His domestic life is carefully examined and his troubles and feelings are in full view; almost all of his story involves the mediation, often unsuccessful, of the rivalries and competitiveness within his family, with his brother, his wives, his children. He engages in a battle of wits with his uncle, at first being outsmarted, and then learning the game and winning. He arrives in Haran , the home that Abraham left, alone and he departs with a huge family. But the trajectory of his life is not simply uphill.
His relationship with his family is constantly troubled. We suspect that the love relationship with Rachel has gone aground; their dialogue certainly seems less than loving. His eldest, Reuben, disrespects him.
His disagreements with Laban almost put his life in danger. Fear and disappointment never leave him. Of all the patriarchs, then, Jacob is the most human, suffering ups and downs, living through successful accomplishment and suffering tragedy.
He is the most human, the most like us. And we are called the People Israel because his are precisely the most human of tasks with which we are to engage: How to live with one another, how to love, how to raise families, how to create community. That is the stuff of Jewish law, the halakha, the path which we are to create in order to build a life that aims toward God.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, begins his classic work, the Tanya , with a discussion of the Beinoni , the middling person, neither the one who is fully righteous nor the one who is evil. Although many Hasidic masters placed great emphasis on the development of the tzadik , the religious master, Schneur Zalman seems to be arguing that in the end, even those who seek a life of extreme piety are simply middling people, made up of flesh and blood, tossed about by circumstance, subject to mixed motives, trying to work through relationships and be decent husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers.
Thus two identities, Israelite and Judahite, once discrete, became synonymous. While the Bible usually uses "Israel" to mean the northern kingdom, elsewhere the name is commonly used to refer to both Israel and Judah together, and less commonly, to Judah alone.
How the modern state almost came to be named 'Tzabar'. As for the modern State of Israel, its beginnings lie in the 19th century, when the Jewish nationalist movement Zionism took shape. Presided over by David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, the small group decided that a Jewish state would be declared independent on the day the British left. According to the only source extant for the proceedings, an article by Palestine Post writer Moshe Brilliant, published a year later, at first the group wanted to go with the name Judah, the name of the ancient Jewish Kingdom.
But this name was rejected, after some discussion, since most of historic Judah fell outside the borders of the nascent state according to the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine that was on the table at the time.
The name "Israel" won by 7 to 3. As for who suggested the name, Brilliant says that it was Ben-Gurion himself. It is possible however that as he wrote a year after the event, he got this detail wrong. And so it was.
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Palestinians gather to show their support to a vessel flotilla that set out Monday from the northern Gaza Strip in hopes of breaking the decade-long blockade of the coastal enclave. Israel in red, Palestinian-majority territories in pink. Vardion Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century.
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