Jacob Afflicted From Youth but Never Overcome

Most people read Psalm 129, "Many times they have afflicted me from my youth," as the collective voice of Israel speaking about its national history. The rabbis heard it differently. They heard it as Jacob speaking in the first person, recounting his own life, and then discovering that his biography is the template for every generation that comes after him.

The Aggadat Bereshit commentary, preserved from approximately the 9th or 10th century CE, opens the reading with a surprising layering. The Assembly of Israel speaks first, connecting the "embittered their lives" of Exodus 1:14, the Egyptian slave labor, to the affliction of youth in the Psalm. Then Moses and Aaron appear as the two supports between whom the people endure. Then comes the sea: "They rebelled at the sea, the Sea of Reeds" (Psalm 106:7). But even there, even in the rebellion, the right hand of God shattered the enemy (Exodus 15:6).

In the wilderness, both the adversary and the yetzer hara (יֵצֶר הָרָע, the evil inclination) pressed against Israel. "And the Lord afflicted the people" (Exodus 32:35) after the golden calf. The counts of the people that bookend the wilderness years bracket the suffering on both sides. Through all of it, Jacob says: they were not able to overcome me. Neither the hand of God's discipline nor the hand of the evil inclination finished the work. I am still here.

Then the midrash narrows from the national story to the individual. Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, stands and makes his accounting. He begins with Esau. From the womb, the older brother was a threat. The struggle before birth (Genesis 25:22) was the first affliction of youth. Then Laban, who deceived Jacob for twenty years, substituting one daughter for another, changing his wages ten times, using him until Jacob's own initiative and God's intervention finally freed him (Genesis 31:38-41). Then the night at the ford of the Jabbok, wrestling with a being whose nature the Torah does not fully clarify, coming away with a limp that Jacob carried for the rest of his life. Then the disappearance of Joseph, the twenty-two years of believing his son was dead, the grief that Jacob refused to relinquish (Genesis 37:35). Then the hostage-taking of Simeon and later the demand for Benjamin.

And yet, Jacob says to God: "See, I have not caused you to suffer before me" (Genesis 48:11). The translation is contested, but the midrash reads it as Jacob's acknowledgment that despite everything, God has not abandoned him, and he has not abandoned God. The afflictions from youth did not produce the rupture they were trying to produce.

The Midrash Aggadah tradition makes Jacob's testimony the interpretive key for the Psalm and for the national history that follows. The Jewish people in exile are not suffering something unique to themselves. They are living Jacob's biography at a collective scale. Pharaoh was Esau scaled up. Rome was Laban with legions. The evil inclination that led Israel to sin in the wilderness is the same force that operates in every generation and every individual who has ever tried to hold onto something good under sustained pressure.

But the affliction from youth, in Jacob's telling, is not the last word. "They were not able to overcome me." That sentence is the thing Jacob wants his children to carry forward. They will try. They will keep trying. The plowmen will plow long furrows across your back (Psalm 129:3). But the Lord is righteous, and the Lord will cut the cords of the wicked (Psalm 129:4). The furrows end. The ropes break. Jacob knew this because he had lived it repeatedly, and he needed his descendants to know it too, so that when they were in the middle of the furrow, they would remember that the furrow has an end.