapter is in someone else’s name The Torah focuses us on him And yet           if we look closely there is a whole supporting cast Two wives, or maybe three, or maybe more, unnamed, And a