Luz, of Lore and Lure
“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure;
the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair;
the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring:
these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.”
― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
When I think of all biblical characters, the one I most associate with paradox is Jacob: “A situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities” (Oxford English Dictionary). A “simple” man who is always scheming; the “good” brother who manipulates, lies, and tricks his way into blessing. He is the patriarch with two names that evoke struggle: Yaakov, “one who holds the heel” trying to emerge first from the womb; and Yisrael, “one who wrestles with God”.
In the opening of our parashah, Vayeitzei, Jacob flees from his brother’s wrath. He finds a spot to sleep in some unnamed place. There he has a dream with a ladder to heaven and angels, and God speaks to him, promising him the covenant that God had made with Abraham and Isaac before him. He wakes up startled and in awe. “And he called the name of the place: Bet-El/House of God— however, Luz was the name of the city in former times” (Bereshit / Genesis 28:19).
This unnamed place all of a sudden gets two names, just like Jacob eventually will.
Rabbeinu Bachya (1255–1340, Spain) asks a basic question here: “Why did the Torah bother to tell us that at a still earlier point in history the town had been known as Luz? What benefit do we derive from such information?”
An ancient Jewish myth (Bereishit Rabbah 69:8) tells us that the name luzmeans an almond (or perhaps hazelnut) tree. And the sages spin a wild story about this city:
This is Luz, in which they dye sky blue wool. This is Luz that Sennacherib attacked but did not transfer its population; [that] Nebuchadnezzar [attacked], but he did not destroy it.
This is Luz, over which the angel of death never had dominion. What would the elderly among them do? When they would become very old [and tired of life], they would take them outside the walls and they would die.
Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: Why is it called Luz? Anyone who would enter it would proliferate mitzvot and good deeds like an almond tree [luz].
The Rabbis say: Just as a luz has no opening, so, too, no man could ascertain the location of the city entrance.
Rabbi Elazar said in the name of Rabbi Pinḥas bar Ḥama: Luz was located at the entrance of a cave. There was a hollow almond tree and they would enter the cave through the almond tree and through the cave to the city.
Now this is a city I would like to visit! The only problem is that the rabbis have told us how amazing Luz is, and yet Jacob sleeps nearby having no idea that it exists. In the apparent wilderness, with some stones and an old almond tree nearby, Jacob rests and has a vision of God. Then he builds an altar and goes on his way. The midrash introduces another paradox - an incredible city that is hidden from those would most benefit from it.
So why does the Torah mention Luz?
Rabbeinu Bachya gives us another legend. He suggests that “perhaps the Torah wanted to hint by using the name Luz that this spot had been the starting point of the earth rejuvenating itself. It was the site at which earth first started to develop into the globe as we know it. The word luz in the midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 18:1) means the place in the spine [imagined to be a nut-shaped bone] from which the tissue is able to regenerate itself at the time of the resurrection.”
We’ve stumbled into even stranger territory here! According to Jewish imagination, in the messianic age humans who have died will be reconstituted into living bodies, and the process starts with an indestructible mythical luzbone near the top of the spine.
I think of Jacob’s dream here as a hinge-point, a moment of transformation that divides his life into a before and an after. He will have more hinge-points. So do we. And at the hinge-point, there are at least two possibilities for how we react. The first, represented by the magical city of Luz, is the desire to escape the paradoxes of life, a yearning for the ultimate sanctuary where death itself (what Yehuda Amichai calls “Change’s prophet”) has no dominion. Change is hard, even positive transformational change. We all want to live in Luz sometimes, cocooned within stability.
But Jacob doesn’t enter the city. In my imagination, he spies it through the hollow almond tree and recognizes it as a utopian distraction from his purpose in life. Instead, he harnesses the generative energy of the luz bone. Instead of entering into a context where nothing has to change, he taps into that kernel of continuity within him. That indestructible, ever-renewing something within that allows us to grow with courage, to embrace change gently, and to keep moving forward on our journeys into the unknown.
Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Jay LeVine
