Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse. This is Ari Levisohn.

Tikva Hecht: And this is Tikva Hecht. 

Ari: And we're going to be talking to you today about Parshat Vayetze. So Parshat Vayetze, although it deals the beginning and end with Yaakov's leaving and then coming back to the land of Canaan, really the bulk of the parsha, in my opinion, is this ongoing struggle between Yaakov and his father-in-law Lavan.

Of course, it starts off when Lavan tricks him into marrying the wrong daughter. He ends up having to work for him for 14 years in order to marry the daughter he wants. Then he tricks him out of the sheep and Yaakov wants to run away. Lavan doesn't let him run away, so Yaakov has to escape in the middle of the night with his whole family, and then Lavan chases after him, and it's this like escalating tension and fight that gets worse and worse until, ultimately, Lavan catches up to Yaakov and it blows up in this whole fight.

And what I want to talk to you about today is some stuff I noticed that really changed the way I read this whole story about this fight between Yaakov and Lavan.

Tikva: Wow, that's a big, epic story to have a whole new reframe on. I'm excited to hear it. Where should we start? 

Ari: Okay, so, I promise we're going to get to Parshat Vayetze; we're going to talk all about it, but we're actually going to start somewhere completely unexpected — or, unless you're an avid Aleph Beta fan, in which case you know to expect the unexpected. 

Unexpected Start: A Confusing Set of Laws

Ari: We're going to start in Parshat Mishpatim; in Exodus, chapter 21, in this section of, like, really just random laws, one after another, mostly having to do with damages and the fines you pay for various different damages. Now, if you’re a big Into The Verse fan, these laws might sound familiar to you, and that's because we actually dealt with them last year for Parshat Vayigash, and we looked at some fascinating parallels that those laws had to one story. So don't worry, today we're going to talk about something completely different. If you're interested in that, we'll put a link in the description.

Let's dig in. These verses begin in Exodus, chapter 21, verse 22. וְכִי־יִנָּצוּ אֲנָשִׁים — So two men are fighting, וְנָגְפוּ אִשָּׁה הָרָה — and they strike a pregnant woman. So, this woman is not part of this fight, just total collateral damage. She's not involved, but they accidentally strike her. וְיָצְאוּ יְלָדֶיהָ, and literally what this means is — Her children come out of her. And for now, let's just leave it with that literal translation. What the fate of these children are is not clear.

Tikva: Meaning, whether the children survive or not. 

Ari: Yeah, right. And then the case splits into two possibilities. The first possibility is: וְלֹא יִהְיֶה אָסוֹן — And there is no tragedy. And the way we generally understand this is, it means the death of the mother, this pregnant woman. So she does not die.

עָנוֹשׁ יֵעָנֵשׁ כַּאֲשֶׁר יָשִׁית עָלָיו בַּעַל הָאִשָּׁה וְנָתַן בִּפְלִלִים. Basically, he has to pay a fine for the damages that were done. That is, if the woman survives this. But, verse 23: וְאִם־אָסוֹן יִהְיֶה — But if there is this tragedy, if she doesn't survive, וְנָתַתָּה נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נָפֶשׁ — so you give a soul for a soul. Now, literally, what does that imply, Tikva?

Tikva: That whoever pushed her would get capital punishment, right? That someone who's responsible for her death is then punished by being killed themselves.

Ari: Exactly. But when it comes to actually practical law, the way that we traditionally understand this is, it doesn't mean literally capital punishment. It actually means you pay a monetary fine in place of that capital punishment, or in place of the soul. Which, the truth is, I think there's a lot of evidence for how the Rabbis understand it that way, and we don't have time to get into that now.

But it does leave you with the question of, if it doesn't actually mean capital punishment, why does it say it like this? What does it mean to say “a soul for a soul” if it doesn't mean literally a soul for a soul? And then why does it go on to continue in verse 24 to say: עַיִן תַּחַת עַיִן שֵׁן תַּחַת שֵׁן — An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, yad tachat yad. Whatever the assailant does should be done to them.

Now we don't actually go poking out eyes if you poke out someone else's eye. But I think this is describing, like, in some kind of ideal Divine vision of justice that, like, at least in theory, if God were enacting these punishments, like, whatever happens to the other person, you deserve for that to happen to you. Practically, that's not how a human court executes justice, but I think that it seems to be reflecting, like, at least, in some ideal level, maybe this is what is deserving.

