Parashat Va-yetzei 3-Dec-11

3) (30:24-43) Jacob wants to return home to Canaan, but his father-in-law Laban dissuades him. Jacob stays, and succeeds in greatly enriching himself.

 Mandrakes: Symbols of Wrestling and Reconciliation
Rabbi Philip Ohriner

Genesis 30:7-8
And Bilhah, Rachel’s slave girl, conceived again and bore  a second son to Jacob. And Rachel said, “In awesome grapplings I have grappled with my sister and, yes, I won out.” And she called his name Naphtali.

Genesis 32:25
And Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.

Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
What Rachel sees reflected in Leah’s soul are the unloved parts of herself. We don’t read of Rachel as the unloved one. Yet, her father offers her older sister to her beloved Jacob, callous to the feelings of his youngest daughter. God has presumably blessed Rachel with beauty…Yet, God does not bless her with the children for whom she yearns. She can claim neither her father’s love nor God’s. Her anger, her jealousy of Leah, is self-hatred for the love she cannot find in herself. Rachel is fearful of recognizing that the unloved Leah is not only a sister but herself. And Leah is fearful of recognizing that the barren Rachel is not only her sister, but indeed herself. The fullness of her womb does not compensate for the emptiness in her life.

Genesis 30:14-15
Once, at the time of the wheat harvest, Reuben came upon some mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah,  “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.” But she said to her,  “Was it not enough for you to take away my husband, that you would also take my son’s mandrakes?” Rachel replied, “I promise, he shall lie with you tonight, in return for your son’s mandrakes.”

Zohar 1:156b
It was not the mandrakes that made Rachel bear children. Rather, God used them as an instrument for procuring the birth of a child (for Leah), Issachar…For Rachel at first held fast to Jacob and did not let him go to Leah, as it is written: “Was it not enough for you to take away my husband?!” But afterwards Rachel said: “I promise, he will lie with you tonight, in return for you son’s mandrakes.” Thus the mandrakes were responsible for the birth of Issachar.

Midrash Hagadol 1:197
Now God remembered Rachel; God heeded her and opened her womb (30:22):Now all the wives of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah, united their prayers with the prayer of Jacob, and together they besought God to remove the curse of bareness from Rachel, On Rosh Hashanah, the day wherein God sits in judgment upon the inhabitants of the earth, God remembered Rachel and granted her a son.