This drash was given in November, 2021, on zoom at my cousin Ann Brown’s synagogue Beit Haverim, located outside of Portland. She serves as their beloved Cantorial Soloist.
Who are we? and whose voices do we carry in our bodies, in our spirits, and in our actions, whether consciously or not?
Before we delve into this question and our discussion of this Torah portion, we divert for a moment to ask, what is Torah?
The Chernobler Rebbe (Me’or Aynayim, d 1797), says that the Torah is not a historical document but rather a garment of God’s light. It is a blueprint that defines who we are!
The way I see it, Torah is our collective dream and our job is to ask what do the stories, the text, guide our lives today and every day. Where is our life embedded in Torah?
It will always be different for each person, and different for each of us every time we engage with Torah text.
This portion is filled with intrigue and adventure, drama and challenge. With four chapters that are so rich with events – Joseph’s dreams; Jakov’s love for Joseph; the rivalry of the siblings and Joseph being sold to slavery; Yehuda and Tamar; Joseph in Potifar’s home and Joseph in prison, the dreams of the Baker and Wine Butler and Joseph interpreting those dreams.
YET: The first verse stopped me in my tracks:
Vayeishev Ya’akov b’eretz megurei aviv be’eretz kena’an
וַיֵּשֶׁב יַעֲקֹב, בְּאֶרֶץ מְגוּרֵי אָבִיו–בְּאֶרֶץ, כְּנָעַן.
Jacob dwelt in the land of his father’s sojourn, the land of Canaan (Gen. 37:1)
This portion begins with Jacob’s conscious return to his father’s land. Note, he is not returning to his father who died in last week’s parshah. He is returning to the land. The rocks, the mountains, the sky, the creeks, the animals who live there.
Just as right now we each are on land that was stewarded for many years by the people indigenous to the land. Here, in Northern California where I write this, ut is the Coastal Miwok also called the Olamentko who still live here and still steward her. We offer gratitude to this land, the coyotes, the bunnies, the quail, the deer who prune our plants, the sea that bring the winds and is home to the sea creatures, the sky that offers fog and rain.
Jacob returning to his father’s land invites us to ask ourselves, Who are our ancestors and where do we feel connected? What land do we feel connected with?
As I began, Who are we? whose voices do we carry in our bodies, in our spirits, and in our actions, whether consciously or not?
I hold this question every day about the voices of my ancestors, my spiritual lineage, my teachers, and the influence of family in my life. I try to notice how these relationships guide me, and when I feel lost, I try to remember to ask for guidance from them.
Ordained in the Jewish Renewal movement I take seriously my spiritual lineage of what the Chassidic rebbe’s have to offer, as much as I take seriously the relationships I have with my parents who are no longer alive, or my chaplain mentors, or even the teachings I receive from the tragedies I have experienced or witnessed. I inherited it all.
Let us return to the first sentence of Vayeishev.
Vayeishev Ya’akov b’eretz megurei aviv be’eretz kena’an
וַיֵּשֶׁב יַעֲקֹב, בְּאֶרֶץ מְגוּרֵי אָבִיו–בְּאֶרֶץ, כְּנָעַן.
The Hebrew of the first sentence has a word that interested a Chassidic rebbe of the 18th century. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. We usually translate this verse to say that Jacob returned to the land where his father sojourned or journeyed through. Instead, Levi Yitzchak read the sentence that Jacob returned to the land of his father’s fear. He came to this because the word here in Hebrew for Sojourning, megurei is also a synonym for fear or Pachad.
Jacob understood that his father Isaac was a man who served God with the quality of this fear.
We might think of fear as bad, but Levi Yitzchak says Jacob does not have a morbid fear of making a mistake, rather, he feels an invitation to see our unique role in the subtle and intimate connection with all others who suffer. And thus to act with caution.
Levi Yitzchak offers the possibility of a productive, positive awareness of our actions. To develop a fear of God is not to be afraid, but to develop the quality of self awareness and mindfulness.
Jacob is taking on this quality, or middah, of fear, as a gift inheritance from his father Isaac. Not an inheritance of burden.
I wonder if Jacob might have been working through his guilt of how he treated Esau, or how he tricked his father. He might be grieving because both his father and the love of his life, Rachel, had just died.
So Jacob leans on his father Isaac’s quality of serving God with fear in order to feel him, to learn from him, to be like him, and maybe to be comforted by him.
Jacob reminds us that what we inherit is of great importance. We also lean on our ancestors to feel them, to learn from them, to be like them, to be comforted by them.
When officiating a funeral I often invite the mourners to make a list of gifts they have inherited from their departed. By doing this myself, at my mother’s funeral it was the first time I noticed how much I was like my mother. In the hospital where I worked as a chaplain I was often mistaken for a medical social worker like she was. To this day I notice more and more how every movement I make, especially with my hands, reminds me of my mom.
Even the tragedy of losing a sister who took her life when I was a young teenager, taught me the gift of resilience and how to make meaning from tragedy. This tragedy, resulted in years of me working in service of others as a public interest lawyer, mediator, chaplain, rabbi, spiritual director, and teacher.
Trust me, tragedy is not a gift, but what has transformed our lives in ways we did not have asked for, may over time, become surprise gifts or teachers.
Jacob was telling us to go back, there is something there to look at, even if we don’t know exactly what it is. This doesn’t mean that inheriting fear is always good. Our people have surely inherited a collective trauma we need to address, but as Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi, z’l, would often say, while driving, don’t forget to look in the rearview mirror.
There is something else that jumped out to me. This portion is the beginning of the Joseph stories. My father’s name was Joseph. It’s not an accident I am here with you today. I can’t ignore that.
It was the merit of my parents Joe and Irma, and Ann’s parents, Sylvia and Murray, zichronam livracha, may their memories be a blessing, that brought me here today to be with you. Ann is my second cousin, our grandmothers were sisters. In our adult years, one could even say our aging years, we found each other again through Torah and music, across cyberspace.
And through the study of this portion, I noticed for the first time that I also follow in my dad’s footsteps, not primarily as an academic, but by making art in my recent years, as he did seriously in his last. He is definitely smiling about that.
Something else worth paying attention to is the shalshelet that appears in this portion! A shalshelet is a rare musical note, a trope sign, that is only used 4 times in the 5 books of Moses. Shalshelet means chain and is sung in three parts. Shalshelet also includes the word shalosh/three. When Joseph was accused by Potipher’s wife (who was not given a name) of trying to seduce her, there is a shalshelet on the word that means he refused. VaiyaMEyn. Genesis 39:8
We are taught in the Zohar that Joseph leaned on his three ancestors: Avraham, Yitzchak, and his father Ya’akov to strengthen him to not engage with, let’s call her, Mrs. Potipher.
I invite us all to take a look at the ones who came before us, including those who show up in Torah narratives, and ask what gifts or qualities did they give us, we might want to return to? Even if the gifts might be painful, surprising, or slow in coming.
I end with a nonrhetorical question.
Who are we? whose voices do we carry in our bodies, in our spirits, and in our actions, whether consciously or not?
Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi, of blessed memory, used to ask us rabbinical students and rabbis how we were being deployed.
There is no reason to feel lonely. The room is crowded with those that have shaped, guided, and offered me gifts, whether they were invited to or not. Born into a Jewish family I was literally shaped with the thighs of my people. Ashkenazi Jewish thighs. Yiddish, secular, Reform Hebrew School, and stockings the morning of Christmas. I swam in the culture of an assimilated, middle class, 1950’s Jewish American pride.
Is there something in your life worth returning to or taking a second helping?
Everything we know leads back to the river of loss and the lessons woven within her gentle ripples and harsh currents.
