Wrestling With Angels

Introduction
 
 
GENESIS: AN ANCIENT BOOK OF MODERN WISDOM
 
Family relationships are inherently challenging and rife with conflict. Yet the family unit endures as the universal crucible in which we forge our identity. As microcosms of human interdependence, families embody our limitless capacity for love and competition, for betrayal and forgiveness. Novelists and playwrights have detailed the infinite variety of troubled families, and modern psychology has charted the obstacle course of the human soul that family relationships must navigate. But neither literature nor psychology has been able to satisfy our hunger for a spiritual identity and a system of values to guide our lives.
 
Three millennia before the writings of Tolstoy and Freud, the Book of Genesis chronicled one family’s multigenerational struggle to come to terms with the eternal themes of meaning and purpose. By exploring this saga of the first family of the Bible, we can discover how their conflicts and transcendent spiritual vision reflect our own contemporary search for a purposeful life. What makes the first family of Genesis uniquely contemporary and compelling? How do the lives of these people speak to us today? How do their struggles illuminate our personal issues of identity, meaning, and purpose? There are no simple answers, no pat formulas for salvation. But what the Book of Genesis does offer is a comprehensive framework for exploring human nature and for embracing adult life with all its rewards and responsibilities.
 
Both the human condition and family dynamic have changed remarkably little since ancient times. The men and women of Genesis are very much like you and me—lusting for pleasure and power, dealing with sibling rivalry, and learning, by trial and error, how to be parents. They fail more often than they succeed. But it is through failing that they move forward, however painfully, in solving their problems. To the end, this family prevails by clinging to its faith in its spiritual identity. One generation is linked to the next by a shared commitment to a higher purpose that transcends the mundane aspects of its members’ lives, offering a code of behavior that curbs their worst instincts and gives expression to their highest ideals of compassion, love, and justice.
 
My love affair with the Hebrew Bible—also known as the Old Testament—began when I was a six-year-old schoolgirl in Haifa, Israel. Biblical studies were a daily part of school life, my treasured window into the adult world. The stories of the Bible were not fairy tales to me, but vivid human dramas with larger-than-life personalities. I learned about adult passion from David and Bathsheba, about jealousy from Sarah, about tenacity and enduring faith from Abraham, and about depression from Saul. Their Hebrew language was the language of my daily life. The land they walked on was the land that I hiked over and lived in. Early on I concluded that if I studied and internalized this Book, I could understand everything there was to know about life without ever having to leave my neighborhood.
 
I was grateful for the Bible’s total candor in portraying humanity with all its frailties and imperfections. Its characters embodied all the highest and lowest human drives—even the heroes, whom I learned to embrace without illusions and without feelings of personal inadequacy. As a teenager plagued by the usual array of adolescent insecurities, I was reassured by the knowledge that I, too, could err and still feel entitled to love and acceptance. In a very direct way, the Bible invited and empowered me to become an adult. By presenting life as it is, with all its contradictions and subtleties, the Bible guided me down the long, patient path of understanding and compassion. This path, which began with Bible study, eventually led me to my work as a psychotherapist.
 
Genesis tells the story of a people who believed in an abstract, transcendent God and embraced the concept of their creation in His image as fundamental to their identity. The horror of the Holocaust, which was the omnipresent backdrop to my adolescence and young adulthood, taught me how crucial a spiritual identity is to overcoming life’s adversities. Many of my immediate neighbors were refugees from Germany and, later, survivors of the death camps. They came to Israel with only what they carried on their backs—and inside their souls. As I was growing up, I watched them rebuild their lives from the ground up, building on whatever inner core of identity had survived. I couldn’t comprehend the horror of the Nazi death camps, and the Bible provided no absolute answers. But it gave me the courage at an early age to confront tough questions about human nature. The Bible demanded that I challenge both myself and my God for an explanation of evil and injustice in the world, as characters throughout the Bible do, from Abraham to Job.
 
Half a century later, and half a world away from Israel, the Bible is still the prism through which I view the world. The biblical characters and stories I first encountered as a child continue to shape my adult roles as psychotherapist, teacher, wife, mother, and friend.
 
While the Bible shows us that human nature has not changed since ancient times, the social framework of our lives is utterly transformed. The multigenerational family has virtually disappeared. And without it, we’ve become cut off from our cultural, moral, and spiritual roots. There has been much talk in recent years about family values, but little serious discussion about what family represents and why family values are worth preserving.
 
So much of modern life is devoid of human warmth or a sense of belonging. Ninety percent of what I do in my therapy practice involves helping my patients combat the alienation and anonymity they experience because of the breakup of old patterns of bonding in families and in the community. Every day I meet people adrift in the world without an inner compass—filled with self-doubt, empty of any sense of purpose. Many of them are successful professionally; some are very wealthy and powerful. I see them distanced from their families and with no real ties to their communities. Often their job descriptions have become the only anchors for their identities.
 
One way to counteract these feelings of anonymity is by going back and reading the Bible, beginning with the Book of Genesis. Enjoying it first of all, being entertained by it, and ultimately, being guided and enriched by the wisdom of this ancient text. Genesis offers us not only a realistic portrait of the human condition, but also a pragmatic, down-to-earth approach to leading a meaningful life. It shows how a family transmits its unique spiritual identity grounded in its faith from one generation to the next—and how that faith becomes a way of life. Not in the sense of an insurance policy against misfortune, but as a tool for overcoming fear, emptiness, loneliness, and cynicism.
 
For the past twenty years I’ve been teaching the Bible to groups seated around my dining room table, in the U.S. Senate, on Wall Street, and in a variety of other settings in Washington, DC, and New York. These groups are devoted to discussing the same Book over and over again. There is always more to uncover, in the Book and in ourselves. One of my classes has been meeting every Friday morning for twenty years. The same people, the same Book. But our lives are constantly changing, and so does our perspective on the Bible.
 
As the foundation of all Judeo-Christian theology and morality, the Bible has profoundly shaped who we are and how we view the world. Our country was founded on biblical values of equality and freedom, and our greatest leaders, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr., have harkened back to these biblical precepts to articulate their causes. But for the vast majority of secular Jews and Christians today, the Bible remains the great unread, undiscovered masterpiece of Western thought. The first goal of our book, then, is to retell the riveting story of the family of Genesis to a generation that has largely ignored or rejected the Bible.
 
As the first of the thirty-nine Books of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis offers an ideal starting point for an inquiry into who we are and what we can accomplish in life. Written in Hebrew over three thousand years ago, Genesis presents a remarkably contemporary overview of human character, personality, sexuality, and family relations. It offers us a comprehensive framework for exploring human nature and illuminates our own search for a purposeful life.
 
As its name implies, Genesis is a book of origins. Regardless of our religious orientation—secular or observant, Jew or Christian—the Bible speaks volumes to us about freedom, justice, and compassion. The Bible outlines a code of ethics, values, and spiritual reference points that are indispensable to a grounded existence. Without a map of moral and spiritual signposts, we walk through life at the mercy of every crisis, every human rejection, and every change in external circumstances.
 
Genesis is a survival story narrating humanity’s tenuous triumph over its self-destructive nature. The key to that survival, the lifeboat for humankind in a sea of anonymity and despair, is the family. While Genesis narrates the story of a particular clan, it teaches universal lessons about the resilience of individuals and of the family unit. It encourages us to rebuild our identity from the inside out, beginning with ourselves and the people we are closest to: our family and our immediate community. Most important, Genesis gives us the tools to reknit the fabric of our families and to rediscover the power of these most personal relationships.