Parashat Vayechi – January 2, 2010 – 16 Tevet 5770

Why is it that we like to have clean endings? We have a certain fascination with having closure on things before moving onto new ventures or new relationships. Whenever we read to our children we like to know that “everyone lived happily ever after.” The prince and the princess marry, with a storybook wedding, and in the final scene before the credits role we see the two of them riding off into the sunset with their new life together as husband and wife! We, as adults, as the kids have drifted off to sleep, imagine our own dreams of living a life so full of promise, that included romance if not love and devotion. Somewhere along the way, often we do not know where and when it happened, the fairy tale of our lives is turning out much different than we expected. What we come to realize is that “happily ever after” is just the beginning to another chapter.

The same words can be applied to the Torah and what it accomplishes to teach us about the characters of the Bible and their life stories, as they, too, seek meaning and purpose from their lives. Both Jacob and Joseph’s lives come to an end. Neither of them know the joy that was promised to them by God. Even though Jacob’s bones were brought back to Canaan, and buried in the cave of his grandfather in Chevron, he died in a foreign country far from home, his heart broken by life’s circumstances too many times to count on both hands. And Joseph, too, died in Egypt, where he was embalmed and his body laid to rest in the Nile River for 400 years before they were retrieved by Moses and Aaron, and taken with them into the wilderness when they led the Israelite nation into freedom centuries after the Pharaohs had forgotten his contribution to Egypt’s survival from famine.

Although the Israelite nation appears to thrive and to grow while they live in Goshen, the place where the Pharaoh sent them to live, their growth is problematic to a more fearful leader who was insecure. As a consequence, we are far from that storybook ending that we seek when a book concludes. We are left hanging in the next chapter to the history of the Israelite people as a nation, and the plot thickens – far away from the home promised to Jacob’s family, and ours.

This is what the Torah does to us – repeatedly. Despite repeated promises made by God to the various characters of Genesis and Exodus, we don’t quite get there. When Deuteronomy and the first five books of the Jewish Canon come to a close, we find Moses standing on a mountaintop in Jordan waiting for God to collect him as he cries over his life’s purpose to get to the promised land, falling short “by inches” from the goal line. Although Joshua, his successor, does taste the fruits of the promised land at the beginning of the Books of the Prophets, another promise remains unfulfilled at the end of this section of the Jewish Canon as well. God promises to bring full redemption by revealing to Israel the “mashi’ach”, a time when the world will know only peace and tranquility. We look ahead. What we see, however, is yet another exile into Babylon in the third section of our “TaNaCh,” in Ketuvim. At the end of “The Writings,” King Cyrus promises to return the Jewish people to their native land to rebuild their precious temple in Jerusalem, but it is yet unfulfilled when the last word is pronounced. Ironically, the Israelite people find themselves in the same area as their beloved Abraham once stood when he first envisioned a single God, about to begin a similar journey home.

We return to Joseph on his deathbed. He makes his brothers and his children swear that they will take his bones with them when they leave Egypt. We find this generation of our people in the same place as the first generation when Abraham went down to Egypt to relieve his family of the pangs of hunger that came with a famine in their time.

Where does this analysis of the Torah portion for the week leave us in our own journeys, our own promises that have yet to be fulfilled? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks makes an interesting comment on the nature of God’s promises and how it relates to time itself. Most of us tend to see time as something linear; “Time marches on,” they say! “Time waits for no one,” say others. Several cultures saw time as being cyclical, in which all things return to their beginning. Those individuals never met the character Dorothy who taught us decades ago in the Wizard of Oz that “there is no place like home.” However, for those of us who have tried to return home, “home is never the same.” That is what Judaism teaches us. When we do go home, we are not the same person who left. Change is inevitable. In Judaism, we are not doomed to repeat the past without making progress when we adopt the philosophy handed down to us by Abraham in which God has struck a covenant with him and his followers.

Rabbi Sacks says the following about covenantal time: “It is the story of the human journey in response to a 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, the new society, the place where justice and compassion triumph over the evil that lurks in the human heart, where human virtues and divine blessedness meet in the consummation of the covenant that we call redemption…”

He then concludes: “Tragedy gives rise to pessimism.

Cyclical time leads to acceptance.

Linear time begets optimism.

Covenantal time gives birth to hope.”

Each of these emotions reflects a certain way that a person looks at the world in which they live. To have hope is to have faith in a future that is open to the possibilities of what can be. We are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and find ourselves like Sisyphus, a human of Greek mythology who was doomed to repeat the same “meaningless” task of rolling a stone up a hill only to have it roll down again. Albert Camus, in his essay on this Greek character, concludes that the only way we can bear to understand this story is to imagine Sisyphus finding meaning in his work, claiming that the struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart! As Jews, we have an obligation – “it is a mitzvah” – to make the most of our time on earth by making our world a better place as God’s partners in Creation.

In the next Jewish month, Shevat, there is a story told about a man who was in the middle of planting a tree when someone informed him that the Mashi’ach had arrived. According to the sages, planting for the future is so important, it takes precedence over greeting the Mashi’ach. The fact that we are obligated to make our world a better place gives rise to the notion that we have moved beyond a certain point in time, even if we are to return to the same place, for we have changed! We live in a world in which the future is still yet to be filled by our presence. What enables us to carry on with our individual tasks is the idea that “covenantal time” is what gives birth to “hope.” This is the way in which we view our world. “Hatikvah” is the hope of Jewish nation being able to relate to the other nations of the world in peace and friendship. As long as we remain optimistic to that mission, the future is open. The last chapter has yet to be written. Until then, we and God continue to write the stories that are the Torah for future generations.