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Weekly D'Var Torah

D'var Torah 

"Every New Beginning” — Vayetzei and the Work of Letting Go – by Doug Dinwoodie

You can’t begin until you’re done.
We try to start the new thing while still gripping the old one, hoping momentum will hide what we haven’t released. We intuit that life moves in neat order -- beginning, middle, and end -- but that’s not how change actually unfolds. In truth, we must end first, then endure the messy middle, and only then do we earn the right to begin again.
Vayetzei won’t let Jacob -- or us -- pretend otherwise.
Jacob’s story begins not with a triumph, but with an ending. He’s leaving everything: home, family, his reputation, even his name. The blessing he tricked his father into giving has cost him nearly everything else he loves. He runs from Be’er Sheva toward Haran with nothing but fear and exhaustion to keep him company.
One night, alone in the wilderness, he dreams of a ladder rooted in the earth, its top reaching heaven, with angels “ascending and descending.” The order matters. The angels go up first, not down. The old ones leave before the new ones arrive. It’s a moment of pure transition -- no longer who he was, not yet who he will be.
This is the emotional terrain of what William Bridges called the Neutral Zone -- that hollow stretch between what’s ended and what hasn’t yet begun. The world around him has shifted; his heart hasn’t caught up. Jacob’s ladder isn’t simply a miracle of connection between heaven and earth. It’s a living picture of transformation. Angels travel both ways because that’s how growth works -- up and down, loss and renewal, confusion and clarity intertwined.
Like most transformations, it starts with disorientation. The blessing that once defined him now haunts him. He dreams not of promise but of movement -- angels shifting places, facts of life changing, heaven itself reorganizing. For a moment, there’s nothing to hold onto, just the sound of wings trading posts.
Then Jacob wakes and keeps walking, straight into the hardest part of his life. In Haran, he’s deceived by Laban, tricked into marrying Leah before Rachel, and entangled in twenty years of shifting deals and disappointments. It’s the perfect mirror to his earlier life: the deceiver becomes the deceived. Life holds up the reflection and waits for him to notice.
This is how endings teach. The old Jacob -- the one who schemed, grasped, and manipulated -- has to burn out before the new one, Israel, can be born. Transformation doesn’t arrive with trumpets; it arrives through attrition. The ego gets tired. The tricks stop working. The ladder is still there, but you start to realize the angels are climbing through you.
And just when it seems like nothing’s happening, the earth shifts under your feet. The text says God was in that place, but Jacob “did not know it.” That line captures the paradox of transition: presence is often clearest when we feel most alone. The moment the old story dissolves, we assume we’ve lost our way, when in fact, we’re finally on it.
If you’ve ever gone through a major shift -- leaving a job, ending a relationship, changing a habit -- you’ve lived this pattern. There’s always that instinct to skip to the “new.” But the new can’t take root while the old still occupies the soil. You can’t hold onto what’s ending and expect something living to grow in its place. The angels in Jacob’s vision understood this; they ascend first. The old energy clears, making room for what comes next.
This is the honesty of Vayetzei: it refuses to romanticize change. The Torah doesn’t skip over the messy middle, it dwells there. God doesn’t speak every day; sometimes the guidance is in the silence. The dream isn’t a promise of constant ascent, it’s an invitation to keep moving even when you can’t tell whether you’re going up or down.
Because beginnings aren’t shiny. They’re usually disguised as endings that overstayed their welcome. The work of transformation is to stay present long enough for the shift to complete -- to stop clutching what’s over and make space for what wants to be born.
When Jacob wakes from his dream, he says, “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it.” It’s not just recognition -- it’s rebirth. The man who lay down running now rises rooted. The fugitive becomes a pilgrim. He doesn’t build a tower or declare victory; he simply names the place holy. Jacob’s revelation isn’t that God showed up, but that he himself finally did. And that’s the real transformation -- not crossing into new land, but seeing the same land with new eyes. The ending has done its work. The new beginning has begun.
So maybe Vayetzei isn’t about climbing toward heaven. Maybe it’s about clearing space for heaven to descend. The angels go up first. The sky empties. And only in that quiet, stripped-down moment -- when the old story is done and the new one hasn’t yet begun -- does something holy finally have room to arrive.
And if you’re feeling stuck -- if you sense it’s time to move toward something new -- remember to put away the old first. Turn off the lights, thank what has served its purpose, and move on. Acknowledge and mourn the past. Bury it if needed. Because endings, handled with care, are what make beginnings real.

Shabbat Shalom!

Thu, November 27 2025 7 Kislev 5786