Vayetze: rocks

 Vayetze: rocks

 

Rocks appear at the beginning, middle and end of Vayetze.   

Yaakov surrounds his head with rocks, awakes from his dream with his head on a rock that he anoints and dedicates as the marker of the site for the Temple.  It sounds quite uncomfortable to me.  Why didn't he find a softer pillow?

Yaakov was tough ( like my parents in the Holocaust)

 

Yaakov then sees a rock that covers the well from which the community's sheep are watered, and he removes the rock for RAchel. The Rashbam says that the rock was a barrier so that animals and people could not fall into the well.  It was also a barrier so that, usually, no individual could use the well without community cooperation.  Yaakov (ancestor of Ayn [note the name means wellspring] Rand) usurps this collectivist idea.

 

Yaakov and Lavan make a treaty defined by a pile of rocks: Gal Eid ( Yigar Sehadutha).  It seems flimsy, easily moved.  Is this an act of trust?  Relatives!

 

Rocks are a marker, a border a barrier.  Rocks are a foundation .  Rocks can generate dreams, especially in Israel.