Parashat Vayechi, 5772, Peter Dale Scott
Parashat Vayechi
January 7, 2012 / 12 Tevet 5772
Peter Dale Scott
How we respond to a text depends in part on how it ends -- whether happily, sadly, or problematically. Vayechi’s dramatic end to Bereishit gives us two closures. One is an outwardly happy ending to the past prolonged rifts in Jacob’s immediate family (Gen 50:21).1 The other is open-ended: two patriarchal deaths that both look ahead to the future of Israel as a people.
This ending is a special kind of closure: an open closure, which simultaneously finishes a narration and also looks forward to an open-ended future.2Jacob on his deathbed promises Joseph, “God will be with you and will bring you back to the land of your fathers” (Gen 48:21). But as Bereishit ends, the Jews are still in Egypt. And so, in a sense, are we today, who have just prayed for an end to war and a more peaceful world than the one we now inhabit.
This open closure, focused on a future return to eretz Israel, prefigures the end of the Torah, when the Jews are poised to cross the Jordan from Moab into Israel (Deut 34:1-12), and also the end of the Tanach, when Cyrus invites the Jews in Babylon to return to Israel to rebuild the temple (2 Chron 36:23). In all three closures, the Jews are in a foreign land – Egypt, Moab, and much later Persia -- but the text anticipates a return to Canaan.
These open endings reinforce the strong Jewish sense of history as a dialectical process, of a meaningful exile led by God’s will to a future preordained return. In Vayechi Joseph says to his brothers: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people” (Gen 50:26; cf. Gen 45:7-8). In other words, the family conflict leading to the Jewish exile in Egypt (destined to become a land of affliction) is part of God’s divine plan along with the promise of return to the land of milk and honey.3
Return is voiced in the deathbed instructions of both Jacob and Joseph, but their two speeches are significantly different. Jacob charges his family, “Bury me with my fathers” in “the field of Machpelah” (Gen 49:29); and his sons duly obey. Joseph’s charge to the bnei Israel is more open-ended with respect to time (“When God remembers you, you shall carry up my bones from here,” Gen 50:25), and also with respect to place. While Jacob’s request looks back to the field already bought by Abraham from Ephron the Hittite (Gen 49:30). Joseph looks ahead to el-haaretz nishba lavraham the land promised to Abraham (and his offspring, Gen 50:24, cf. Gen 12:7) but not yet achieved.4
Thanks to Joseph’s last instructions, the Jews in the wilderness traveled after Mount Sinai with two aronot: the aron or coffin which carried Joseph’s bones back to his ancestral past, and the aron or ark destined for the future Temple (said to have been foreseen by Jacob in his dream at Luz, Gen 28:17).5
These reminders of past and future reinforce a Jewish sense of history that is still with us. We heard it in today’s Torah service, where we first remembered our ancestors in the time of Joseph and Moses and then looked forward in prayer for “the day when war and bloodshed cease.”6 Nothing has affected history more than this strong Jewish sense of a linear history (transcending a closed or cyclical one).7 This awareness eventually spread from Judaism to Christianity, Islam, and via the 18th Century Enlightenment. It inspires western civilization today.
Many peoples came to America from a land of affliction: for example the Finns8 and the Scots.9The Finns and Scots struggle here to maintain identity; and so we have around us our Finnish Halls and Scottish Games. But if Finns and Scots strive here to be better than the world around them, they do so as individuals, not as a nation. For in their national background there is no Mount Sinai, no divinely manifested destiny.
Jews in this respect are clearly different, having come with a collective sense of preordained mission. Moreover Jews came to a country already strongly influenced by the same Jewish sense of mission and an ordained destiny, long before any significant numbers of Jews had ever arrived.
The earliest settlers, such as John Winthrop in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Rolfe in Virginia, spoke metaphorically of their communities coming from a land of affliction to a New Israel.10 References to Pentateuchal liberation were common in the American Revolution: Washington was called a new Joshua, George III was called “pharaoh,”11 and Promised Land images were proposed for America’s Great Seal. (Franklin suggested Moses dividing the Red Sea, while Jefferson preferred the Israelites being led out of the wilderness.)12
So when Jews arrived in America in numbers, a century later, it was to a world whose traditions they had already helped create. These traditions survived in the phrase “manifest destiny,” and Walt Whitman’s “One common indivisible destiny for ALL.”13 This “destiny,” as first articulated by Young America and Whitman, meant that America’s experience of preordained liberation would spread through the world.14
Inspired by Whitman, the poet Czeslaw Milosz15 emphasized the vital importance of “a sense of open space ahead” to our western civilization, “shaped as it is by the Bible and, for that reason, eschatological to the core.”16 I agree with him that this sense of an open future, when it prevails, nourishes faith and trust in common endeavor. And when it falters, as it has since 9/11, a culture of trust is replaced by a culture of mistrust and fear; and old inter-family grievances return.
Today America is again divided, with wounds reopened that predate the Civil War. In our present demoralization and gloom, let us recall how Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address17 and Second Inaugural,18 used open closure, tinged with biblical precedent, to help America see beyond present affliction to a better future. And here is Martin Luther King’s open closure and evocation of Torah, from his last speech, the night before he was assassinated.
I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain…. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.