Tikva: Yeah, it's reflecting some kind of value or reciprocity, which, when we actually take that into our practical lives, we kind of account for the fact that, I guess, in this case, it's not intentional. And so we, as human beings, maybe can't execute justice in that 100 percent reciprocal way. It seems to me like the Torah is trying to balance both the ideal of reciprocity and then the complexity of real life.

Ari: Yeah, yeah, totally. So now, I just want to come back to that language of וְיָצְאוּ יְלָדֶיהָ that we talked about before; that, literally, her children come out of her. And traditionally, this is understood to mean she miscarries, which I think makes a lot of sense. But there's another word that Torah has for “miscarry;” it's mishakelet. So it's weird that it would use this word וְיָצְאוּ, “they come out.” To me, that actually doesn't imply that the children die at all. It actually is completely ambiguous. I think you could totally read here that the children survive.

But either way, it's just bizarre for the Torah to use this, like, very technical, physical word describing them coming out of her, and not a typical word that would either describe a miscarriage or a successful birth.

Tikva: Yeah, definitely. It feels like, if the Torah wanted us to be really clear about what was going on in this verse, there was a lot of different ways it could have done that, either using more direct language or more direct description. But it feels like It's actually intentionally trying to be ambiguous, because otherwise you'd just have an editor in here with a red pen going, “Wait, this is very, very unclear.” So, let's give the Torah the benefit of the doubt and say there's some value to that lack of clarity.

Ari: Yeah, Tikva, I think you're totally right. There's so much ambiguity going on in these verses, and I think that's intentional. I think that the Torah is building in many different layers of meaning here. And unfortunately, you know, we only have a short amount of time here on this podcast, and I think for the sake of what we're going to do today, we're just going to have to take one of those layers of meaning and leave, as hard as it is, to leave some of the other possible layers of meaning aside for the time being.

But at least the way I want to look at it today is, you know, seeing וְיָצְאוּ יְלָדֶיהָ as not meaning a miscarriage, but really leaving this possibility open that the children survive. And to understand that, at least in the traditional way, that אָסוֹן means the mother that we're talking about. Does the mother die? Does she not die?

Tikva: And so I just want to clarify then, in that case, what the fine that comes out of that is. This is still a premature birth, this is still where this striking against this woman seems to be leading to her going into labor, probably not when she would have naturally, and that's the crime here, right? It's no…there's no damage done, but still, that's emotional damage. We might say that that’s not the natural course of events, and so there's still some punishment for that. 

Ari: Yeah, exactly. According to this understanding, this would mean that even if, you know, even if everything is okay at the end of the day and everybody survives, the Torah recognizes that, you know, if you cause someone to have this premature birth, there's a lot of trauma and pain that comes with that. And that, you know, that deserves to be repaid. You can’t just brush that off as “all’s well that ends well.”

The Bigger Question

Ari: We've talked about some of the different questions and the weird language of יָצְאוּ here and why it talks about “a soul for a soul,” but there's a much broader problem that I think we have to ask when looking at these pesukim. 

Generally, when you want to teach a legal principle, you want to be as simple and straightforward as possible, right? Like, makeh nefesh mot umat, “If you kill someone, you get the capital punishment.” That's super clear, super straightforward. You know, you can bullet point it easily. But if I had to ask, like, in a few words, Tikva, like, what is this law? It's the law of “blank”. Two words.

Tikva: Yeah, I'm not sure, because it starts off…like, if you really are going to hold me to two words, I would say “collateral damage.” It starts off with these two men fighting and someone else gets hurt from their fight. So it feels like, okay, that's what the Torah wants to teach.

But the simplest way to do that is just say, “they fell down,” “they got bruised,” “they hurt…they broke their arm,” whatever it is, and then you're teaching that law. They then go to this case where this pregnant woman then has birth. So it seems like you're saying you want to teach the law of, if you somehow, accidentally, but while two people are fighting, you know, force a woman into early labor. That feels very, very specific, and then it feels very strange at the end that we then go to the woman dying, so it's like, okay, now we're back to collateral damage. I’m not sure if it’s trying to teach…I'm not sure how to put my finger on it.

