When Jacob fled his brother’s rage and lay down to sleep in the wilderness, he experienced one of the most famous visions in all of Scripture:
For centuries, readers have pictured this scene as angels traveling between heaven and earth on some cosmic stairway. But Rabbi Pinchas Polonsky offers a stunning interpretation that transforms our understanding of both the vision and our purpose in this world.
The key lies in a small Hebrew word that appears twice in the verse: vehinneh, “and behold.” Grammatically, it’s unnecessary. It interrupts the flow. And in the Torah, such interruptions always signal deeper meaning.
According to Rabbi Polonsky, the ladder isn’t simply near Jacob—it is Jacob. The critical word is the Hebrew bo (בו), typically translated in this context as “on it.” But bo literally means “in him,” which Rabbi Polonsky understands as in Jacob himself. The verse is telling us that Jacob is the staircase between heaven and earth, and the angels aren’t climbing an external ladder; they’re ascending and descending within Jacob, inside his very being.
This transforms everything. The vision isn’t about some distant cosmic architecture. It’s about Jacob’s own soul, his own spiritual journey—and by extension, ours.
But here’s where Rabbi Polonsky’s insight becomes truly radical: notice the order. The angels ascend first, then descend. These aren’t celestial beings making their rounds. These are angels that begin on earth, in the human heart. They climb toward heaven, and though they might be tempted to remain in those exalted spiritual realms, their true mission requires them to return.
They must bring what they’ve acquired back down to earth.
This reverses our usual understanding of spirituality. We often imagine that the goal of religious life is to ascend—to rise above this world, to protect our souls from earthly contamination, to dissolve into divine light. Rabbi Polonsky insists the opposite is true. A person who rises into metaphysical worlds should not simply “dissolve in God,” he writes. The human task isn’t to escape this world but to transform it. We ascend in order to descend. We reach toward heaven in order to bring heaven down to earth.
Only by returning with spiritual light can the soul achieve the advancement it needs to truly communicate with God.
Jacob receives this vision as a dream while fleeing from his homeland, sleeping on stones in the wilderness. Yet even in exile, even in sleep, the message is clear: the ladder is set on the ground, its base firmly planted in this world. That’s where the work begins and where it must return.
Every person who reaches for something higher—whether through prayer, study, meditation, or moral striving—faces the same temptation those angels faced at the top of the ladder: to stay there, to remain in the purity of spiritual heights, safe from the messiness of daily life. But that was never the point. The ascent is only half the journey. What matters is what you bring back down: the compassion, the wisdom, the divine light that you then pour into your relationships, your work, your community, your broken world.
Jacob’s ladder isn’t out there somewhere in the ancient past. According to Rabbi Polonsky’s reading, Jacob is the ladder, the connection between heaven and earth. And so are we. Each of us carries within ourselves that same sacred architecture, that same capacity to reach upward and bring holiness back down. The angels are still climbing, still descending, still carrying light from the heights into the depths of ordinary life where it’s needed most.
To learn more of Rabbi Pinchas Polonsky’s insights on the Bible, order The Universal Torah: Growth & Struggle in the Five Books of Moses – Genesis Part 2 today!
