(12) He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and messengers of God were going up and down on it.

(1) עלים וירדים ASCENDING AND DESCENDING — It states first ascending and afterwards descending! Those angels who accompanied him in the land of Israel were not permitted to leave the Land: they ascended to Heaven and angels which were to minister outside the Land descended to accompany him (Genesis Rabbah 68:12).

(1) עולים ויורדים בו, “ascending and descending on it.” They first ascended and then descended; afterwards they remained at the bottom. They behaved like a human being who climbs the ladder in his house to get to the loft, and then descends on it again. This is what led Yaakov to understand that this location was intended to become G-ds house on earth. He surmised that for the time being this was the residence of the angels he had seen. Angels, servants of the Lord, must have their residence in G-d’s house. If G-d was to establish a residence on earth also, they would have to ascend to heaven first in order to accompany their Lord to His alternate residence. If these angels were meant to only briefly remain on earth, the Torah should have described their movements as יורדים ועולים, “descending and then ascending, “(back to their residence) The Jerusalem Targum understands the function of these angels as having been to accompany Yaakov from here on in wherever he went. The reason that they ascended was to relay their messages to other angels in the celestial spheres that they had been assigned to descend to earth. They were to show them that there was a human being of the stature of Yaakov on earth. They would recognise him at once as a likeness of his features had long been engraved at the base of G-d’s throne.

(1) והנה מלאכי אלוהים עולים ויורדים..והנה יהוה נצב עליו, this foreshadowed the future when the “angels of G’d” the superpowers who had become very powerful in our world would begin their decline and end up at the bottom of the rungs of the ladder. The Lord G’d Who stood above the ladder is the symbol of the promise that G’d will never abandon the Jewish people, as we know from Jeremiah 46,28 כי אעשה כלה בכל הגויים ואותך לא אעשה כלה, “even when I utterly destroy all the gentile nations, I will not destroy you.”

(3) When a prophet is informed of a message in a vision, it is granted to him in metaphoric imagery. Immediately, the interpretation of the imagery is imprinted upon his heart, and he knows its meaning. For example, the ladder with the angels ascending and descending envisioned by the patriarch, Jacob, was an allegory for the empires and their subjugation [of his descendants].

(3) “I say that king Shlomo saw prophetically that in the future, Israel will undergo exile after exile, destruction after destruction, and they will mourn in exile for their original glory, remembering the original love by which they was seperated from all other peoples, and they wil say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for then I fared better than now’, and they will remember His kindnesses and their own value, and the goodly things promised to them in the eschaton. And Shlomo wrote this sefer prophetically, in the language of a widowed woman who longs for her husband, ‘who clings to her beloved’, remembering how she loved him in her youth, and [she] admits her failings. And even her Beloved is pained by her pain, and remembers the kindness of her youth, the comeliness of her beauty, and the quality of her deeds, in which he was bound up with her in intense love, and He tells her that He does not willfully bring her grief, and nor has she been sent away permanently, for she is still His wife, and He her husband, and he will return to her in the future.”