The Wound That Awakens Us
The dream before the wrestling.
A ladder between worlds.
A woman at the riverbank, held by her dogs and her own clarity.
This is the image inside this week’s Torah as Mirror —
the moment where movement becomes revelation
and the wound becomes the doorway.
Every week of writing Torah as Mirror changes me in ways I don’t always expect.
Some weeks are gentle.
Some ask me to revisit truths I thought I had already faced.
And then there are the weeks — like this one — that ask for something deeper.
A few nights ago, my almost-17-year-old son looked at me and asked,
“Why did God make Jacob disabled?”
It wasn’t a theological question.
It was a human one — full of curiosity, tenderness, and the kind of honesty only a teenager can offer.
And I realized I didn’t want to give him the reflexive answers people reach for.
I wanted to give him something true.
Something worthy.
Something that honors disabled bodies — including my own — as places where wisdom lives, not where meaning goes to die.
So I wrote this essay.
And then rewrote it.
And rewrote it again.
Because I wanted to answer him with my whole life,
not just my words.
This piece asked me to be vulnerable,
to be steady,
to be brave enough to be known,
and brave enough to name the holiness inside bodies the world often misreads.
I hope, as you read, that something in it helps you feel closer to your own story —
your own wounds, your own thresholds, your own becoming.
Thank you for meeting me here.
TORAH AS MIRROR
WEEK SEVEN — Vayetze
The Wound That Awakens Us
This is where Torah meets the inner world —
where the old stories start speaking in the language of our lives,
and where each of us, in our own way, gets to begin again.
You don’t need to be religious to enter this text.
You don’t need Hebrew, ritual, or familiarity.
You only need a bit of curiosity about your own life —
a willingness to ask:
What part of me is trying to grow?
What truth have I been circling but not quite naming?
These ancient stories aren’t relics.
They’re blueprints for the soul
for anyone who’s ever felt caught between who they’ve been
and who they’re becoming.
And if you know what it is to carry a wound that changed your path,
you already belong inside this week’s portion.
Before Jacob wrestles in the night,
he dreams of a ladder rooted in the earth with messengers traveling up and down —
a kind of spiritual traffic between what’s conscious and what’s waiting underground.
A ladder can be a symbol of access,
but it can just as easily mark the places many of us can’t climb.
Torah is never only literal.
The ladder is an inner map —
a way of showing how we move between states of mind,
between memory and becoming,
between hope and fear,
between the stories we inherited
and the ones we’re ready to live.
And the ladder asks each of us:
Where in me is something trying to rise?
Where in me does something need to come down and be grounded?
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The Wound That Re-Shaped His Gait
Some stories settle into the body before the mind has words for them.
Jacob’s night at the river is one of those stories.
He is alone — not casually alone, but the kind of alone that arrives when there’s nowhere left to go and the past is suddenly at the front door.
And that’s where the mysterious figure finds him —
angel, shadow, Self, Presence —
the part of life that won’t let us dodge the truth anymore.
The encounter is physical.
A single touch to the socket of his thigh.
A dislocation the Torah names directly.
A wound that re-shapes his gait for the rest of his life.
This isn’t punishment.
It isn’t shame.
It’s an awakening — the kind that rearranges the inner world and leaves nothing untouched.
And in that altered movement, he receives a new name:
Israel — the one who wrestles and refuses to turn away.
Torah could have given us a patriarch who floats above suffering.
Instead, it gives us someone whose authority begins in the body,
in vulnerability,
in transformation.
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The Body as the Site of Truth
The Torah doesn’t soften the blow.
It says clearly: Jacob’s hip was dislocated.
His movement was permanently changed.
The truth lives in the body.
This is where the story intersects with mine.
Unlike Jacob, I didn’t meet disability in a single night.
I met it at birth — cerebral palsy threaded into my earliest moments.
Not one wound, but many thresholds:
surgeries that felt endless,
hospitals that became familiar,
rooms, bathrooms and hallways that weren’t built for the body I live in,
doorways I learned to measure before I knew the word “access.”
People often imagine disability as limitation.
But I know it as a landscape —
one that has taught me clarity, adaptability, precision, and truth.
Jacob’s wound was sudden.
Mine is lifelong.
But the pattern is the same:
the body becomes the place where our truth settles.
And sometimes the thing we think will break us
is the very thing that gives us our life.
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Kabbalah and Disability — A Different Kind of Light
Kabbalah offers a lens that speaks directly to bodies — all bodies — with reverence.
