Vayechi

And he lived

VAYECHI

“And he lived”

Genesis 47:28 - 50:26

In this Torah portion, Joseph promises Jacob that he will bury him in Canaan. On his deathbed, Jacob blesses his grandchildren, Ephraim and Menashe, and then blesses each of his sons. Jacob dies and is embalmed. Joseph affirms to his brothers that he has forgiven them for their misdeeds. Ending the Book of Genesis, Joseph dies

“The first of the following essays looks at the values of truth and peace in Judaism, and which takes priority when they clash. The second analyzes the names of Joseph’s sons and what they tell us about his state of mind when he named them. The third looks at the paradoxical idea that, through teshuva, we can change the past. The fourth shows how forgiveness is an essential part of the life of freedom, for it alone liberates us from being held captive by memory and resentment. Jewish time, defined by repentance and forgiveness, is the defeat of tragedy in the name of hope.”

“Not only is it permitted to tell a white lie to save a life, it is also permitted to do so for the sake of peace.”

Both sources are necessary. If we only had the evidence of Joseph’s brothers, we could not infer that what they did was correct: Perhaps they were wrong to lie. And if we only had the evidence of God’s words to Abraham, we could only infer that a half-truth is permitted, not an actual lie: God does not say anything false – He merely omits some of Sarah’s words. Both together serve to establish the rule. Peace takes precedence over truth.”

“To understand a civilization, it is necessary not only to know the values and virtues it embraces, but also the order of priority among them. Many cultures value freedom and equality. The difficult question is: which takes precedence? Communism values equality more than freedom. Laissez-faire capitalism values freedom more than equality. They share the same ideals, but because they assign them different places in the ethical hierarchy, they result in completely different societies.”

“Truth and truthfulness are fundamental values in Judaism. We call the Torah “the law of truth” (Malachi 2:6). The sages define truth as the signature of God.3 Yet truth is not the highest value in Judaism. Peace is.”

“Isaiah Berlin devoted much of his intellectual energy to arguing that “Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups… that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth.”11”

The drama of younger and older brothers, which haunts the book of Genesis from Cain and Abel onwards, reaches a strange climax in the story of Joseph’s children. Jacob/Israel is nearing the end of his life. In the only scene involving grandparents and grandchildren in the entire book, Joseph visits him, bringing with him his two sons, Menasheh and Ephraim. Jacob asks Joseph to bring them near so that he can bless them. The Torah describes what follows next in painstaking detail:”

“Before the years of the famine came, two sons were born to Joseph by Asenat, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On. Joseph named his firstborn Menasheh, saying, “God has made me forget [nasheh] all my trouble and all my father’s household.” The second son he named Ephraim, saying, “For God has made me fruitful [fara] in the land of my affliction.” (41:50–52)”

“He knew, in other words, that this was the start of the long exile that God had told Abraham would be the fate of his children, a vision the Torah describes as accompanied by “a deep and dreadful darkness”(15:12). Knowing that these were the first two children of his family to be born in exile, knowing too that the exile would be prolonged and at times difficult and dark, Jacob sought to signal to all future generations that there would be a constant tension between the desire to forget (to assimilate, acculturate, anaesthetise the hope of a return) and the promptings of memory (the knowledge that this is “exile,” that we are part of another story, that ultimate home is somewhere else).

The child of forgetting (Menasheh) may have blessings. But greater are the blessings of a child (Ephraim) who remembers the past and future of which he is a part.”

“However, once the brothers had undergone complete repentance, their original intent was cancelled out. It was now possible to see the good, as well as the bad, consequences of their act – and to attribute the former to them. Stripped of their initial aim, the act could instead be defined by what part it played in a providential drama whose outcome was only now fully apparent in retrospect. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, the good they did would live after them; the bad was interred with the past (Julius Caesar, act iii, scene 2.). That is how, through repentance, deliberate sins can be accounted as merits, or as Joseph put it: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” This is a hugely significant idea, for it means that by a change of heart we can redeem the past.”

“The revolutionary idea behind Joseph’s and Resh Lakish’s words is that there are two concepts of the past. The first is what happened. The second is the significance, the meaning, of what happened.”

“Until Tanakh, time was generally conceived as a series of eternal recurrences, endlessly repeating a pattern that belonged to the immutable structure of the universe. ”

“This conception of time produces a deeply conservative philosophy of life. It justifies the status quo. Inequalities are seen as written into the structure of the universe. All attempts to change society are destined to fail. People are what they are, and the world is what it is always been.”

