Dvar Torah on Parshat Vayechi

This week we read Parshat Vayechi, the coda to the Joseph story. The drama actually ended in last week's parsha, when Joseph finally reveals himself to and is reconciled with his brothers - the very brothers who sold him into slavery all those years before. His father Yaakov then comes down to Egypt to see his long-lost and much beloved son.

In this week's parsha, Yaakov, in Egypt, approaches the end of his life, blesses his children and grandchildren, and dies. Interestingly, we never get the feeling that Yaakov is much comforted by the reappearance of his beloved Joseph. When they first meet, in last week's parsha, Yaakov makes the strange declaration: "Now I can die, having seen your face, for you still live." I don't know what you think, Sigmund, but it sounds a little negative to me. Although one can salvage it as a somewhat positive statement, as the Targum does - "If I were to die now I would be comforted, now that I have seen your face, as you are alive" - but it still sounds somewhat sour, as if Yaakov is not really comforted, and is still so upset that he must talk about himself dying, almost embrace the idea of dying, rather than focus on the time he has left to live with his son Joseph.

This negativity is repeated when Yaakov is introduced to his son's boss, Pharaoh - "...few and ill-fated were the years of my life" he says to the King of Egypt, again anticipating his imminent demise. It appears again in this week's parsha, when, actually approaching his death, Yaakov makes only one request - "Please do not bury me in Egypt" - and asks his son Joseph to bury him back in Canaan, where his fathers are buried, in the land which was promised to him by God. It feels as if Yaakov, almost as soon as he gets to Egypt, is anxious to leave it.

After Joseph agrees, Yaakov sickens, and then prepares for the deathbed blessings he will give to his children and, in the case of Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Menashe, to his grandchildren. In a complicated speech, Yaakov tells Joseph that these two children will count as two of the twelve tribes of Israel, and will be considered as Yaakov's own.

I would like to look at this speech in its entirety: "And Yaakov said to Joseph, 'the Lord God appeared to me at Luz in the Land of Canaan and blessed me. And he said to me, 'behold I will make you fruitful, and multiply you, and make you into a congregation of nations, and I have given this land to your descendants after you as an eternal possession.' And now, your two sons who were born here to you in the Land of Egypt are mine, Ephraim and Menashe will be like Reuven and Shimon [Yaakov's first two sons] to me. And your children who are born to you after them will be yours, by their brothers' names they shall be called, in regards to their inheritance [they will not have, in terms of inheritance, their own identities, but , rather, will be subsumed in the tribes of Ephraim and Menashe]. And I, when I came from Padan [back to Canaan, after having left it as a young man], Rachel died on me in the Land of Canaan, on the road, with a stretch of land still before us on the way to Efrat, and I buried her there, on the road to Efrat, which is Bethlehem.' And Yisrael [Yaakov's other name] saw the sons of Joseph and said 'who are these?' And Joseph said to his father, 'they are my sons, which the Lord has given me in [or with] this'. And he said, 'bring them to me and I will bless them'".

There are many difficulties here. One is the retelling by Yaakov of his return to Canaan after the years he spent, on the run from his murderous brother Esav, in Padan Aram, working for his father-in-law Lavan, a retelling which focuses, for some reason, on the death and burial of Yaakov's beloved Rachel,  Joseph's mother. Why is all this brought up now?

On a simple level, we are being shown how much Yaakov still mourns and misses her; even at this late date, when there is no real relevance to the story of Rachel's death, Yaakov feels compelled to mention it. Still, one would like to find some reason for this story being told at this juncture, rather than simply explaining its presence here as the ramblings of a depressed old man. Another difficulty is Yaakov's inability to recognize his grandchildren, Ephraim and Menashe, about whom he had just been speaking ["And Yisrael saw the sons of Joseph and said 'who are these?'"] What is that about?

