A woman once asked Rabbi Jose Ben Halafta: “If creation was completed in only six days, what has God been doing since?” He answered: “God spends his time building ladders, for some to ascend, and others to descend.”

That teaching may have been the inspiration for Kotzker Rebbe, who asked his students: Who was higher, someone on the tenth rung of a ladder or someone on the twenty-fifth? When they responded that the person on the twenty-fifth was higher, Kotzker answered: Who is higher depends upon which way the person is heading.

This week in the Torah, we read of Jacob’s remarkable dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder reaching to heaven. As our sages have pointed out, if ascending comes first, that means the angels begin here on earth. In our lives, we have often encountered angels on earth– if not Divine beings, than beings with the Divine in them– who act to aid and even save others.

A good question to think about is where we are on the ladder. Are we ascending or descending? Are we reaching for the next rung and trying to do better, be better, than we have before? Could we be taken for angels in the lives of those who need us?

The world resists stasis. So do our souls. We are always in movement, changing, hopefully growing. The metaphor of a ladder occurring when Jacob first leaves home reminds us that growth is our own responsibility.

In a confusing and often frightening world, we turn to our traditions, our community, and our convictions to help us grow. We cherish the values that have been nurtured within us. The poet Yeats wrote: “Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” The patriarch Jacob, fleeing from home, dreamt of a ladder for the angels. He was scared and alone and his dream began in the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” but it also stretched to the heavens. Between heaven and the human heart, God has offered us a ladder.