“And Yaakov was left alone”: Confronting the Darkness of Solitude

By Yaacov Mascetti*

There is an impossible and uncompromising tension between the individual and the collective, between the specific and the general – a tension which can lead to the crushing of the individual in the name of the general, in the name of the coherence of the collective; or which can lead to the crumbling of the collective in the name of extreme individuality. In his tragedy “Coriolanus” William Shakespeare explored this tension with great care and precision, showing his audience both a proud and self-sufficient hero in the battle field, crying “O, me alone! make you a sword of me?” (1:6) and the banished, disgraced man who is forced by the banishing collective to experience the full pain of solitude, as he leaves Rome “alone” like a “lonely dragon.” Yaakov is the point of departure of Israel as a people – but what we ignore, a lot of the time, that the birth of the general, of a nation, starts with the individual, with Yaakov himself fighting against himself and turning his individuality into the fertile ground for the cultivation of the Israelite nation.
So for there to be a nation, Yaakov needs to be, first and foremost, on his own, alone in the desert, alone and face to face with himself.

There is something terrifying in solitude, something that forces the individual to face his innermost weaknesses, and tackle the darkest corners of his being. Upon preparing himself to face his brother Esau, Yaakov prepares himself for every possible outcome, terrified by the encounter, and consumed (I speculate) by guilt feelings for what he did to him. And upon sending off his wives, sons, daughter, and slaves, he remains alone. Why he remains alone is a question I wish to address here. But it may be worthwhile considering first of all that the solitude experienced by Yaakov in Genesis 32:25 is not a physical one, nor a merely social one – Yaakov is existentially isolated. He is one, and as one is going to have to confront himself, and no one but himself. Yaakov is alone now as he was alone when he dreamt of the ladder reaching up to Heaven, upon which angels ascended and descended.

It is in this specific moment that he encounters “a man” who will fight with him all night long, and will grant him the name Israel. And in the midst of this epic wrestle, Rashi surprises the reader by explaining Yaakov’s solitude with a rather unexpected, and somewhat demeaning narrative “‘And Jacob remained alone’: He had forgotten [some] small vessels (פכים קטנים), and returned for them.” After having brought his wives and belongings across the river Yabok, he goes back – and according to this interpretation, he does so in order to retrieve a set of small containers he left behind. That’s what stands behind Yaakov’s solitude? That’s why he remains to face his innermost fear? Because in the hectic effort to save his belongings and family, he forgot what the Siftei Chachamim defines as “vessels of little value”? This is awkward, in my humble opinion, and requires further attention.

The 16th century commentator Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, better known as the “Kli Yakar,” invests a great effort in the explanation of Yaakov’s solitude and the ensuing encounter with a mysterious man popping up out of nowhere. This “ish,” explains the Kli Yakar, is the angel Samael, one of the most important amongst Satan’s fallen and rebellious angels.

“This angel is called Samael because all his duty and reason to be is to blind the eyes of men, hitting him with blindness and making it impossible for him to use the mind’s eye, to the point that the contemplating individual hit [by Samael] will no longer be able to see the mirrors of truth, and will thus no longer be able to contemplate the visage of Gd and see the secrets of the Torah – this is Satan, this is the Angel of Death, this is the yetzer ha-ra… It is thus that the angel Samael, seeing the issues Yaakov had with Esav were counteracted by his observance of the Torah, and since Yaakov never looked or contemplated upon evil, he never had a chance to tempt him by blinding his intellectual sight (Mind’s Eye). But when he saw that Yaakov , who had been blessed by Gd with richness and honor, was no longer content with what he had and went back to save some insignificant vessels which he had left behind, he found that Yaakov had remained alone with his vessels… and since for these objects of little value he had exposed himself to the dangers of the night, Samael said to himself ‘Ha! I have found the sin I was looking for, since Yaakov has made himself partially blind by virtue of this action, for who is blind like those who cherish money and belongings?’ and approached Yaakov, wanting to embrace him and blind him with the dust and impurity of possessions… And Samael attacked Yaakov, trying to blind him and force him to forget the Torah, blinding Yaakov’s intellectual eye… and he fought him [yeavek – as in avak, dust] in order to blur his ‘sight’ and tempt him into denying the presence of Gd above.” (my non-literal translation)

Yaakov’s solitude is thus an internal engagement with the very personal denial of a Gd that is present and, through his Providence, cares for and directs the life of the individual. The fight takes place specifically in a moment of solitude, because it touches upon the capacity to conceive Divine presence. And this all happens in the dark, in the middle of the desert, or in the very meanders of Yaakov’s heart. Why, I ask, would Rashi want to complicate this narrative with the “small vessels”? I wish to propose a rather audacious and very allegorical interpretation to this apparently senseless event in the general framework of the biblical narrative of the Fathers.

What if these vessels which Yaakov forgot behind were not that insignificant, but were, as the Hebrew term says, פכים קטנים, little vessels which were used to contain oil; since the fight is, as the Kli Yakar states, on the capacity to see or not Divine presence in the darkness of absence, what if these vessels were those containers of pure oil found by the Maccabees upon winning their battle with the impurity of the Greeks and their pagan culture, and which allowed them to light the Menorah for a miraculous eight days?

Samael is not an external agent – it is the inherent incapacity each one of us possesses to stop believing, to despair, to perceive only the pitch black darkness of absence. Samael is the blindness ensuing from the absence of light – and this tendency to give in to the temptation of the dark despair (what Rav Soloveitchik would have called “yeush,” despair, in his Lonely Man of Faith) is one that can be fought, or counteracted by light and light only. And in an moment of ahistorical merging, Yaakov sees the dangers of that very blindness and goes back, back to the darkness of the desert, back to the solitude of the nothingness, to grab those small, “insignificant” vessels filled with oil, in order to point to a historical moment in which the people of Israel would fight off the darkness of spiritual assimilation with the light of Torah, with the light of Divine Presence.

Yaakov, to conclude, can become Israel, only by virtue of the capacity to fight off the dark – a virtue possess neither by Abraham, nor by his blind father Isaac. Israel is, as the Kli Yakar writes, “he whom can see the face of Gd,” certainly not despite his tribulated life, but because his well-sharpened capacity to engage the difficulty of things, and invade with the light of oil-fueled wicks the darkness of life.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.