For the past eleven years twenty or more of us have studied Torah for one hour at 9AM on Saturday morning.

Rather than finding the text repetitious, we continue to make joyful discoveries such as the fact that Jacob did not have to wait seven more years but actually got Rachel on credit, enjoyment now and pay later.

No wonder we are still reading the Torah after so many years - unedited and unchanged.

Regardless of the details, the problems is that Jacob was cheated out of seven (7) years of his life by his own uncle, Laban and he was saddled with a less desireable second wife that Laban palmed off on him. Laban was a crook and Jacob was so weak a patsy that he let himself be hoodwinked out of the prime of his life. If he had any guts at all, he would have beaten Laban half to death, left the x-virgin Leah (who was in on the con game) for Laban to worry about, and taken the beautiful Rachel away. Instead he stayed with his conniving uncle, allowing himself to be the doormat of the family. He would never have amounted to anything without God looking after him later on.

Jacob could dream of wrestling with an angel, but his courage evaporated when he awoke.

Our bat mitzvah this Shabbat unwittingly lit upon an interesting cultural reference for this week's parashah: 2 women spend their lives fighting over the same man - sounds just like half the CW shows that our young teens are watching each day.

But just a comment on M.B.'s feedback.

A little harsh, no? And once again, we get to beat up on Leah? How many of us wake up in the middle of the night with an insight on how to make the world right - and then completely fail to do that thing when we're awake? Seems to me that one of the reasons Jacob is us (and we are Yisrael) is exactly because he is so flawed, so complicated and ultimately so dependent on God for figuring out what is and how to do the right thing.

M.B. wrote:

Jacob could dream of wrestling with an angel, but his courage evaporated when he awoke.

What we transmit orally differs from the text. The first time I read through the Torah for myself I remember thinking, "well, that's not what I remeber from Hebrew School." We embellish, we sometimes fail to distinguish between the text and the midrash, and I think, in this case, the salient point is that he had to work fourteen years instead of seven for the wife he wanted, so we overlook that he got her at the seven year point. I also wonder if seeing Jacob get Rachel at the seven year point leaves us confused as to why, having got what he wanted, Jacob - whom we are accustomed to thinking of as the trickster - doesn't just leave. That he treats Laban with absolute integrity (even if Rachel does not) messes a bit with our image of him, and so we suppose that he got Rachel at the end of the term instead of at the beginning.

On further review, I recognized that I failed to factor in that this episode of the Bible took place hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments and long before the prophets changed everything. These primitive people were not living in a culture which had the same fundamental laws and moral guidelines that we do in Reform Judaism, including basic rules of honesty and fair dealing. So Laban could demur to a complaint that he cheated his nephew and Leah to a complaint that she conspired to defraud the man she married. If there are no rules, anything goes. It's whatever you can get away with (outside the Noahide laws).