Dvar Torah on Parshat Vayechi

This week's parsha has a very dramatic and portentous ending. After the patriarch Yaakov, on his deathbed, blesses his children and then passes away, he is embalmed and taken to Canaan for burial. His children return from the funeral to Egypt, where Yosef also dies. Later on, at the very end of our parsha, which is also the end of the book of Genesis, before his death, Yosef makes the following stirring valedictory speech to the Jewish people: "And Yosef said to his brothers - 'I am dying, but God will remember, yes he will remember you, and he will bring you up from this land to the land which he swore to Avraham, Yizchak and Yaakov.' Yosef had the sons of Israel swear, saying: 'God will remember, yes, remember you, and you will bring my bones up from this place.' "

After making this speech, Yosef dies, and the parsha concludes by telling us that "they embalmed him and put him in a coffin in Egypt." Many of the commentators point out that, grammatically, the Torah actually says that they put him in THE coffin in Egypt (because it says 'ba'aron' - in THE coffin - rather than b'aron - in A coffin). This indicates, according to the Sforno, that the Israelites kept him in the same coffin in which he was embalmed, rather than burying him in the ground, thereby making it possible for the coffin to be retained and taken up to Israel years later, at the time of the Exodus.

The Ibn Ezra and the Chizkuni point out that "THE coffin" indicates that it was the very one that Yosef had picked out for himself while still alive; unlike his fathers, at whose burials no coffin is mentioned, Yosef arranged one for himself in order to make sure that he would be eventually taken in it, along with his people, up to Israel.

Recently I was in New York, and I took the opportunity to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and spent some time with the Egyptian artifacts. There, one can see mummies and coffins galore, similar to, I imagine, the mummy into which Yosef was turned and the coffin in which he was placed. One of the impressions one gets from looking at a lot of ancient Egyptian artifacts is the apparent dichotomy between the point of their complex burial rights - to accompany and aid the dead person on his journey in the after-life - and the remarkable sense of "this guy ain't goin' nowhere" that one gets when looking at the massive, ancient, unchanging burial coffins and chambers into which these mummies were placed. The burial chambers are just about the most permanent things ever built - deep in the ground, often under tons of rock. In fact, one of the things that struck me at the museum was the irony of seeing all of these Egyptian noblemen and noblewomen who had gone to such great lengths to be buried forever in a very specific place surrounded by very specific things, being gawked at thousands of years later on New York's Museum Mile.

It is interesting in this context to note the subversive and challenging use that Yosef makes of these Egyptian burial customs. He is embalmed (I remember as a kid, when we learned this parsha in school, always getting a creepy feeling when reading that both Yaakov and Yosef were embalmed - mummified - in Egypt. It seemed so goyish!), turned into a mummy, and placed in an Egyptian burial coffin, but not buried, not locked forever into the unchanging Egyptian landscape, as other dead noblemen were. Instead, he is embalmed and placed in a coffin in order to NOT remain forever in Egypt, in order to state clearly that this is not his home, and not his culture, not his final resting place, and that whatever is supposed to happen to those other mummies here in Egypt is not going to be his after-life.

Yosef is embalmed and put in a coffin precisely in order to make the point that his future is not to lie alone, encased under tons of rock and surrounded by other dead people and animals and inanimate objects, to somehow make his solitary journey into the underworld. His future is with the living Jewish people; he will go where they go, to his people's once and future homeland. It is with them, there, in the land where his people have lived and will live once again, that he will find his very un-Egyptian after-life.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix