Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Vayechi, literally means “he lived.” Yet despite its name, the parshah is about death—Jacob’s deathbed blessings to his sons, the mourning rites that follow his passing, and then Joseph’s death. This past year, I, like so many others, have found myself overwhelmed by the encounter with so much grief, and I desperately wanted to write this dvar Torah about anything else: perhaps how the blessings Jacob gives his children represent intergenerational political strife, or the ways the blessings, which balance intimate knowledge with global awareness, prefigure later tensions in Jewish history. But in the end, our parshah really is about death, beckoning us to confront the topic head on.
At first, it seems to be the story of a good death: Jacob gathers his family around him, offers them final words of blessing, and gives instructions for how he wants to be buried. But after he actually dies, it becomes less clear that this is a model for “doing death well.” Although Jacob’s family fulfills his final wish—to be buried in Canaan—they allow for the pageantry of Egyptian court procedure at every step. Indeed, they are accompanied on their travels to Canaan by “all the officials of Pharaoh, the senior members of his court, and all of Egypt’s dignitaries,” and before this procession, Jacob receives an Egyptian-style embalming, followed by a 70-day period in which the Egyptians “bewail him.” Is this extensive pomp and circumstance, apparently characteristic of Egyptian court mourning, the “gathering to his kin” that he desired?
Jews are often surprised to learn that Jacob was embalmed, because Jewish burial rites entail simply wrapping a washed body in a plain shroud. There is a particular power in this stark confrontation with the fact of death, mirrored in the austerity of the shiva: The mourner must sit with their grief; there are no distractions, no fancy floral arrangements to decide on or choices about which casket to select—only simplicity and brutal presence. The rabbis notice that Joseph, according to the Torah, “observed a mourning period of seven days for his father,” and suggest that this is a precursor to shiva. Yet Parshat Veyechi leaves the reader wondering: Did Joseph and his brothers have time to simply sit and feel, or were they constantly distracted by the Egyptian court pageantry? Might they have even sought out this very spectacle as a way to avoid feeling the full brunt of their loss?
I have spent too much of this terrible year running away from stories of death. I avert my gaze away from online posts about a Gazan child killed in their favorite sneakers or a father murdered before he held his newborn baby, and I recoil at images of the childhood bedrooms of hostages killed before they could return home. I can bear the anger I feel at witnessing this war, and try to channel it to take action, but I struggle to sit with the grief, distracting myself to avoid encountering the pain. Yet it is only when we allow in our sorrow—in silence rather than noise—that we can truly face it, and let it transform us. Sarah Aziza, wrestling with the figure of the witness in Jewish Currents almost exactly a year ago, wrote, “Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.” I wonder if mourning harbors a similar power: We can break, letting that rupture help us to break open the world. And it is only without distraction, without fanfare, in moments of quiet grief, that this breakage becomes possible.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