The mystics teach that every person is a vessel shaped to hold a particular frequency of divine radiance. Difference is not deficiency. It is intentionality. The Shekhinah, the indwelling Presence, is said to dwell closest to those whom the world misreads, not because those people are “broken,” but because their openness allows light to enter in ways others may miss.
In this view, disability is never punishment, karma, or correction. It is a form of sacred embodiment that reveals hidden light — the kind that escapes ordinary assumptions. Lurianic Kabbalah describes some vessels as configured to hold intensities that a more “typical” shape could not contain. Hasidic tradition teaches that the deepest spiritual movement happens through intention and presence — realms where physical ability matters far less than the honesty of the heart.
Seen through this lens, Jacob’s bodily change becomes something else:
not diminishment, but attunement.
not impairment, but revelation.
a shift that opens him to what was always there.
The question is not “What happened to him?”
but “What became possible through him?”
And suddenly, the story belongs to all of us.
⸻
The Morning That Names Us
The blessing doesn’t land in the dark.
It arrives at daybreak —
that quiet moment when you can finally see what’s been true all along.
Jacob rises with a changed gait.
A wound that changes how he crosses thresholds,
how he is known,
how he knows himself.
And suddenly, his dream of the ladder makes more sense:
Some ascents aren’t upward —
they’re inward.
Some descents aren’t collapses —
they’re returns.
The ladder showed the psyche’s movement long before the wound made it visible.
Our lives aren’t shaped only by what lifts us —
they’re shaped by what grounds us,
what humbles us,
what roots us in the truth of our own bodies.
For those of us who don’t climb physical ladders,
Torah widens the metaphor beautifully:
We climb in insight.
We climb in courage.
We climb in clarity.
We climb in the willingness to tell the truth.
We descend when we integrate what we’ve learned,
when we return to ourselves,
when we stand in the life we actually have.
And every movement counts.
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The Psychology of the Riverbank
In my work as a psychologist, I sit with people at their own riverbanks —
moments when the old way no longer works
and the new way hasn’t fully formed.
Jacob’s night mirrors the inner world:
Attachment theory shows us the early hunger —
a father who didn’t see him,
a mother who saw too much.
Developmental psychology tells us the river is individuation —
the point where borrowed identities finally fall away.
Jung teaches that the nighttime figure is both Shadow and Self —
the parts demanding to be integrated.
And disability studies affirms what Torah whispers:
the body is not the failure.
The body is the witness.
The body is the truth-teller.
Every week in Torah as Mirror, I open these stories wide enough
for someone to recognize themselves —
their river,
their wound,
their threshold,
their blessing.
Not because we share the same story,
but because we all know what it means
to be changed in ways we didn’t choose
and still find meaning there.
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And Then He Says the Line That Breaks the World Open
There is one moment in this portion that stands like a hinge —
a single sentence that reveals everything Jacob has been running from
and everything he is finally ready to see.
After the dream, after the ladder,
after the messengers rise and descend through him as much as around him,
he wakes and says:
“Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it.”
It’s one of the most honest lines in all of Torah.
He’s not making a theological statement.
He’s confessing a human one.
He is realizing that the Holy was present
even in the places he feared,
even in the places he misread,
even in the places he thought were abandoned.
The ground didn’t change.
His awareness did.
And that is the truth that threads through this story —
and through ours:
Sometimes we only recognize the sacred
after the wrestling,
after the wound,
after the night-long truth-telling,
after the body shifts and forces us to feel what we once outran.
“God was here,
and I did not know it.”
Every one of us has a place like that —
a moment we misjudged,
a room we thought was empty,
a threshold we didn’t recognize as holy
until the light caught it from the right angle.
Jacob’s words remind us that revelation is not always thunderous.
Sometimes it is retrospective.
Sometimes it arrives hours, years, or decades later,
when the soul finally has the courage to say:
I was not alone.
I just didn’t know how to see it yet.
And that is where the blessing begins.
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CLOSING BLESSING
May your life reveal its own ladder —
not the kind built of rungs,
but the kind built of awareness.
May you rise into clarity
and settle into embodiment
with equal honesty.
May your movements —
in mind, in heart, in body —
be honored as holy.
And may the wound you carry
be the place where light flows in.
And when morning finally calls you by your new name,
luminous and absolutely divine,
may you arrive at the gate:
changed and ready to rise.
Shabbat Shalom!
Love,
Jenny