Vayeshev: Wells, Pits, and the Spaces We Build

Vayeshev opens with a yearning for stability: Vayeshev Yaakov. Jacob wants to dwell. To sit. To settle. After generations of flight, rivalry, exile, and survival, the Torah names a desire that feels profoundly human: rest, rootedness, family continuity. But the portion immediately fractures that hope. Not because settling is wrong, but because routine has a way of revealing what was already fragile. You can wander for years and keep old dynamics at bay. The moment you try to live inside steadiness, whatever is unresolved rises to the surface.

Torah communicates that fracture not only through plot, but through motif. There are recurring scenes in Torah that, once you notice them, function like emotional shorthand. One of the most powerful is the well. The well is where futures begin. Rebecca is found at a well. Rachel is encountered at a well. Moses meets Zipporah at a well. The well is encounter, sustenance, continuity, and family formation. It is a source of life, physically and relationally.

And then Vayeshev offers the devastating inversion.

Joseph is not thrown into a well of water. He is thrown into a bor reik, ein bo mayim, an empty pit with no water. The Torah goes out of its way to tell us not only that it is a pit, but that it is dry. This is not a place that holds sustenance. This is a place of absence. Where the well gathers and gives, the pit isolates and withholds. The space that symbolizes beginnings is reversed into a space that symbolizes rupture.

And then comes a line that is almost unbearable in its simplicity. Joseph is stripped of his coat, thrown into the pit, and they sit down to eat a meal. Together. While he is alone in the dark. The cruelty is embedded in stillness. Just as the pit is empty of water, the moment is empty of empathy. Torah is telling us something sharp and uncomfortable: a family can be together and still be completely disconnected.

This is where the teaching turns from Joseph’s story to ours.

Vayeshev teaches us that families are not broken by movement alone, nor healed by stillness alone. They are shaped by whether the spaces we create, emotional, relational, spiritual, function as wells or pits. Do they nourish? Or do they contain?

Because every family system creates spaces. We create them with our words, our assumptions, our silences, our patterns of praise and critique, our habits of listening or dismissing, our willingness to repair or our need to be right. Sometimes the same action can dig in two directions. A boundary can be a well. Or it can be a pit. A tradition can be a well. Or it can become a pit. Even love, expressed without wisdom, can become a kind of containment.

The Torah does not let us choose neutrality. There is no clean middle that requires nothing of us. We dig either way. The question is what we are making with the spaces we dig.

A well is a space where something can be drawn up: patience, generosity, benefit of the doubt, apology, courage, care. A pit is a space where something gets thrown down: shame, resentment, scapegoating, silence, cruelty dressed up as normalcy. And Vayeshev insists we look honestly at the spaces we are building in our homes, in our community, and inside our own inner lives.

May we have the clarity to notice what we are digging, and the courage to choose water.