I Am Not Jacob

Today I had the opportunity to attend the convocation "installing" my Ph. D. director and mentor into her new role as Dean at a local divinity school. It was a nice service, especially since it gave me an opportunity to hear her preach on a biblical passage I've always loved--the story of Jacob wrestling with God.

If I would have been a boy, apparently, my parents would have named me Jacob, after my grandfather. In high school and college, I took this would-have-been-name as a sign that it was OK to wrestle with belief about God, Bible, reality, etc. As a philosophy major, in fact, I reveled in the practice of questioning norms and accepted beliefs. It was a time of pushing against what I had been taught to believe and defining myself in opposition to family, church and others. In graduate school, I followed this trajectory toward wrestling with biblical texts, especially "difficult" texts . . . hence, my focus on the Book of Revelation. When I tell the story of how I came to study Revelation, in fact, I often shape the narrative around the theme of struggle: Having been raised in a church that embraced Revelation as unfolding around us, I chose to study Revelation as a way of disarming the text of its power to create division and imbue fear. (See evidence related to scriptural-fear-mongering below.)

Today, however, my mentor argued for reading the story of Jacob in a new light, shedding the tendency to idealize struggle. She suggested that our cultural valorization of struggle makes it difficult for us to see that Jacob's tendency toward opposition and winning almost made him loose sight of the divine. We read the text as Jacob having to wrestle the one that comes to him during the night. We fail to ask, what if Jacob had not struggled, not approached the other as an opponent. So intent was Jacob on battling the stranger, that he almost missed experiencing the other, the divine.

As I sat and listened to her talk about how our culture has embraced the notion of competition, how we look for opponents and assume others as enemies, I was struck by my tendency to view my self and my work in this way. I typically think of my approach to a text in contrast to another approach or reading, usually a reading that I understand to be dominant or dominating in some way. (Of course, part of this is related to my reading texts from a feminist perspective.) At times, I even approach texts, their contexts, the material I study as things to be mastered. I imagine scholarship and even teaching as wrestling against something or someone.

But, I need to remember, I am not Jacob. So, what if I began to think of the process of writing, teaching, working with texts in other ways, as something other than wrestling and struggle? What might those metaphors be?