Parashat “Va’yechi” (Genesis 47:28-50:26)
for the week of December 18, 2010

Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what we pass along to our children.  When they are young, we fill their hands, their hearts and their minds.  We give them washcloths and teach them to take care of their bodies.  We give them love and support so they will feel that they are cherished, worthy of love and even, potentially holy.  We give them lessons about the difference between right and wrong so they will know how to choose.

But sometimes, despite our genuinely loving intentions, we also pass along hurtful legacies.  We give our children wounds.  In spite of ourselves, we feed their insecurities, their fears, their self-doubt, their anger and their hurt.   We smother them with our own worries and need for control and so they find it difficult to learn to trust themselves.  Or, we are absent and disconnected when they need us and they find it more difficult to trust that others will be there for them.  In our own most challenging moments of brokenness, we sometimes find it difficult to help our children move toward the wholeness we want for them.

In this week’s Torah portion, Va’yechi, Jacob, the patriarch, the dying father, gathers his twelve sons around his deathbed to bless them (the lack of a blessing for Dinah will have to wait for another year’s commentary).  Biblical scholars teach us that these blessings are intended not primarily to describe the destinies of Jacob’s individual sons but rather the twelve tribes that will descend from them and eventually bear their names.  But never mind.  This year, I read Jacob’s prophetic words as a powerful, flawed and passionate, final attempt by a father to pass bitter and sweet legacies on to his children.

That this will not be a saccharine deathbed blessing is pretty clear right from the start.  Jacob “blesses” Reuben, his first-born son, by calling him “licentious” and accusing him of having relations with his father’s (i.e., Jacob’s) concubine (Gen 49:3-4).  Jacob “blesses” his sons, Simeon and Levi, by saying that their “fury so harsh” is cursed and by praying that they will be “dispersed” and “scattered” in Israel (Gen. 49:5-7).  For Joseph, by contrast, Jacob asks the “blessings of the heaven above” and “the bounty of the timeless hills,” calling him “the prince among his brothers” (Gen. 49:22-26).  Taken as a whole, it’s clear that Jacob’s words to his sons could be described (pun intended) as a “mixed blessing.”

In his commentary, Rabbi Plaut writes:  “Every blessing bestowed by any of us is at the core a prayer, since it asks God to help accomplish what we ourselves cannot.  Yet the blessing is more than prayer, for it assigns a decisive role to the one who pronounces it.  Placing his hands in the solemn act, the patriarch sees himself as God’s co-worker and as an essential link between the generations.  We cannot take God’s place; but neither can God take the place of parents and grandparents in the shaping of the children’s future.*”

So, whether we shape our children with formal words and hands laid upon their heads or with each silent caress, glance and hug, whether we influence their future with words of hope, promise and profound faith in who they are becoming or with angry criticisms, relentless worry and suffocating control, whether we see our children for who they are as independent, mysteriously “other” human beings or merely as extensions of ourselves and our own needs and aspirations, we are constantly choosing the content of our “blessings” to them.  With every touch, every word, every action, we define our role in that partnership with God in which we raise up and launch the next generation into life, into the world, into history.  May our blessings truly be blessings and may we ultimately be worthy partners with God in this most sacred of endeavors.

*The Torah:  A Modern  Commentary (Revised Edition), ed., Rabbi William Gunther Plaut (New York:  Union for Reform Judaism Press, 2005), pg. 317.