Shabbat Vaychi

Friday night I spoke about blessings. We looked at the traditional Shabbat evening blessings for women, Eishet Chayil, a Woman of Valor, which we use as a personal check list in our house. One for men, a more recent addition which shows how liturgy changes over time. And the one for our children. The origin of that blessing comes from this week’s parsha, “May you be like Maneseh and Ephraim.” What does it mean that G-d blesses us? What does it mean for us to bless our children? What blessings do we wish for each other, for our community? For our children? How do we bless our children when they are adults or no longer live at home? What do we do if we, G-d forbid, lost a child? And who were Maneseh and Ephraim anyway? That was a good discussion.

They were the grandsons of Jacob, the sons of Joseph. Raised in Egypt, they looked and dressed like Egyptians. Cue Walk like an Egyptian here. So much so that Jacob didn’t even recognize them. However, having been separated from Joseph he was delighted to live to see both Joseph and his grandsons. And he blessed both his children and grandsons. That is precisely why we bless our sons in their names. May you be like Maneseh and Ephraim, able to carry on the line of Jacob. One of our congregants shared a midrash I ddin’t know, that this parsha is also the roots of the Sh’ma. Listen, old man Jacob, Israel, our father taught us that the Lord our G-d is One. This midrash enriched the kavanah of our recitation of the Sh’ma. We, fairly assimilated Jews in the Diaspora, witnessed, just like Manaseh and Ephraim that G-d is One.

Back to blessings. I love the moment in our house when we share these ancient words. They still resonate, even though Sarah is grown. It is a moment of much needed peace. In this modern world, sometimes this happens just before I light the candles and we sing the blessings together on the phone. Sometimes I add my own words to the ancient formula, as my mother used to do, calling it her Shabbat shpiel. I don’t have any sons. But I wonder why we bless our daughters with “May you be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah”, our matriarchs, and our sons to be like the next generation. Why not a more parallel construction?
And while the ancient words come from this parsha, sometimes I wish Jacob had controlled his mouth better. Still playing favorites, Jacob blesses Benjamin telling him he as like a ravenous wolf. Huh? How is that a blessing? But it is exactly where our triennial reading began on Shabbat. . One congregant suggested that it is really Jacob being prophetic. Benjamin will be like a ravenous wolf. There was much discussion and I confess I am still not sure.
Rabbi Judith Edelstein wonders a similar thing in this week’s Academy for Jewish Religion D’var Torah. She says that Jacob’s words to his sons have always bothered her. She thinks they are mean-spirited. And she wonders whether we are to view his blessings as a paradigm to emulate or as a blueprint of how NOT to behave. And then the important question—how do we talk to our own adult children? Is honesty always the best policy or should we restrain ourselves, despite our insights and desire to advise or maybe control? Or our words for their benefit or ours? She remembers her own mother cursing her with the name mekhasheifeh, witch in Yiddish because of her long, unruly hair and then on her death bed saying “Your hair looks beautiful, my darling.” The last words her mother ever spoke. She said, “To this day, nearly 20 years later, I remember both: being called a mekhasheifeh, but finally told that my hair looked beautiful.”
Our words have the power to hurt or to heal. We need to be careful with our words, especially those to our children, all of our children.
But this portion is more. This portion is very end of Genesis. After we finish we will say together Chazak, Chazak v’nitchazak. Be strong, be strong and be strengthened. We have been strengthened by our study of these stories of Genesis and our people’s ancient past. We learned about the beauty of creation, how we are all created b’tzelim elohim, how G-d was frustrated with creation and its imperfections and told Noah to build an ark. A what? An ark. Say what? As Bill Cosby asked. We learned that G-d promised to never destroy the world again by flood and how we are partners with G-d in creation. We learned about Abraham and how he had a vision of the one G-d. How G-d called Abram to leave his country, the house of his father, birthplace, to go to the land that G-d would show him, how G-d would make him a great nation and bless him and those that bless him and make Abraham’s name great. We learned about the challenges that he faced and then each of his children. We learned that these are covenantal relationships, with God and with each others. In every generation God promises something and the children promise to be faithful in return.

Today’s story deals with the death of Jacob and Joseph. This narrative closes one chapter but points to the future. I received a “holiday card” in the mail with a smiling family and a daughter dressed in her academic gown. Forward it says. This portion points the way. Forward! It looks towards the next chapter which we will begin next week.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, in commenting on this portion, notes that Genesis, like the Tanach as a whole, “is a story without an ending which looks forward to an open future rather than reaching closure” (Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings, New Milford, CT: Maggid Books and The Orthodox Union, 2009, p. 350). While this parsha ties up lots of loose ends, we are not at the end of the story, but the beginning of the next story, the birth of Israel as a people. There is a tension in Genesis, in fact in Judaism between the past and the future, between what was and what is yet to be. The covenant that God makes points us toward the future but that future also will include us being strangers in a strange land which we will later be implored to remember. 36 times it will tell us to treat the stranger well because we were slaves in Egypt. In what will foreshadow the upcoming Egypt experience, Abraham went down to Egypt. There he almost sells his wife Sarah into what could be called slavery.
This week we pause for another reason caught in the tension between what was and what will be. We celebrate secular New Year’s, called Sylvester in Hebrew, named for the pope who died on this day in the 4th century and what it was called in Germany and Poland in the Middle Ages. In Israel they barely celebrate at all. I am not going to argue whether we as American Jews should celebrate or not. I am not going to compare Rosh Hashanah and Sylvester. But I am going to suggest the idea of pausing, seeking forgiveness from family as Jacob did for burying Rachel on the road, exchanging blessings comes right from this week’s parsha.
Genesis twice takes us back to Haran, the land that Abraham came from. First to find a wife for Isaac and later when Jacob fled from Esau. But each time they return to the land of Israel. To the future. As Rabbi Sacks says, “Haran is the past to which we might return from time to time but where we can never remain.” Someone posted yesterday on my facebook, you can’t start the next chapter of your life if you are still rereading the last one. Except as Jews that is exactly what we do.
Each year we read this cycle again. But it is not really a circle. Each time we read these words we learn a little more, about our ancestors or about ourselves. Even the last word of this morning’s text, Mitzrayim, Egypt, points the way forward to Egypt, towards next week.
Rabbi Sacks points out that Judaism views time markedly differently from other cultures. We don’t see time as cyclical, characterized by endless repetition. We also do not see time—as it was viewed by many during the Enlightenment—as marked by inevitable progress.
Instead, Rabbi Sacks writes, Judaism believes in “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, of the Promised Land…” (p. 353).
So what do we make of this confluence. The end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus. The end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013. To quote John Lennon’s Christmas song, “So this is Christmas and what have you done. Another year over and a new one just begun.” Where do you want to be in a year? Where do you want this community to be? What new year’s resolutions do you want to make? How does a new year’s resolution, so often broken by mid-January compare with the introspection that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur demand?
Resolutions don’t work so well for me. I know what it is I need to work on. More Hebrew, losing more weight, getting more exercise. Like most of you my good intentions may fall by the wayside. Rather, on New Year’s Eve Day I will pause and look forward. What do I want to accomplish? What goals will I set? What can I look forward to each month? My list will include seeing sunrise on New Year’s Day morning, a trip to Orlando, helping my daughter find her way, either in Chicago or New York, celebrating our 25th anniversary, my installation as rabbi at Congregation Kneseth Israel, the continuation of firsts…each holiday, getting Illinois license plates in our new home, making new friends and keeping up with so many old ones, a trip back to northern Michigan this summer since we are so much closer! 2013 promises to be a good year.
For me, for all the Kleins you are a blessing, each one of you, a real blessing and we wish for each of you, health, happiness, prosperity, peace, joy, love. We look forward to celebrating with you, to studying with you, to sharing community with you. We will mourn with you—as the children of Israel did in this parsha for Jacob and Joseph. But please G-d not too many of those! As Debbie Friedman put it so well in her Tefilat Haderech, “May you be blessed as you go on your way. May you be guided in peace. May you be blessed with health and joy. May this be your blessing, Amen. May you be sheltered by the wings of peace. May you be kept in safety and in love. May grace and compassion find their way to every soul, May this be your blessing. Amen. May this be our blessing!
Then we read the Torah and the haftarah. And like the parsha was the roots of the Sh’ma, the roots of the V’ahavta can be seen in the haftarah. Our children our are blessings if we teach them diligently. We are supposed to have a party, a siyyum hasefer when we finish studying something. At Kiddush wee enjoyed a kosher champagne to mark Sylvester and Genesis beer to mark the end of Genesis. Forward! Kadima! Chazak, chazak v’nitchazak.