Ari: Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, if you're trying to teach a case of accidental collateral damage, then, like, why do we have the whole thing with the pregnant woman? If you're trying to teach a case of what happens if you harm a pregnant woman and all the complications that should come with that, why does it matter that it started between a fight between two random other people? And, you know, you could go into it more. There’s so many details here. And it's like, wow, this feels like it's describing, like, a really specific and complicated case.

And so, Tikva, you know, one thing that we've seen before at Aleph Beta is, when you have a section in the Torah about laws, and the laws have all of these super specific, seemingly unnecessary or over-complicated details, it's a telltale sign that maybe this isn't a hypothetical case after all. Maybe it is…?

Tikva: An actual case. Maybe this is not just a legal principle, but it is case law and we're responding to an actual case that happened.

Where Have We Heard This Before

Ari: Right, indeed. Maybe this is actually telling a story that we've already heard previously in the Torah. So let's try to figure out what story could this be talking about, and let's try to break down, like, the elements of this set of laws here and figure out where we've heard some of these before.

So it starts off וְכִי־יִנָּצוּ אֲנָשִׁים, right, when two men are fighting. Okay, what might that be talking about?

Tikva: I think that there's quite a few. I mean, even starting from Kayin and Hevel, there's a lot of fights. So nothing is jumping out to me specifically there.

Ari: Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, the Torah is packed with stories of people fighting, so that doesn't really help us much.

So let's turn to the next element of this law, which is, you have this pregnant woman and her child comes out, and there's a possibility, and maybe she actually does die as this child comes out. I think there's only one other story in the Torah where we have something like this at all.

Tikva: Yeah, women giving birth, again, all over that itself. I don't think we can narrow it down so easily, but a woman giving birth and then dying…that would be Rachel while she's giving birth to Binyamin.

Ari: Indeed, right. Rachel, when she is giving birth to Binyamin. She has this really hard pregnancy, and right after he's born, she passes away. But if we think for a minute also about the backstory to that. So on one hand, right, this death happens in Genesis 35, and it seems to be this isolated thing out of nowhere.

But when the Rabbis read this, they actually point to something that happened four chapters earlier that they say brought about this death, which brings us actually back to the fight between Yaakov and Lavan. So basically, after 20 years in Lavan's house...see that smile coming on Tikva's face?

Tikva: A fight between two men. A fight! So we have a fight, we have a pregnant woman, and we have this woman dying in labor. It's starting to feel like the elements are coming together.

Ari: Right, so let's catch people up here. So, right, so Yaakov and Lavan, right? Things were really bad after 20 years in Lavan's house. He refused to let Yaakov leave, so Yaakov runs away, and eventually, Lavan catches up with him, is really upset at him for running away, for taking the whole family. He's like: וַתִּגְנֹב אֶת־לְבָבִי — You've stolen my heart (Genesis 31:26). And he also says, “You've stolen my idols,” and Yaakov, not knowing what Lavan is talking about, is, you know, “After everything you've done to me and you chase after me, you don't even let me leave with my family. Now you're accusing me of stealing your idols?” And kind of, in what I read as just a real kind of explosion of rage, says in Genesis 31, verse 32: עִם אֲשֶׁר תִּמְצָא אֶת־אֱלֹהֶיךָ לֹא יִחְיֶה — Whoever you find these idols amongst, they shouldn't live. Right? He puts this curse of death upon whoever Lavan finds the idols with.

Now, what Yaakov doesn't know is that his wife Rachel, his beloved Rachel, was actually the one who took these idols. And although Lavan never actually finds them with her — because she manages to conceal them and that’s a whole separate story — as the Rabbis understand, Yaakov's words were really binding here. And this curse, even though it came out of this fit of anger, and maybe he…however much, I don't know, he meant it, wanted it to really come true, he ends up putting this curse on his wife Rachel. But then the curse actually doesn't take effect right away. It's actually not until she's pregnant that this curse kicks into effect, and her dying in childbirth, which was not very long later, we understand as a result of this curse.

Tikva: Ari, what you're pointing out, it's really resonant with what you're showing us in Shemot. It's also so heartbreaking because we have these two men fighting and it's as a result from their fighting in their…it's not physical blows, but in their sparring, their verbal sparring. Yaakov says something which is almost like an inadvertent push to someone else, and that person getting pushed is Rachel. And what you're pointing out is that when that push essentially takes effect, it's when she's pregnant, and when she's giving birth to Binyamin is when she actually passes away and feels the full effect of that curse. And so it does feel like when you put all those elements together…again, it’s not as immediate, it’s not as physical as the case we have in Shemot, but you do have all of those elements: Two men fighting and the collateral damage is Rachel.

Ari: Yep. Men fighting, we have collateral damage, a pregnant woman who dies giving birth. Really, all of the elements are there.

Tikva: It’s funny because we were talking about how Shemot, how Exodus seems to be making this case so complicated, but when you point this out, what I'm realizing is, Exodus is actually making the case simpler. It's trying, it's actually showing us here's what happened in a case that was even more complicated and even, in a way, more abstract or less direct. It's really interesting to have that flip of vision there, and all of a sudden be like, oh, Exodus is actually helping us see this story simplified in a clearer way.

Ari: That's a great point. It's like, all of a sudden, distilling this case down into, like, these core elements. It's like, a fight, pregnant woman, childbirth.

Does Anyone Get Punished?

Tikva: Yeah, what's striking me now though is the implication is that, yeah, well, someone is responsible in Exodus, right? Someone is punished, and my assumption was, it was the person who hit this woman. Doesn't matter if the two people are fighting. Maybe I'm not reading close enough, but it doesn't matter if the two people are fighting, right? Someone hits this woman and now they get punished.

If you follow through that algebra, Yaakov is the responsible party. He's the one who, in a sense, actually hits Rachel. So I don't know if that's where you're going or relevant, but that just strikes me as a little chilling.

Ari: Right, you know. And so, Tikva, it's interesting because the language it uses when it talks about striking her is actually נָגְפוּ, which is plural. Which seems to imply that, to a certain extent, you know, when two people fight, they're kind of both to blame for what happens.

Like, collateral damage is this really ugly thing that's kind of unavoidable when you have fighting. And, you know, it's really, like, everyone who's involved in the fight is to blame to a certain extent for what happens. But once it switches to the punishment, it goes back into singular, and so it does seem that, although, to a certain extent, maybe both of these parties share some blame. There is one person who is primarily responsible, and as you said, in this case, that seems to be Yaakov.

So let's look at that punishment now, and let's look at, you know, what it actually says. So, remember we said the case splits into two, right? Is there אָסוֹן? Does the mother die, or does she not die? And of course, sadly, in our case, which one are we dealing with? 

Tikva: We're dealing with אָסוֹן, when she does die. 

Ari: We're dealing with אָסוֹן, right, when she does die.

Tikva: So the punishment would be נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נָפֶשׁ.

Ari: נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נָפֶשׁ. So as we said, right, it doesn't mean you execute the person, but on some level, what it seems to be describing is whatever the assailant does to this woman gets done back to him; or at least should, in some ideal world, get done back to him. So let's think about that, right? Like, so what happens to her, right? We have, like, two things: יָצְאוּ יְלָדֶיהָ, right? Her child leaves her, and then as a result of that child leaving her, she dies. So do we ever have something like that with Yaakov? Does that come back to bite him as a punishment?

Tikva: He does, in a sense, lose a child. I mean, Yosef ends up being kidnapped. He ends up being abducted, sold into slavery, and he's absent for a number of years. Is that where you're going? 

Ari: Yeah, so take a look at Genesis chapter 44:28. This is actually…it's Yehudah who is describing to the Egyptian viceroy who, turns out, is Yosef, although he doesn't know that. But he is describing how they wanted to bring Binyamin back to Egypt, like Yosef had wanted them to. And, of course, Yaakov refuses to let them. And look at the language he uses to describe losing this one child. 

Tikva: So this is Yehudah talking to Yosef, telling him what his father Yaakov had said to him:

וַיֹּאמֶר עַבְדְּךָ אָבִי אֵלֵינוּ אַתֶּם יְדַעְתֶּם כִּי שְׁנַיִם יָלְדָה־לִּי אִשְׁתִּי — Your servant, my father, he said to us, “You know that my wife gave birth to two sons,” וַיֵּצֵא הָאֶחָד מֵאִתִּי — “and one of them is gone from me,” וָאֹמַר אַךְ טָרֹף טֹרָף וְלֹא רְאִיתִיו עַד־הֵנָּה — “and he was torn by a beast, and I haven't seen him since then.” Yehudah is telling Yosef, essentially, the story of Yosef's own demise, his fake death, through the eyes of Yaakov.

Oh, he says וַיֵּצֵא. It's the same language, “he's gone out.” So he doesn't say explicitly “he died.” 

