Who Is That Masked Man? (1)
Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. Genesis 32:24 NASB
Left alone – “Man is meaningless without God,”[1] wrote Abraham Heschel. He could have written, “Man is totally alone without God.” That’s more than just man is alone. We all know we are alone. Yes, of course, we have friends, family, lovers, but there is still something in us that has been alone ever since we were expelled from the Garden. Man without others is tragic. Man without God is suicidal. “With God” is our last refuge of personal identity. “Without God” is a self-aware animal lost in the abyss of accident. The Bible speaks about such a man. His name is Jacob (Ya’akob).
Biblical stories are meant to elicit our deepest emotions—longing, fear, security, joy, acceptance—all woven into the lives of these personalities interacting with, or without, God. Biblical stories are identification buoys as we row backwards into our future. We hear the tale. Something in it strikes a note in us. We find ourselves in the pages of these dramas, for good or woe. Sarah and Susanna, Abraham and Adam, Job and Jacob, and all the others, named or unnamed. We are standing in their place when Paradise is lost, when we wait for a promise for decades, when we experience betrayal, when life is fetid, when the furnace awaits, when manna descends, when the Temple is finished, when the scroll is found. The rails of humanity are greased with emotion—and God applies the lubricant.
Jacob is a man of suppressed passion. We only glimpse his ardor in matrimonial slices and sibling trepidation. Most of the time he looks like someone in control, although we discover if we look carefully enough that he is hypokrites, a Greek word meaning “an interpreter from underneath,” an actor, a masked man, the lone ranger. He pretends to be another. He avoids his calling. He deceives his enemy. Esau aptly names him. He is like us, a masquerade, a poser, someone who does not reveal himself in hopes that others will find him loveable—and all the while knowing that he is alone.
The Hebrew is way-yiwwater lebaddo. As I noted in my book, Crossing: The Struggle for Identity, these particular words, translated “left alone,” are stewed with foreboding in Hebrew.
The text tells us that he was left alone. The verb is yatar—“to remain over, to leave.” Derivatives include some things we wouldn’t think of: abundance (yitra), advantage (yoter), excellence (yitron) and profit (motar). Most of these ideas are connected with excess, that is, what is left over. But this is not Ya’akob’s definition of the word. His is what remains after everything else is gone. What is that? What is left when everything else is removed? Himself. He remains. He is the left over, the profit of all his labors, the last of what matters to him. What he discovers is what we all discover at the point of emptiness. We are alone.
The Hebrew, lebaddo does not simply mean “solitude.” It carries the sense of being apart, being separated from community and from God. It can mean abandoned, the recognition and emotional trauma of unexpected isolation. Ya’akob is abandoned, perhaps intentionally so because there is no logical reason for him to retreat to this side of the place where past labor and future household are divided. Perhaps he is compelled to go back across because there is still something unfinished in that place, something non-tangible that cries out to be carried across or be buried on this side. Whatever it is, he must return to face the emptiness of his life. It has all come down to this. In the end, he is alone. All his possessions, all his relationships, evaporate in the dark. It is night—the night when there is nothing left of the former Ya’akob, the night when it has all moved on—except him.
The verb, yatar, in the Niphal stem, usually denotes the incomplete passive or the reflexive voice. This is not something Ya’akob chooses. It is done to him. He is compelled to separation. The verb also has another important characteristic. It is a waw-consecutive (remember?[2]). Here’s the technical explanation:
However, early Biblical Hebrew has two additional conjugations, both of which have an extra prefixed letter waw, with meanings more or less reversed from the normal meanings. That is, “waw + prefix conjugation” has the meaning of a past (particularly in a narrative context), and “waw + suffix conjugation” has the meaning of a non-past, opposite from normal (non-waw) usage. This apparent reversal of meaning triggered by the waw prefix led to the early term waw-conversive (in Hebrew waw hahipuch, literally “the waw of reversal”). The modern understanding, however, is somewhat more nuanced, and the term waw-consecutive is now used.[3]
We discover that Ya’akob is forced to meet his destiny. There is something about who he is that must be confronted, and that can only be confronted when he is separated from everything he has made of himself. There is another man in Scripture who is compelled to face his destiny. As the verse says: “ Immediately the Spirit impelled Him to go out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12). But Yeshua’s experience of compulsion toward confrontation doesn’t turn out like Ya’akob’s. In the Genesis account, the syntax is also revealing. The verse does not read, “Then Jacob was left alone.” It reads, “Then was left Jacob alone.” The emphasis is not on Jacob. He is not the subject. “Was left” (yatar) is the subject. Abandonment is the real issue here. When Jacob reaches the limit of all he can make of himself, when he voluntarilyremoves everything he has attained, he is compelled to look inside, to the place he doesn’t want to see but can’t go forward without looking. That place is the waw-consecutive of yatar—was left, is left, will be left.
Isn’t that the real experience of life? Was left—we have all had past relationships that have been left behind. Parents die, friends move, communities disband. There is always a “was left” in us, usually not of our own making. The tragedy of disconnection just happens. The world is broken.
Then there’s “is left”—the immediacy of isolation, the existential awareness that our “left over” is never enough to give us the security of identity we so desire. “Is left” is our lack of connectedness—to ourselves. It is the deep awareness of hypokrites; the awareness of our masks. At this very moment some part of us is posing, some part refuses the light. Why? Because vulnerability is frightening and painful. The yetzer ha’ra is a psychological mycelium
growing best in the dark. Finally, “will be left” is the realization that I too will pass into oblivion and all that I accomplished, all that I am in this life, all my hopes and dreams will come to nothing more than decomposition. Koheleth is right. Inside the box there is nothing but “left over.”
Ya’akob is you and me, facing inevitability. If life is going to be something other than “left over” we will need an identity that does not depend on us. We will need something other than “alone.” “The destiny of man is to be a partner with God . . .”[4]
How that happens is another investigation.
Topical Index: Ya’akob, left alone, way-yiwwater lebaddo, Genesis 32:24
[1] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 74.
[2] https://skipmoen.com/2018/10/the-future-past/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vav-consecutive
[4] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 80.