“The Jewish understanding of time that emerges from Tanakh, in contrast, was utterly revolutionary. For the first time people began to conceive that God had created the universe in freedom, and that by making man in His image, He endowed him too with freedom. That being so, he might be different tomorrow from what he was today, and if he could change himself, he could begin to change the world. Time became an arena of change. With this, the concept of history (as opposed to myth) was born.”

“In life considered as a narrative, later events change the significance of earlier ones. It was the gift of Judaism to the world to discover time as a narrative.”

“We now see the profound overarching structure of the book of Genesis. It begins with God creating the universe in freedom. It ends with the family of Jacob on the brink of creating a new social universe of freedom which begins in slavery, but ends in the giving and receiving of the Torah, Israel’s “constitution of liberty.”6 Israel is charged with the task of changing the moral vision of mankind, but it can only do so if individual Jews, of whom the forerunners were Jacob’s children, are capable of changing themselves – that ultimate assertion of freedom we call teshuva. Time then becomes an arena of change in which the future redeems the past and a new concept is born – the idea we call hope.”

“Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim: none concludes with an ending in the conventional sense. Each leaves us with a sense of a promise not yet fulfilled, a task not yet completed, a future seen from afar but not yet reached. The paradigm case – the model on which all others are based – is the ending of the book of Genesis in this Parashat Vayehi.”

“Atonement and forgiveness are the supreme expressions of human freedom – the freedom to act differently in the future than one did in the past, and the freedom not to be trapped in a cycle of vengeance and retaliation. Only those who can forgive can be free. Only a civilization based on forgiveness can construct a future that is not an endless repetition of the past. That, surely, is why Judaism is the only civilization whose golden age is in the future.”

“It was this revolutionary concept of time based on human freedom that Judaism contributed to the world. Many ancient cultures believed in cyclical time, in which all things return to their beginning. The Greeks developed a sense of tragic time, in which the ship of dreams is destined to founder on the hard rocks of reality. Europe of the Enlightenment introduced the idea of linear time, with its close cousin, progress.”

“Judaism believes in something else, neither endless repetition nor inevitable progress, but covenantal time, the story of the human journey in response to the divine call, with all its backslidings and false turns, its regressions and failures, yet never doomed to tragic fate, always with the possibility of repentance and return, always sustained by the vision with which the story began”

“Tragedy gives rise to pessimism. Cyclical time leads to acceptance. Linear time begets optimism. Covenantal time gives birth to hope. These are not just different emotions. They are radically different ways of relating to life and the universe. They are expressed in the different kinds of stories people tell. Jewish time always faces an open future. The last chapter is not yet written. The messiah has not yet come. Until then, the story continues – and we, together with God, are its co-authors.”

Excerpt From

Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

Jonathan Sacks

You have now heard the whole Book of Genesis (Bereishit). When we finish reading a book of the Torah we Jews have the custom of saying, Hazak! Hazak! V’Nithazek! “Be strong! Be strong! And may you be strengthened!” It’s our way of saying, “Congratulations on finishing the study of a book of the Torah. Prepare yourself! You will need all your strength! For the study of Torah never ends!” Now that you know the custom, you can celebrate by saying the words out loud, with strength: Hazak! Hazak! V’Nithazek.”

Excerpt From

The Torah: Portion-by-Portion

Seymour Rossel

“R. Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–93) goes so far as to insist that “the peak of religious ethical perfection to which Judaism aspires is man as creator.”239 This means that we are often asked to use the power at our disposal both to better our lives and to achieve holy ends.”

Excerpt From

The Heart of Torah, Volume 1

Shai Held

“In the Talmud Pirkei Avot 4:1, Ben Zoma teaches, “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in what they have.” Most of us have to learn and relearn this important lesson time and again throughout our lives.

I have often thought that perhaps each of us would benefit from writing Ben Zoma’s words on a sign and placing them over our bed so that we can contemplate his wisdom every night before we go to sleep and every morning as we awake.

The ability to appreciate our blessings before they are lost is one of life’s greatest lessons (and missed opportunities). This is why our ancestors in their wisdom encouraged us to recite daily prayers of gratitude—for the miracles of our bodies that sustain us, for our souls refreshed each night as we sleep, for the relationships that give life its ultimate meaning.”

Excerpt From

A Year with Mordecai Kaplan

Steven Carr Reuben