Sidrah
Divided camps – this week’s parashah: Vayishlach
“Jacob was greatly frightened; in his anxiety, he divided the people with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two camps” Genesis 32:8
December 4, 2025 12:09
“Jacob was greatly frightened; in his anxiety, he divided the people with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two camps” Genesis 32:8
December 4, 2025 12:09Known to Americans as dodgeball, Mahanayim is a team game once popular in Israel. Like so many other aspects of popular Israeli culture, the name of the game echoes, the name of this game is biblical in origin.
The Hebrew language can express the idea of a pair in one word. Two hands are yadayim, for example, and two weeks are sh’vuayim. At the end of last week’s Torah portion, Jacob perceives the presence of a celestial host, a kind of base camp for angels paralleling a human place. He names the location Mahanayim, meaning “a pair of encampments”.
Commentators differ as to the camps to which the name refer, some suggesting that it is the location of the changing of the guard between foreign angels and those in charge of the Land of Israel. Others prefer to see it as a place of encounter between the heavenly and the terrestrial domains, where the camp of angels meets the camp of Jacob. In any case, the name denotes encounter, mutuality, collaboration.
At the start of this week’s portion, a few short verses after Mahanayim gets its name, Jacob is stricken by fear that his renewed encounter with his own brother will end disastrously. He devises a strategy likely to minimise the risk of fratricide. He splits his property into two camps, mahanot and concocts a plan to appease Esau.
Why use the form mahanayim to describe the first pair of camps but the more prosaic “two mahanot” for the second pair? In the first episode, Jacob is enraptured by an encounter with that which lies the natural world. In the second, he is anxious and terrified about what the future may hold.
When we, the descendants of Jacob, are confident and emboldened, two camps can be seen in mutuality, even when they are separated by ideological or metaphysical distance. When, however, we are plagued by existential fears, joined-up thinking eludes us.
While rhetorical appeals to unity abound, in these days of fear and anxiety it is hard to see our camps as mahanayim. Most of us, regardless of our political convictions, are living through this tempestuous period with a sense of confused disjuncture rather than constructive diversity, crisis instead of osmosis. We are not playing mahanayim with our adversaries, but rather discrete games of mahanot.
What needs to happen to transform confusion into joined-up thinking? How do mahanot become mahanayim? In our current moment, simple platitudes of unity are not equal to the challenge. Jacob’s story offers a clue to how we may proceed: check for the presence of angels, and strive to hold our fears and anxieties in check.
Image: Jacob's encounter with Esau, Simon de Vos, 1641 (Wikimedia Commons
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