Lent Day Twenty Four

Reflecting back on yesterday's commentary on Rachel. As Jacob is on his death bed, dispensing blessings to his sons (and Ephraim and Mannaseh), he stumbles. Zornberg has a final paragraph on that passage on page 378 (of The Beginning of Desire). She writes:

"In Mahalral's reading, therefore, heroic complexity, a kind of tragic optimism, radiates from the figure of Rachel, buried 'by the way.' It is this painful radiance, I suggest, that overwhelms Jacob's memory, just at the moment when he is about to synthesize the exiled fragments of his world. The thought of Rachel becomes a mirror, reflecting, same and yet inverted, some of his own deepest dilemmas. For, if she could tolerate the diffractions of her experience, Jacob, it seems, cannot. Rachel can hold a position at the margin between reality and appearances, on the border between meaning and meaninglessness. For Jacob, the tension underlying such a position is sometimes unbearable. At the very moment of reintegration, it precipitates him into the blank."


http://www.visit-palestine.com/bet/places/rachel.htm
And notice with a Google search, the competing claims to this site by the road...