And He Brought His Sons With Him
What a deathbed visit teaches us in Parashat Vayechi
(I Swear My Life to You by Nasrin Kadri. Gorgeous song to welcome Shabbat.)
“My kids may not know how to spell yet, but they know what to do when someone dies.”
These were the words I offered about my children to a colleague at the shiva of a beloved congregant — my verbal offering when small talk seemed beyond reach. Most people at the shiva knew that our families were close, and that we were simultaneously mourning and working, as rabbinic families in tight communities often do amid tragedies.
In a small town, people know each other’s business, even when you’re not quite sure how. That said, there is nonetheless a small circle that understands to extent to which my children have been exposed to death and dying at a young age. A week before this congregant died, I brought my eldest daughter to do homework in his living room while I kept him company. She knew he was dying, but she still would approach him with ease regularly, reporting wild and wacky facts about animals from her National Geographic book from the library. It wasn’t the first time she had been with someone who was terminally ill. In fact, it has been a constant feature of her life, since her first shiva call when she was six weeks old. Both of my children know what it is to be with someone when we know their days are numbered, and the shock and pain when the inevitable news comes that they are gone.
When this congregant died, I was still at his home when the girls woke up for school. Mel delivered the news to them, and after tears, they left her and went to their room. They had written a card to his widow, and made a gift bag for the family with the cookies they had baked the previous day . They asked me to deliver their gifts and give the dog a big hug. We hadn’t asked them to do anything — they just knew the drill already.
Cry, show up, show love, bring food.
Shiva will be boring. Bring art supplies.
Help hand out prayer books. If we do havdallah, one of you will hold the candle, and the other can bring the spices around the room.
In moments like these, I take comfort (nachas) in the fact that they have learned to comfort the dying and those in mourning at a young age, but I also worry as well. My children have been raised in a community where funerals easily outnumber baby namings by a factor of 10-1 (Maine is America’s “grayest” state, and its affiliated Jews tend to be older as well), and their closest relationships are with elders decades older than their parents. They lose people they love at a rate far greater than most people, and certainly more than most people their age. It is a freighted inheritance.
That said, while they may be outliers in the contemporary American landscape, they are part of a long history of children visiting the dying to give and receive blessings. In Genesis 48:1, we encounter Joseph bringing his sons, Ephraim and Menashe, to their grandfather’s deathbed.
וַיְהִ֗י אַחֲרֵי֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה וַיֹּ֣אמֶר לְיוֹסֵ֔ף הִנֵּ֥ה אָבִ֖יךָ חֹלֶ֑ה וַיִּקַּ֞ח אֶת־שְׁנֵ֤י בָנָיו֙ עִמּ֔וֹ אֶת־מְנַשֶּׁ֖ה וְאֶת־אֶפְרָֽיִם׃
Some time afterward, Joseph was told, “Your father is ill.” So he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.
The French commentator, Rashi, explains why Joseph would bring his sons along with him: “so that Jacob would bless them before his death.”
There is a long Jewish tradition, starting with Jacob/Israel, of providing individualized blessings to one’s relatives before death. In apocryphal literature, these letters are often known as Testaments. These blessings provide something essential for the giver and the recipient. The one who gives blessings is provided with the opportunity to intentionally bequeath his wisdom and sentiments, and is relieved of the doubt that he won’t be remembered or understood.
The recipient not only receives wisdom and sentiments, but also a connection to her ancestors through an unbroken chain of tradition. She is also brought into the presence of God in a very particular way. Our parashah shows us how:
In Genesis 47:31, we encounter Jacob entreating Joseph to bury him in Israel, and not Egypt.
וַיֹּ֗אמֶר הִשָּֽׁבְעָה֙ לִ֔י וַיִּשָּׁבַ֖ע ל֑וֹ וַיִּשְׁתַּ֥חוּ יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל עַל־רֹ֥אשׁ הַמִּטָּֽה׃ {פ}
And he said, “Swear to me.” And he swore to him. Then Israel bowed at the head of the bed.
Once Jacob/Israel is assured twice that he will be brought back to the land of his ancestors, he “bows at the head of his bed.”
