Not Missing The Flatlands

What was Yaakov's nature? Was he an Ish Tam, as he's described as a boy, sitting with his face buried in a book? When he meets Lavan and says he's a brother, Chazal hear him saying; "I'll play ball however you want. You want to shoot straight, fine. You want to play crooked with me, then I'll be playing you move for move. Could it be there was a process Yaakov went through? How would you describe his process?

Do you think that in life we have to go through a process, similar to the one Yaakov did? Could it be that the dealings with Yaakov and Lavan were necessary to make him who he was? To make the Jewish People who we are as a group and as individuals?

Did you ever notice that Lavan means white and Edom means red? What can we glean from this about different types of adversaries? What do you think of the saying "man's inhumanity against man?"

When my friend Seth Berman left the theater with his father, as a kid, after seeing Bang The Drum Slowly his father turned to him. Then he said, "that move was about man's inhumanity against man." Sounds right.

Can someone small or old or feeble still act in an inhumane way? Are big and loud and tough talkers more dangerous or just more scary (or neither) (or both)? Did you ever meet someone with a tough style and find that they're very compassionate? Did you ever encounter someone who proves to be dangerous who smiles and speaks in terms of endearments?

I sit on a balcony of an suburban looking home built incongruously at the edge of the camp grounds that are hosting me this week. The days here have been rich. My time here always reminds me of Magic Mountain. It's about a man who goes to visit a sanatorium and gets taken in by the life and world apart. As Wikipedia puts it: "In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium."