In this week's parasha, we meet a common noun that would eventually become an extraordinary name for God. We read of Jacob's flight from his brother's wrath. Laden with anxiety, he leaves Beer-sheba to return to Haran, where Abraham had first received God's summons. On the way, the Torah reports: "He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set (Genesis 28:11)." And, as you know, that place became the site for Jacob's justly famous dream of a stairway filled with divine angels, some of which were ascending to heaven while others descended.

But precisely where was this awesome place which Jacob, upon awakening, would call "the abode of God" and "the gateway to heaven (Gen. 28:17)"? We ask for a degree of specificity to which the Torah is consistently indifferent. Rashi tries to help. He notes that grammatically the noun is accompanied by a definite article: ha-makom, literally "he came upon the place," and goes on to suggest that it must be a place already mentioned by the Torah. Accordingly, he identifies it with the mountain upon which Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac, since the word makom appears in both verses (Gen. 22:4). Reflecting rabbinic tradition throughout, Rashi then asserts (in Gen. 28:17) that indeed this spot was the Temple Mount in Jerusalem which truly linked heaven and earth. In short, long after the destruction of the second Temple, the rabbis deepened the sanctity of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount by making them the locus of the two narratives in Genesis.

click here to continue reading