December 6, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Vayishlach
Worry
December 6, 2025 — 16 Kislev 5786
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
I once met with a family after their beloved mother and grandmother had passed away. Her son shared that whenever he would visit her, she would say to him before he left, please call me to let me know you got home. One day, as he was taking leave, she said to him again: please call me to let me know you got home. He finally said: “Mom, I live in Newton. You live in Newton. We have both lived in Newton all our lives. I live 10 minutes away. And Mom, I am 62 years old! Do I still have to call?” And then he realized that for his mother, worrying was a form of love. She showed her love through her worry.
But worrying is not always a form of love. Sometimes worrying is about facing real fear. That is the story of our father Jacob in our portion this morning.
Twenty years after stealing Esau’s blessing, Jacob comes back home to Canaan, to face Esau, worried that his brother might still want to kill him for the sins of his youth. Jacob sends out messengers to find out the lay of the land. Their report is alarming. Esau is coming to meet Jacob, and he is bringing 400 men—arba me’ot ish—with him. 400 men? That sounds like an army! Jacob is terrified. What if these 400 men kill my family and me?
Worry is an inevitable part of life. What is our version of an army of 400 men?
Do we worry about how we are going to handle real loss and real pain? Somebody we love has passed on, how will we live without them?
Do we worry about our children not finding their way?
Do we worry about a serious health challenge that we or somebody we love is facing?
Do we worry about professional setbacks or financial woes?
What is a healthy way to handle legitimate worries?
As he faces his worry about these 400 men, Jacob role models three moves.
First, he talks to God. His first line is one of the most poignant in the whole Jewish cannon:
I am unworthy of all the kindness that You have so steadfastly shown Your servant [Jacob himself]: with my staff alone I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps. (Genesis 32: 11)
Twenty years ago I had nothing. Nothing but this stick. And now, I have a big family. Now I have all these children. Now I have all this wealth. Yes, I am worried about what will be, but I am grateful for what has been.
Katonti, thank you God for what I have. This word has been an anthem of the Jewish people. It is literally a rock song in Israel by Yonatan Razel. The spirit of Jacob’s words has animated the Jewish story especially in the mid-twentieth century. When Donniel Hartman was here a couple of years ago, he pointed to the heroism of Jews who were the survivor generation. They lost the world from which they came. They lost their loved ones. All they had left was their life, their courage, their resilience. And with that they rebuilt.
This week we paid a loving farewell to a woman who was born in pre-Hitler Poland in 1925, Rene Levy, Lew and Joanne Levy’s mother and mother in love. Rene lived to be 100 years old. She came with her mother and sister to America in 1937. Everybody else who stayed behind in Poland was murdered. Her extended family, her Hebrew school classmates, the Jews in her Polish village, all dead. But at 12 she came to America, she built a beautiful marriage, a beautiful home, a beautiful family of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
This voice of Jacob was not limited to European Jews. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, about 850,000 Jews were kicked out of Arab countries and Iran. That included 100,000
Jews who lived in Egypt in 1948. They were kicked out and dispossessed. They had to leave behind their homes, their assets, their money. That included Jacques Telio, our Bar Mitzvah Aaron’s beloved grandfather, who passed away several weeks ago. All he had when he was expelled from Egypt was the shirt on his back and the courage in his heart, and that enabled him to build a home, a business, a family, a life.
That is the force of katonti, Jacob’s first word, and the anthem of the Jewish story in the 20th and now 21st centuries. I am here, I am alive, thank you God.
Jacob’s second move: He prays. In fact he prays for a specific outcome. He prays that God save him from Esau and his army.
Praying for a particular outcome is a tricky business. On the one hand, it feels natural. So many of us reach out to God and pour out our heart’s deepest desires, yearnings, and needs. On the other hand, we have this gnawing doubt: does the world really work that way? If we pray to God for a particular result, does it make it more likely that the particular result will happen?
So, I often think about a teaching of the late Rabbi Harold Kushner, that when we pray to God not for a specific result, but for the courage to handle what is, that is a prayer to which God always answers yes.
I saw a vivid example of what this looks like from Rabbi Kushner himself. My late father in love Rabbi Arnold Goodman was a close friend of Rabbi Kushner and his late wife Suzette. One Sunday afternoon, when my father in love was in town, we went to visit Rabbi Kushner and his wife at their home at Orchard Cove in Canton. I saw on the coffee table a book that was a collection of Rabbi Kushner’s old sermons, sermons he had written many years ago as a younger rabbi. I am a huge fan of his sermons, and I did not have that volume. I asked him if by any chance he had an extra copy that he could give to a rabbi groupie, namely me. He said of course, and he gave me a volume of his sermons. I asked him—he was then in his 80s—how he felt about reading the sermons he had written in his younger years. He said he liked his old sermons, but he no longer has the ability to write them. I asked him how it feels to read sermons you once wrote that you could no longer write. I’ll never forget his answer. He said life is all about making peace with what just is. It just is. When we pray to God for the strength to make peace with what just is, God says yes to that prayer.
And Jacob’s third move, perhaps the most iconic, is he wrestles with the angel. What is the resonance of wrestling?
Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor, offers a useful angle here. He teaches his students about what he calls “cognitive reframing,” which is the act of changing the lens through which we view a problem. We look at a problem that causes us to worry, pause and ask ourselves: What else could it mean? Is there a way that this problem could be an opportunity?
For example, a student worries that they messed up a job interview and will now not get a job that they had hoped to get. Brooks offers a reframe: Instead of seeing the interview as a test that you failed, can you see it as practice, you are developing skills and learning from experiences so that you will do better at the next interview.
Wrestling is about reframing disappointment as an experience from which we learn and grow.
Which brings us back to Jacob. Whatever happened to that army of 400 men? We will never know why Esau brought 400 men with him, but we do know that when they reunite, Esau hugs and kisses Jacob, he does not kill him. Meaning that the thing Jacob worried about never came to pass. My late father used to say: 95% of the things we worry about never come to pass. I don’t know if his statistic is right, but the 400-man story reminds us that we often worry about things that do not come to pass.
For those worries that do come to pass, Jacob’s three moves are so helpful. Thank God for what is right in our life, starting with the very fact that I am alive. Pray to God for the courage and strength to accept what just is. Recast our pain as an experience from which we grow. Our next chapter can be deeply beautiful in its own way. Shabbat shalom.