When President Trump announced that he would no longer receive The New York Times or Washington Post at the White House, I was struck that a sitting President would brazenly cut out half of America’s civil discourse to justify his domination of American politics. I felt how deep the rift in our politics has become, and it dawned on me that an Iroquois Confederacy prophecy was coming true.
While still under British rule, the early colonist leaders sought a system to govern the 13 conflicting colonies. Benjamin Franklin became an intimate student of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy) and their Great Law of Peace. Their system of governance had brought centuries of peace to five previously warring Native American nations (Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Onondaga). For eleven years, Franklin studied the Mohawk language and their system of representative democracy. Ultimately, Franklin and Thomas Jefferson drafted the Articles of Confederation based on the Iroquois Confederacy‘s Great Law of Peace, mirroring their system of checks and balances.
At the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Haudenosaunee sent a delegation to commend the Founding Fathers on adopting the Great Law of Peace and to warn them of two fatal flaws: 1) changing consensus decision-making to majority rule, and 2) failing to give women voting power. Not only did Haudenosaunee women have a voice in governance, but their clan mothers exercised the ultimate authority to unilaterally remove leaders whenever their conduct became unfit for leadership. They warned that these changes would establish a crack in our foundation that within seven generations would split the young nation into two irreconcilable parts.
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In Parshat Vayetze, we encounter a seemingly irreconcilable rift. Twin brothers Esau and Jacob famously struggle within Rebecca’s womb: The first born Esau becomes a hunter, known as a man of the field, while the rabbis fancy Jacob a scholar, known as one who dwelled in tents. (Gen 25:22, 27) While Esau is commonly considered the wicked one (Rashi on Gen 25: 24, Gen Rabbah 63:8), it is Jacob who dominates Esau, robbing him of his birthright for a bowl of lentils and stealing his blessing by lying to his dying father. Jacob drives a wedge so deeply between himself and his brother that he must flee from Esau, who wants to kill him. (Gen 27:41)
Their path to healing, through empathy and intimate confrontation, is medicine for our times. Fleeing Esau, Jacob gets caught overnight in the wilderness alone, outside his comfort zone but in Esau’s, and dreams of the ladder, angels ascending and descending (Gen 28:12). When he awakens he proclaims, “Surely God is in this place, and I did not even know it . . . this is none other than the abode of God.” (Gen 28:16-17) Jacob realizes that God’s presence can be found in the natural world, a first step in reconciling with Esau by deeply understanding, perhaps even empathizing, with something Esau ‘the man of the field’ inherently already understands. In next week’s parshat Vayishlach, Jacob takes his second step by wrestling with Esau face to face, all night long. (Rashi on Gen 32:25, Gen Rabbah 77:3) Neither prevail (Gen 32:26), but through intimate confrontation Jacob transforms into his true self, Israel.
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A mystical reading of Jacob’s Ladder sheds an even deeper dimension on the healing that is possible. The Zohar (the essential medieval mystical work) describes the Shekhinah (the aspect of God, known as a sefirah, that is closest to the created world) as the “embodiment of the feminine, earth-centered presence of God.” With this in mind, I read Jacob’s epiphany that earth is “the abode of God” (Gen 28:17) as his realization that God has a feminine face. God contains feminine wisdom too, which embodies understanding and compassion, and promotes human connection and healing brokenness. This is the beginning of his healing from his heretofore pattern of domination. In the Kabbalistic tradition, Jacob eventually comes to embody Tiferet, the paragon of balance between masculine and feminine qualities. Jacob must heal his internal rift between these qualities before taking his place as Israel. 
Like Jacob, our fractured society is in critical need of rebalancing masculine and feminine qualities. While next year we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of adopting women’s suffrage in the U.S., we are far from truly honoring the depth of feminine wisdom in our American civil discourse. With the rift at a breaking point, we would be wise to heed the warning of the Haudenosaunee and finally give our clan mothers that ultimate authority. At the very least, we all must seek to become Israel by engaging and wrestling intimately even with those who feel irreconcilably different.
Rabbi Zelig Golden, Wilderness Torah‘s Founder and Executive Director, works at the intersection of awakening Judaism’s earth based traditions and renewing Jewish culture with heart-centered peace-making culture by guiding an annual cycle of multi-generational land-based festivals, nature-based rites of passage, and mentorship for emerging leaders.
