Truth and Peace

Jacob finishes blessing (and admonishing) his children, and dies. Or does he? Yes, of course he does . Here's the verse: Egyptian wooden sarcophagus, circa 14th century BCE "And Jacob concluded commanding his sons, and he gathered his legs into the bed, and expired and was gathered to his people." (Gen 49:33) Rashi cites the Talmud here, where Rabbi Yitzchak is invited to speak some words of Torah at Rabbi Nachman's table and says the following in the name of Rabbi Yochanan: "Jacob our patriarch did not die." (B.T. Ta'anit 5b) The scriptural basis for the idea, says Rashi, is that Jacob is the only person whose death is described in the Torah merely as "he expired" - as opposed to "he expired and died," as it says for Abraham (25:8), Ishmael (25:17), Isaac (35:29), and Aaron (Num 20:26). Rashi doesn't quote the rest of the conversation from the Talmud. When Rabbi Yitzchak suggests that Jacob didn't die, Rabbi Nac...

"Deborah, Rebecca's nursemaid, died, and she was buried beneath Beit El, beneath the oak, and [Jacob] named it the Oak of Weeping." (Gen 35:8) Who's this "Deborah" all of the sudden? We know Rebecca had a nursemaid who came with her when she married Isaac (24:59), but she was never mentioned by name in all this time. And what's she doing with Jacob, anyway? One idea is that Rebecca sent Deborah to Jacob in Padan Aram to let him know it was safe to come home. (See Rashi.) If that's the case, Deborah would have been around for all of Jacob's youth, probably helped raise him, just like she raised his mother before him. Deborah would've been like a grandmother to Jacob. Another idea is that Deborah returned to Padan Aram early on but wanted to make this final journey with Jacob to see Rebecca one last time. (See Ramban.) If that's the case, Deborah would have been there with Jacob during his tenure with Laban, helping him...

Jacob offers to work for Laban, for the privilege of marrying his daughter Rachel. The Torah says after the fact: "Jacob worked seven years for Rachel, but they seemed in his eyes like a few days, in his love for her." (Gen 29:20) But why did it seem so quick? Shouldn't it be the opposite? If you can't wait to be finished, and you're just counting the days, watching the clock, time can feel brutally slow. Think about sitting in school counting the minutes for class to end, or being in the hospital waiting for the doctor to come. When you're just waiting, it feels like an eternity. Like the expression goes, "A watched pot never boils." How about a "watched Rachel"? Time-perception studies in psychology and neuroscience try to understand when and why we experience time as moving slowly or quickly. It turns out that "slow-moving" time is in fact a more accurate assessment of clock time. It's when we perceive "...