It seems to me to be perfectly clear that the fact that Yaakov and Joseph were reunited did not, in any meaningful way, really comfort Yaakov. On one level, this can be understood simply as Yaakov having become too used to living in the shadow of tragedy to be able to get out from under it. The difficulties he experienced with his father-in-law, who tricked him into an unwanted marriage to Rachel's sister Leah, the tensions that were created with these marriages, the death of his beloved Rachel, and the years of living without knowing what had happened to Joseph have all made it impossible for Yaakov to know any real happiness. His life has been too tragic to salvage, with or without Joseph.

On another level, however, I think there is a specific reason why he can not be comforted by the reappearance of Joseph, and by Joseph's success in Egypt. Yaakov is a stranger in Egypt. As he prepares to die, he emphasizes again and again that this is not his home - the land of Canaan, promised to him by God, where his beloved Rachel and his forefathers and mothers are buried, where he himself wants to be buried, is his home. Joseph, on the other hand, seems to be at home in Egypt. Yaakov, in fact, assumes that, unless told not to, Joseph will bury him in Egypt. Joseph has succeeded in this exile, and apparently intends to stay there. This, for Yaakov, is a failure, a new tragedy for him to bear, one that prevents him from rejoicing at Joseph's reappearance and success. His claiming of his grandchildren Ephraim and Menashe as his own children is, I think, a repudiation of Joseph, the Egyptian, and an attempt to salvage his children as 'Israelis', like Yaakov's own sons, essentially people of the land of Canaan. This is why Yaakov, at this moment, in connection with his decision to bless Ephraim and Menashe as if they were his own children, brings up this strange geography lesson about where precisely Rachel died and is buried. The story of Rachel expresses, in an acutely personal way, Yaakov's rootedness in the Land of Israel, the Promised Land, and his commitment to it. With the story of Rachel, Joseph's mother, he is reminding Joseph who he is, where his mother died and is buried, and where he, Joseph, really belongs.

This brings us to Yaakov's inability to recognize Ephraim and Menashe. The Rabbis have a number of explanations, I will focus on one. They tell us that as his grandsons approached him for their blessing, something goes wrong. Yaakov felt the Holy Presence, the divine inspiration, remove itself from him, making it impossible for him to bless them. At this point he asks Joseph "who are these?", not meaning that he does not recognize them but asking, rather, who they really are - Jews or Egyptians, pagan or monotheistic, one of us or one of them? Yaakov wants to know if he can claim them as his sons, as Jews, as Israelites, and, as such, bless them. Joseph's answer - 'they are my sons, which the Lord has given me in [or with] this' - can be understood simply, with the words 'in this' meaning here, in Egypt. This reading does not really answer Yaakov's question as we have understood it. However, the Targum Yonatan (attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, Israel, beginning of the Common Era), sensitive to the strange locution of 'in this' (ba'zeh in Hebrew), says an amazing thing. Do not read ba'zeh as 'in this', referring to the Land of Egypt, but rather as 'with this', referring to a contract of engagement and a ketubah (a mandatory contract entered into at marriage by a husband and wife which delineates the husband's obligations to his wife). Joseph, according to the Targum Yonatan's reading, showed his father Yaakov these documents, proving that his sons were, in fact, Jewish, for he had married their apparently Egyptian-born mother in accordance with Jewish law, and he has the papers to prove it.

Yaakov's question - "who are these?" has now been answered satisfactorily, and he can, indeed, consider Ephraim and Menashe to be his children. It is only at this point that Yaakov is able to bless his grandchildren, and it is at this point as well that Yaakov makes his first really positive remark since seeing Joseph - "I never hoped to see your face, and behold, the Lord has shown me your children as well!" Yaakov is depressed in Egypt not because he has gotten into the habit of depression, not because his life has simply been too hard to get any joy out of. He is unhappy with the possibility that Joseph, his beloved son, has become an Egyptian, and has been lost to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. When reassured by the ketubah - the marriage contract - of Joseph's commitment to Jewish life and continuity, and when he makes it clear that that Jewish life is meant to be lived in Israel, to which Joseph has agreed to return him, and not in Egypt, Yaakov is able to rejoice in his recovered relationship with his favorite son, and, crucially, that son's Jewish children and their Jewish future.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix