Do you want to live forever? Do you want to be remembered? Who are you and who do you wish to be? Questions such as these loom large in each of our lives as we move gracefully or otherwise through the passing years of our personal journeys. This year this question looms large for us as Americans and as Jews as well.
What values are most important to us? What kind of future do we wish to bequeath to our children and to future generations as well? What kind of message do we wish to communicate to future generations by our own actions, our own actions, our own commitments, our own words.?
Such questions are not merely the stuff of which our private meetings with attorneys and financial planners are made. These are the really big questions, the ones that keep us up at night, the ones that inspire us when we vote, when we speak publicly about what matters to us.
These are the questions that lurk beneath the surface of our lives, and that are so easy to overlook and avoid as we go about the day-to-day business of our lives. Yet these are the questions that really matter.
These are the questions that fill this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Vayechi, as we witness Jacob blessing his own grandchildren, Ephraim and Menasseh and reviewing each of his twelve sons gathered around his bed before he dies. These are the questions that confront Joseph and his brothers as they fulfill Jacob’s wishes to have him buried in the family burial place in Hebron, and when Joseph reconciles with his brothers and assures them that all is forgiven. These are the questions that Joseph also asks as he makes the Children of Israel promise to return his bones to the Land of Israel when they eventually return hundreds of years later. And of course, these are the questions each successive generation has asked as time has passed and we are confronted with our own limitations, our own mortality, and our own dream of immortality for our values and our vision of a better world.
It is the end of December, the end of a year filled with setbacks to our values, a year of tragedy, fear, hatred, prejudice, terrorism, war, and more. This has been a year of protest, a year of the taking away of rights, a year of lies, a year of deceit, a year of mistrust, a year of deep sadness, a year of despair. Yet it has also been a year of hope and dreams of the possible, visions of values upheld, belief in the power of good over evil, of hope over despair, of possibility over impossibility.
The name of this portion is “Vayechi” – “and he lived.” Of this, Rabbi Yochanan teaches in the Talmud: “Jacob did not die, . . . for just as his children live, so too, Jacob lives” (Ta’anit 5b). Rabbi Yochanan’s point, I think, is clear. If we, the descendants of Jacob, maintain the core values of our tradition, the vision of a better world, and hold dear to those values; if we make certain to live the lives we want our children to live; if we work to build the kind of world in which we want our children to live; then those who come after us will say of us that we, too, live forever in their memories and in their lives.
Rabbi James Bennett serves Congregation Shaare Emeth and is a past president of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