Commentators disagree on what this means, but Rashi offers this explanation:
Rashi:
על ראש המטה UPON THE BED’S HEAD — He turned towards the Divine Presence (the Shechinah) (Midrash Tanchuma, Vayechi 3). They (the Rabbis) inferred from this that the Shechinah is above the pillow of a sick person (Shabbat 12b).
When you are in the presence of someone who is terminally ill, you are brought into the realm of the shechina. You not only receive personalized blessing, but you are also brought into direct contact with God’s feminine manifestation in our world.
There is a chance that my children will look back at this stage of their life with resentment, as children of caretakers often do. When my mother took me on rounds in the hospital when I was their age (this was before HIPAA), sometimes I would color in the doctors’ lounge and watch the news on cable TV while she tended to patients. At other times, I would go with her from room to room, distracting the patients from their pain and also becoming uncomfortably accustomed to profound illness at a young age. I hated the smell, and the depressing air that infused the hospital. However, I can say thirty years later, without those experiences, I could never do the job I do today. I don’t think — without that background — I could have sat with the dying and buried the dead of my congregation starting at 27 years old. I’m blessed that I was raised in a world where those visits were still legal, and that my mom took me with her, despite the natural discomfort in inhabiting a world usually free of children.
At this moment in Jewish history, there is an additional concern I carry in raising my children in a community of elders. Most young Jews have not spent considerable time in multigenerational communities. Maybe they have spent time with their grandparents, but not in a broader milieu that evokes a different Jewish era. While I romanticize and generalize a bit too much, it is true that the older members of my community have held their Jewish commitments differently, and I think (mostly) better. Regardless of their religious practice, there were certain tenets of Jewish faith they all held: that showing up consistently is the essence of Jewish adulthood, that you are viscerally bound to other Jews in your community and around the world whether you knew them or liked them, and that Jewishness lived not just in the mind or the heart, but in the kishkes, the deep gut of your life. Those Jewish instincts were not viewed as vestigial limbs or a cause of embarrassment, but rather the core of their Jewish lives.
What does it mean to imbue your children’s lives with an expectation of vanishing virtues? Am I hurting them or helping them by raising them in a community where they can expect a certain type of care and presence that is increasingly rare and precious? Even as I sat in New Jersey with them a few months ago as they ate hot, kosher tongue sandwiches on rye, kreplach soup, and Dr. Brown’s root beer, all I could think to myself was, “this is the last kosher deli for miles, and it used to be one of three in my hometown.” Am I preparing my kids to live in a museum of Jewish life, among shadows, ghosts, and others’ nostalgia?
It seems clear to me that while Jewish life is not about to perish, it is clearly on the verge of some kind of metamorphosis. Some elements of Jewish life are near death and don’t have a critical mass of supporters to sustain. There are new elements of Jewish life that are already being born, the value and durability of which are yet to be seen. My family, like Ephraim and Menashe, are standing at the head of the bed with me, and the shechina, receiving blessings and testaments that will connect us to the past, bring comfort to those who have given them to us, and will prepare us for what comes next. There is undoubtedly a weight they will carry bringing these blessings, stories, and values into a new wilderness. Maybe they will shed them to reduce the burden of a lonely, strenuous journey for Jewish and personal survival and liberation. Or maybe, they will carry it all uncomfortably on their backs without knowing what they are for, until one day, it was the thing they needed to be the person their grandparents blessed them to be.
Shabbat Shalom.
So may people to pray for: Everyone in Los Angeles, our hostages in Gaza, the children dying in Gaza. May God bless us all with safety, freedom, and life.
What I’m reading:
About an Israeli-Arab Christian woman, Valerie Hamaty, who might represent Israel at the next Eurovision competition. Fascinating story, especially now. In a similar vein of unexpected stories out of Israel, the first gay male couple legally adopted a child in Israel this past month.
One of the most important members of Israel’s current Knesset is a Reform rabbi, MK Gilad Kariv. You should listen to his impassioned speech on the floor of the knesset responding to those who claimed that there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza.”
3: And on a totally different note: Nora Ephron: I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.