What Jacob Did Before Leaving Israel Changed Us Forever - J. Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

Jacob has another key to his success. He leaves the promised land as Jacob. And we know that he returns as Israel, a new name and a new identity. And he earns that identity on his journey. But he does something critical before he leaves. He sets his center. He establishes his north star that's going to guide him on his journey. And you know, it's like if you know where you want to end up, you can go off track and the GPS system will reroute you to your final destination. But he put his final destination into course. And eventually, no matter what happens, he's always redirected back to his destination. Jacob establishes a physical and spiritual destination, a house of God that will be a house of prayer for the entire world. What Jacob does sets the stage for what the people of Israel will do until the end of times. Genesis 28:10. Jacob departed from Beerva and went toward Karan. He encountered the place and spent the night there because the sun had set. And he took the stones from the place and he arranged them around his head and lay down in that place. And so if you haven't noticed it, the text is bringing our attention to the word the place. Hamakum. The place is key here. And throughout the paragraph, the word hamak, the place, it's mentioned over and over again. It's like hamakum, the place. Hamakum is also one of God's names. So he is the place in which we reside. We live within Hamakum, within his space. Jacob discovers for the first time in scripture that God can be sensed in a place through a particular people. He's not going to be found in spirit, but specifically in Mount Mariah, the Temple Mount. Jacob then takes a stone from the place that he slept. He sets up a mata, a spiritual monument. Genesis 28:18. Then Jacob rose early in the morning and took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, poured oil on top of it, and he called the name of that place bait l the house of God. And so that was his north star. He's like, "Okay, I get it. This is where I need to return to." So fast forward now centuries and centuries of Jewish history until this day for thousands of years every Jew all of Israel was given a north star by Jacob. Every synagogue in the world before they lay the first brick they bring an architect and they designed the synagogue so it faces Jerusalem. Every synagogue in the United States faces the east. Everyone in South Africa faces the north. Every synagogue in Europe faces the south. Asia, Australia, I mean all of Israel, they praise pray facing Hamakum, the place in Jerusalem. And when you think about it and you look around the world and you have like a bird's eyee view of history, it's really remarkable. It's really beautiful. It's one of those beautiful images that I can think of. It's like no matter what, for centuries upon centuries, whatever happened the night before, the Crusades, the Inquisition, Muslim oppression, Nazis in Germany, communists, the Jewish people woke up the next morning, wherever they were, they faced Hamakum. They faced that place that Jacob set that stone and they prayed to come home knowing somehow sometime in some way God would fulfill his promise and bring us back to our place. And so Jacob before he went into exile and before he descended into the darkness he set his compass toward Bel the house of God toward the land of Israel in Jerusalem and his children after him do the same exact thing. The Land of Israel Fellowship [music] is a global community. It's like a movement that's happening all around the world. [music] Jews, non-Jews, from so many backgrounds, so many languages, so many cultures, all of us connected [music] to the land of Israel, all of us connecting to the Torah, connecting to each other. It is like nothing else on [music] the planet. Please check out our global community, the Land [music] of Israel Fellowship today.