Vayeitze 5782: We're Gonna Be Okay
About three years ago, during Pesach of 2019, Lizzie and I came to Ithaca. Not to live quite yet, but to look for a house to call our home, our Bayit, our Base. As all of you know, but we had not yet understood, trying to find a place in April to live the following September in Collegetown is...nearly impossible. Things book out a year in Collegetown, hence the perpetual “For Rent” signs all year long on every house.
It was a grey April day, snow still dusting the ground and the trees still bare, when we started our search. I had set up some places for us to see from craigslist and facebook marketplace. One on Dryden, the building that looks like it could be owned and inhabited by Ronald McDonald himself, bright yellow with red trim. What had been advertised as a “three bedroom apartment” was a series of small rooms, joined together by a living room that could hold maybe four people comfortably. Looking around, Lizzie and I squeezed each other's hand. A perfect place for studying, for getting through college, but not a place to host raucous Shabbos meals. It’s okay, we thought, we have a few more places to see. The day was full of ups and downs, a roller coaster of emotions. One place was gorgeous, with an acre of land and a literal jacuzzi, but it was a mile and a half from campus. Nobody would ever walk that long to come to Shabbos in the cold, Ithaca winter. Another was clearly an abandoned frat house, with 7 bedrooms and two kitchens. The filth felt like it was generations deep, as if it would be wrong somehow to clean it, like we’d upset the ghosts of past tenants. Paint was peeling off the walls, and when asked if we could repaint the walls, we were met with a hearty “no.” At this point is when we decided to go back to the drawing board. We started driving around and calling the numbers on the “For Rent” signs all around Collegetown. Most were already taken for the fall, and in the midst of a moment of despair, we drove down Linden Ave.
In this week’s Parsha, Jacob leaves his hometown of Be’er Sheva and goes to Haran. There, in the night, he sleeps on a stone and dreams a magical dream. Angels ascend and descend a ladder, connecting heaven and earth. G!d appears to Jacob and tells him, essentially, that everything is going to be okay. That he and his descendants will be blessed. That he is not alone. That he’s gonna make it. He wakes up, literally and figuratively, and says, “Surely haShem is present in this place, and I did not know it!”
Back in Ithaca in April 2019, Lizzie and I drove by our future home, and while on the phone with our now landlord Ezra Cornell, we headed to Fall Creek to the bottom of Cascadilla gorge. To say I was anxious at that moment is an understatement. I was about to graduate from Rabbinical School, move to the middle of nowhere (no offense, Ithaca), and we didn’t have a place to live. I couldn’t envision things going well, much less the kinds of epic parties, shabbos meals, havdalah, talent shows, and more that would fill our space. I walked up to the base of Cascadilla Gorge, full of anxiety, and looked up. The water flowing gracefully over the stones, the way the gorge seemed to twist and turn for eternity, the way the rock walls were decorated with brightly colored moss in all different shades of green, it woke me up. Like Jacob awoke from his dream and knew, I knew. I knew that we were going to be okay. That we were going to find a home, that Hashem would take care of us and that we would get to create a joyous community for so many Jewish students here at Cornell.
When we are in moments of darkness, like now with the increasing darkness of winter, and feel scared or anxious, may we be blessed with moments like this. It doesn’t have to be as epic as a prophetic dream and vision of the Divine. It can be as small as hearing a bird sing or seeing the leaves illuminated by the sun. It can be laughing with a friend on your way to class, or getting a good night’s sleep. May we be blessed to hear the voice of Hashem in those moments, calling to us and reminding us that we are going to be okay.
Shabbat Shalom.
