Dreaming a Stairway to Heaven
An atheist reads the Bible
And it’s whispered that soon
If we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason.—Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven
I n the 28th chapter of the book of Genesis, the patriarch Jacob, forefather of the Israelite people, is fleeing for his life. Bedding down for the night, he dreams a dream that fills him with awe and wonder. Even to an atheist like me, the dream speaks a deep truth about the mystery of existence. You don’t have to take the Bible literally to understand its meaning and the message it conveys.
Growing up in his father Isaac’s tents in Beersheba, Jacob has always been overshadowed by his bigger, stronger brother, Esau. Although they’re fraternal twins, the two brothers could not be more unlike. Esau—who emerged from the womb first and so is accorded the privileged title of firstborn (bakhor in Hebrew)—is brawny and vigorous, a man of the fields, a skilled archer and hunter. The boys’ father, Isaac, loves feasting on the fresh-killed game he brings home from his hunts. Their mother, Rebecca, is partial to Jacob: quiet and withdrawn, a watcher, a thinker, a homebody who prefers sticking close to the family tents.
Daddy Isaac is a wealthy man, rich in flocks and herds, cattle and sheep, goats and camels, but he’s old and blind and nearing the end of his days. By the laws of that time and place, a man’s worldly estate, when he dies, is divided equally among his sons (daughters, of course, don’t count), with the firstborn son to receive a double portion. As there are only two sons, this means that Esau stands to receive two-thirds of the inheritance and Jacob one-third.
But he’s a sly one, that Jake. First he exploits his brother’s rash, impulsive nature to dupe him into trading his double inheritance, the firstborn’s birthright, for a bowl of lentil stew. (Esau may be quick with a bow, but with his wits, not so much.) Then comes the final provocation: Isaac, on his deathbed, sends Esau out to hunt him one last feast of venison, to give him the strength to rise from his bed and confer his final paternal blessing on his bakhor, his firstborn son.
Now this is no small thing, this blessing. This is the Covenant of Abraham: the very blessing that Isaac’s father, Abraham, received from Yahweh, Lord and Creator of the World, promising to multiply his seed into a nation as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the seashore, and to bestow on them the land of Canaan for a dwelling place. Abe passed the blessing to Isaac, and now Ike is preparing to pass it on to the next generation. Rebecca is determined to see that it goes to her favorite, Jacob, instead of that patently unworthy shlemiel Esau. While Esau is out chasing deer, she schemes to exploit the old man’s blindness and have Jacob impersonate Esau and usurp the blessing for himself.
When Esau returns from his hunt and discovers the deception, he is understandably enraged. But it’s too late, the deed is done. He vows to wait until Isaac is gone, and then, as soon as they’re finished sitting shiva (mourning) for the old man, to slay his brother and reclaim his rightful inheritance and blessing. Rebecca, eavesdropping as usual, overhears the threat and rushes to warn Jacob to run for his life to the protection of her brother, Jake’s uncle Laban, back in her homeland of Haran.
So to escape his brother’s wrath, Jacob sets out alone on the long trek from Beersheba, on the edge of the Negev desert in the south of Canaan (negev means “south” in Hebrew), all the way up north to Haran on the upper Euphrates in present-day Turkey or Syria, a journey of hundreds of miles:
A s the sun is setting one evening, Jacob decides to stop and camp for the night near the Canaanite town of Luz. He stretches out on the ground, rests his head on the nearest stone, and dreams. In the dream, a ladder or stairway (sulam in Hebrew) stands on the earth, with its head touching the heavens and angels of God ascending and descending on it:
And there at the top of the ladder (or next to it, or next to him, depending on how you read the Hebrew) stands Yahweh Himself, repeating the promises He once made to Jacob’s Grandpa Abe: to multiply his seed like the dust of the earth and to give them the very land on which Jacob now lies sleeping. He promises further to watch over him wherever he goes and bring him safely back to his father’s house.
Waking from his dream, Jacob is overcome with fear and awe (the same Hebrew word, yir’ah, means both):
Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I knew it not! How awesome [or fearful] is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven!
He takes the stone on which he laid his head, anoints it with oil (a sign of sanctity or holiness), and sets it up as a pillar to mark the spot where the stairway to Heaven rested on the ground. He names the place Bethel (“House of God”); in later times it was to become one of the central shrines of the idolatrous northern cult of the Golden Calf, set up in opposition to the Jerusalem temple by the traitor Jeroboam [I Kings 12:28–33]. For generations to come, Israelites would continue to worship at the spot Jacob marked as the house of God.
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide.
Above the earth is spread the sky,
No higher than the soul is high.The heart can push the sea and land
Farther apart on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two
And let the face of God shine through.But east and west will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat, the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence
When I read that story, I can’t help thinking that Jacob doesn’t understand his own dream. (Maybe he needs his favorite son Joseph, the Reader of Dreams, to interpret it for him.) I’ve written elsewhere that I’m an atheist who believes in God:
As I hope I made clear in that earlier piece, I’m not talking about some invisible puppeteer in the sky who scratches His beard one morning and says, “I think I’ll create the heavens and the earth,” who talks to people on mountaintops and dictates rulebooks for them to follow, or impregnates virgins with progeny who walk on water and miraculously rise from the dead. Not this guy:
Not this guy, either:
No, the God I’m talking about is subtler, more austere, more elusive than that. God is not a “He” (or a “She,” or even a “They”). In my earlier piece, I referred to the Essence of Being; another way to put it is the Truth Beyond Understanding. The Hindu scriptures simply call it That: the thing, the source, the Fount of Existence, whatever it is that causes the world to be. To the Kabbalists (Jewish mystics), it is the Ein Sof (“Without End”). The ancient Chinese sage Lao-Tse speaks of the Tao, the Way: God is the Way Things Are.
This inscrutable mystery at the heart of existence was already beyond human comprehension in Jacob’s day, four millennia ago; how much more so the cosmos revealed to us by today’s science. A universe billions of years old, of trillions of galaxies, each containing trillions of stars, must surely be teeming with worlds, scenes, phenomena stranger than our wildest imagination. The full panoply of human existence, all our undertakings and concerns, our hopes and fears, our triumphs and failings, are but the blink of an eye, the drop of a pin in these vast echoing halls of space and time: as James Joyce put it in Ulysses, a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.
And yet That, the power that moves the stars and stones and quarks and quasars, has also brought us into being on this negligible speck of rock spinning around one of those trillion trillion stars. Sentient creatures capable of contemplating the cosmos in wonder. We are in God and God is in us. We are part of the Way Things Are.
This, to me, is the meaning of Jacob’s dream. The heavens and the earth—the vast, impersonal cosmos and the intimate realities of human existence—are somehow connected, knit together in the same fabric. The stairway between them is everywhere. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas — one of the ones that didn’t make it into the official canon — Jesus teaches that the Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. As Jacob himself exclaims in the story, “Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I knew it not!”
Marking the spot with a monumental pillar, building a shrine and calling it the House of God, misses the point. In the words of the late religious teacher Alan Watts, it’s like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road. The whole message of the story is that this is nowhere in particular: just some random rock in the wilderness where Jacob happened to lay his head. The house of God is everywhere; the gate of Heaven is anywhere you happen to be. You don’t need to go searching for the stairway: wherever you go, there you are.
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“Dreaming a Stairway to Heaven” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
