In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vayishlach ('And he sent', Genesis 32:4-36:43) recounts Jacob's night of wrestling with a mysterious figure, after which he is renamed Israel, his fearful reunion and reconciliation with Esau, the violation of Dinah and its aftermath, and the death of Rachel giving birth to Benjamin.
Jacob's night of wrestling with a figure the text leaves ambiguously identified, described only as 'a man' (Genesis 32:24), is read by rabbinic tradition, following an interpretation attributed to the sage Rabbi Judah, as an encounter with the guardian angel of Esau, so that the physical struggle enacts symbolically the historical struggle between Jacob's and Esau's descendants that the Torah elsewhere treats at the political and national level. The renaming of Jacob as Israel, 'for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed' (Genesis 32:28), gives the nation its enduring name, and rabbinic law derives from the episode's closing detail, the sinew of the hip that was touched and made to limp, the traditional Jewish prohibition on eating this particular sinew in meat, one of the dietary laws whose origin the Torah itself explicitly narrates rather than simply legislating.