May America, grounded as it is in this rich and on-going biblical tradition of an open future, again learn to overcome its family divisions, as did Joseph and his brothers. And instead let us in trust continue to strive, in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase, to “achieve our country and change the history of the world.”19
In closing, I want to thank Art Braufman, Seymour Kessler, Rabbi Creditor, and my wife Ronna Kabatznick for their help in preparing this drash. I’d also like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to Congregation Netivot Shalom. As I approach my 83rd birthday I will also soon stand up and say kaddish for my own departed father. I cannot express how grateful I am to participate in these and other meaningful Jewish rituals, which have done so much to shape my own evolution, as well as those of the Jewish and other peoples.
1. As in real life, the reconciliation contains ambiguities. The brothers’ speech to Joseph is in part deceitful, and Joseph’s tears can be seen as either reenacting those of Jacob in his reconciliation with Esau (Gen 33:4), or as a sign of his sadness “at the discovery that his brothers still do not trust him” (Eitz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, 309n)..
2. Neil Parker, Open closure: endings in literature, modernism Joyce and Proust (M.A. Thesis in English--University of California, Berkeley, May 1988). Cf. Frank Kermode, The sense of an ending; studies in the theory of fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
3. The Christian Bible also is marked by similar open closures, with a strong sense of an open space ahead. For Christians the Old Testament ends with the messianic prophecy of Malachi (“Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah…,” Mal 4:5); the Gospels with Jesus’ last open-ended words about his Second Coming (John 21:23), and the New Testament as a whole with the Book of Revelation’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth (“Surely I am coming soon,” Rev 22:20; cf. 21:1).
4. The et-bnei Israel or sons of Israel whom Joseph charges on his deathbed to return his body addresses both Jacob’s literal sons who hear the charge and also their progeny, the people by whom the charge will be fulfilled.
5. E.g. Ben C. Ollenburger, Old Testament Theology, 149.
6. E.g. The prayer is from the Hebrew of Rabbi Nathan Sternhartz (1780-1845), but it includes the prophesy of Isaiah that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Is 2:4).
7. Since giving this drash I have been informed that the same point about a linear sense of history from the Bible was made by Elie Wiesel, and developed at length by Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1998).
8. Finnish migration to America increased radically after 1899, as the Russian government started an aggressive campaign for the Russification of Finland. Many Finns chose to escape the repression by migrating into the New World, and, during the 1900s, there were 150,000 new migrants. See Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1904.
9. In the 1670s and 1680s Scottish Presbyterian Dissenters fled persecution by Charles II and James II, to settle in South Carolina and New Jersey. The quite different immigration of Scotch-Irish Dissenters from Ulster after 1691 was partly in response to the Penal Acts and other laws introduced to favor the Anglican Church in Ireland.
10. Donald M. Scott, “The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny,” National Humanities Center, . http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm: “John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and unique Providential mission. ‘On Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630,’ Winthrop delivered the blueprint for what Perry Miller has dubbed an ‘errand into the wilderness’ which set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that ‘America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny.’ Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston…. ‘We are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission,’ he declared, adding ‘if the Lord shall please to hear us and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission and will expect a strict performance of the Articles contained in it.’ He went on to specify more full what fidelity to this commission entailed: the people of New England must ‘follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities.’ But it is near the close of the speech that he coined the phrase that has been invoked again and again (most recently by President Ronald Reagan) to express the idea of America’s providential uniqueness and destiny. If we are faithful to our mission, ‘we shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when tens of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.’” Cf. Conrad Cherry (ed.), God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1971).
11. E.g. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 9, 1776: “I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever” (Life and Works, ed. Van der Weyde, 2, 137-38).
12. Donald M. Scott, “The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny,” National Humanities Center,http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm; Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1856, 180,http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=harp;cc=harp;rgn=full%20text;idno=harp0013-2;didno=harp0013-2;view=image;seq=00190;node=harp0013-2%3A1. The ultimate Great Seal we know from a dollar bill, with its unfinished pyramid, was Masonic, drawing on a tradition said to date back to Hiram, the alleged Mason who helped build Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 5:15-25). Cf. Thomas Paine, “Origin Of Free-Masonry,” http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/origin_free-maso... .
13. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Exposition,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Michael Moon, 171.
14. These traditions of exceptionalism were not without their downsides. “Manifest destiny” -- originally a faith in the ordained spread of democracy -- soon became a rationale for mere imperial expansion, whose consequences we are still suffering from.
15. Czeslaw Milosz is honored as a Righteous Gentile at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust (http://www.respectance.com/czeslaw_milosz/).
16. The Witness of Poetry [Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1983], 14, 37; cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Changing North America -- III. The Space Ahead,”http://japanfocus.org/site/view/3553; Peter Dale Scott, “Poets Who Grow Gardens in Their Heads,” (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, forthcoming).
17. The Gettysburg Address opens with the language of the Psalms in the King James Bible (“Four score and seven years ago…; cf. Ps 90:10) and closes with a vision of hope beyond affliction: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
18. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, the quotation "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether" is from Psalm 19:9 in the King James Bible. The address again ends with an open closure: “let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
19. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 119; quoted in Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1998), 13; Peter Dale Scott, Minding the Darkness (New York: New Directions, 2000), 164.