Ari: I mean, I think it actually implies some ambiguity, right? וָאֹמַר אַךְ טָרֹף טֹרָף וְלֹא רְאִיתִיו עַד־הֵנָּה — I said, “Oh, he was surely torn by a beast, and I haven't seen him until now.” Which, to me, leaves some possibility of, you know, maybe he's still alive. He's gone. I'm never going to see him again.

Tikva: I think you're right. He doesn't want to say he died. He's just saying he had this horrible experience that most of us would assume led to death, but all he's willing to say is, “I haven't seen him and he's gone away from me. He's left me.”

Ari: Right, and so here is Yaakov, just like the pregnant woman in Mishpatim and just like Rachel, who gave birth to Binyamin; a child already “went out” from him. And now, what's about to happen is, he's afraid about the next child, about Binyamin coming out from him. And look back at verse 22, what Yehudah says will happen if Binyamin leaves Yaakov, if Yaakov loses Binyamin.

Tikva: לֹא־יוּכַל הַנַּעַר לַעֲזֹב אֶת־אָבִיו וְעָזַב אֶת־אָבִיו וָמֵת — The boy can't leave his father. If he were to leave his father, his father would die. So our father would die; Yaakov would die. He's basically saying that that is death, for a child to go out from him. It’s Yaakov’s own death.

Ari: Right. A child leaves Yaakov, and as a result of child leaving Yaakov, Yaakov would die. It doesn't happen, but here you have this threat, this possibility that this is going to happen. And by the way, who is this child? 

Tikva: This child is Binyamin. This is the child that Rachel gave birth to. So we’re essentially seeing Yaakov is in a similar situation to Rachel at that moment. Rachel is giving birth to Binyamin, he's leaving her body, and she is dying from that. And here we have Yaakov, and we know happens. They have this whole conversation, but ultimately, Binyamin does leave.  And what you pointed out is that Binyamin leaving Yaakov’s house…it's like, Yaakov is going to die from that.

Ari: Right, it's like this perfect middah k’neged middah (measure for measure). Like, what Yaakov caused to happen to Rachel is now about to happen to him, and it seems like it's about to happen until Yehudah steps in and stops fate in its tracks and saves the day.

How It All Began

Ari: You know, it’s interesting. If you think about what the most immediate thing that brought about Yaakov losing his children was, it was actually also a fight.

Tikva: Yeah, that's true. A fight between the brothers.

Ari: Right, which maybe had some unintended consequences for Yaakov, but the brothers probably didn't mean to hurt him the way they did. And then, if you think backwards, this all started with the fight between Yaakov and Lavan, which really kind of came to a head when Lavan chased after Yaakov. But why was Lavan so mad chasing after Yaakov? It was partly the idols, but there was a much bigger thing that was on his mind, which was…?

Tikva: Yaakov had run away with his daughters, and I believe that's what Lavan says. Lavan had lost his children, in a sense.

Ari: Right, Lavan had lost his children. They were taken away from him before he was ready. He wasn't ready for them to leave him yet. It's almost like Lavan had this, like, “early birth” kind of experience too. And then, if you keep working backwards and you think, well, how did it go before this? There was another fight between people. You had Yaakov and Eisav who were fighting, and that also led to someone leaving their parents. Yaakov left their parents because of the fight between Yaakov and Eisav, and what's the language, you know, it uses there? It's the first word of our parsha, right? וַיֵּצֵא. Yaakov went out. He wasn't just going out from the land of Canaan. He was also going out from his parents, in that same language.

So we have a cycle of: Fight, children being forced to go out; fight, children being forced to go out; fight, children being forced to go out. And it's just like this horrible, terrible cycle which eventually, at the end of Bereishit, gets stopped; and Yehudah does what he does to stop it and Yosef does what he does to stop it.

Tikva: Yeah, you just have a series of fights and leaving, fights and leaving. And again, we can, like, go through it and mark off who we think is responsible, who we think is collateral damage. But I would say, when you have a family like this and this is your family history, there's a lot of collateral damage in that, right? Like, there's a lot of people getting hurt, for sure.

