The Torah relates how the patriarch Yaakov, in his first night away from home, finds himself alone on a mountain. He takes some stones and places them under his head (Bereshit 28:11); in the morning there is just one stone (ibid., 28:18) and he consecrates it to God. This is the inspiration for a tale that is familiar to most children who attend Jewish schools. An aggadic tale, which Rashi includes in his commentary on the Torah, it is of ancient provenance, being cited in the Babylonian Talmud (Chullin 91b; see also Bereshit Rabbah 68:11). As the Talmud succinctly puts it:
All the stones gathered themselves together into one place and each one
said: “Upon me shall this righteous man rest his head”. Thereupon all [the
stones], a Tanna taught, were merged into one.
A small
child, hearing this tale in class, is likely to accept it as fact. Yaakov was such a good person that each stone
wanted to be the lucky one to have his head rest upon it—and there is nothing
strange about stones arguing with one another and shouting “me, me!” since that’s
what little children do too.
When that
same child becomes a teenager, this tale may be measured against an increased
degree of life experience and a hostile, if not cynical, stance towards the uncritical
acceptance of teachings. By this view, surely this tale is a complete
fabrication. Everybody knows that stones can’t talk, let alone argue; they are
the very embodiment of speechlessness. Nor do they have feelings. And how would
they have any clue as to who Jacob was anyway? Also, the merger of stones into
a single unit would be a most striking and impressive miracle so why, if this
event actually happened, would the Torah not spell it out for us instead of
waiting for a rabbi to infer it from a small grammatical quirk over a thousand
years later?
The stones
taken by Jacob were three in number. These stones represented the three pillars
upon which, according to Shimon HaTzaddik (Avot 1:2), the world stands: Torah (representing
mankind’s means of self-improvement), avodah (serving God) and gemillut
chasadim (acts of kindness towards others). A case can be made for each of these pillars
to be the foundational pillar, of greater importance than the others. Indeed,
the Tanach supplies the textual ammunition that supports the claim of each of
them. But God, by fusing the three into a single stone, teaches that, just as three
legs are needed in order to support any chair or table, so too does a combination
of Torah, service to God and cultivating good relations within mankind create the
condition of stability necessary for society to exist.
This is not just a message for society. According to the Maharal it is a message for the individual too, since each of us is our own little world. We have to get the balance right. Without attending to all three facets of our lives, we are each diminished as individuals.