So Ari, this is fascinating. We ended up jumping all over Genesis. I just want to take a minute to pause and think back to what we've seen. So you showed us these laws in Mishpatim, and we saw that they seem to actually apply to cases in Bereshit, and it seems that the core case is Rachel's death. That seems to be our cornerstone, I would say, right? Like, we have a woman who's pregnant, who dies in labor. And what we've seen is that that death itself is actually part of this larger fight between Lavan and Yaakov. And then we were continuing the implications of that, right?

Okay, so if this story in Shemot lines up to the story between Lavan, and we just follow through on our Cast of Characters, Yaakov seems to be the person who is then the person who you would expect to be punished. And what you’ve shown me is that actually does come through, that does follow through. Yaakov does seem to be punished and he seems to be punished in this reciprocal way that lines up with the punishment that we've seen in Shemot. And you've shown me that this cycle of violence is actually part of the larger story, right? So we have this case in various ways repeating itself.

A New Read of Parshat Vayeitzei

Tikva: So I'm on board with you for all of that, but I remember you saying that, for you, what this really changed was how you see that fight between Lavan and Yaakov. And so, I'd love to go back to that.

Ari: Right. So for me, what these connections in Parshat Mishpatim made me realize is that this thing where Yaakov says this curse and it ends up leading to the death of Rachel, it's not this isolated thing. It was part of a fight, a fight between two people, neither of whom wanted to hurt Rachel, right?

Rachel was Lavan's beloved daughter and Yaakov's beloved wife. None of them wanted this to happen, but they were fighting. And when two people fight, there's going to be collateral damage. There's going to be unintended consequences. That's the nature of conflict and of fights, and I always read this story of this fight as being really one-sided.

Lavan’s this terrible guy. He's tricking Yaakov constantly, he's abusive, he gaslights him. When Lavan finally tries to leave, Lavan doesn't let him. And so, like, what choice does Yaakov have? Like, of course he has to run away in the middle of the night. How else is he going to get his family out of there? He seems totally justified and I think he is. And if I was in Yaakov's shoes, I don't know what else I would've done.

But, you know, then you could also look at Lavan's side of it, and you could see how heartbroken Lavan was. And he says: וַתִּגְנֹב אֶת־לְבָבִי — You've stolen my heart. And however justified one side may be, a fight is a fight.

And the way Parshat Mishpatim shows it is, it doesn't say what the fight's about. It doesn't say who started the fight. It says there was a fight. And not just “he hits a woman.” They hit a woman. Because to a certain extent, like, anyone who's involved in this fight is responsible for the damage that is caused.

And you know, this has unintended consequences for Lavan, it has unintended consequences for Yaakov and for Rachel, and even for the next generation as this cycle of conflict and children getting pulled away from their parents continues. 

Tikva: That’s interesting. So if you just read Genesis without Shemot, one of the things you're saying is, Yaakov would look like an innocent victim himself. He would look like someone who's just trying to, you know, do what he can to have freedom, and Lavan's the bad guy.

But once you see all these parallels and you're lining, again, lining up the Cast of Characters, it hits you. Like, oh, Yaakov is not just an innocent player in this. He lines up with one of these two men who's having the fight. And in Shemot, the responsibility lies on both those men. Like we said, only one is punished, but in the language of נָגְפוּ, that plural language, there is a sense that these two people are responsible for this fight.

It makes you go back to Genesis and kind of check yourself and say, oh, wait, have I been going too easy on Yaakov? Because the implication in Shemot is that he is partnered with Lavan as one of the fighters. He is not just the innocent bystander in this episode. And so, yeah, I see that does actually really change your lens on Yaakov. You're giving Yaakov a lot more responsibility for the conflict with Lavan. 

Ari: Yeah, you know, and one of the things I think is so powerful about how the Torah does teach us is, it does it through this abstract case in Mishpatim. It doesn't say, like, here's the story of Yaakov and Lavan, and here's who was right and who was wrong, and here's what they should have done. It says two men are fighting, and they strike a pregnant woman, and it lets us think about that case in the abstract. And then we can find these parallels, and then apply them to the case of Yaakov and Lavan, and learn some things and use that language from the abstraction to deal with the more complicated case.

And then we can use all of that to give us language to try to deal with the situations in our own lives. And there's something that is really comforting about how the Torah validates the complexity of it all and validates that. You know, there isn't always one clear right answer.

Credits

This episode was recorded by: Ari Levisohn together with Tikva Hecht.

This episode was produced by Evan Weiner.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our production manager is Adina Blaustein.

Our senior editor is Ari Levisohn. 

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.