The Burden of a Blessing

Three times now, over the course of a little more than a dozen years, my wife and I have held a bundled-up, wrinkled newborn in our hands, encircled by family and friends, and blessed our child with the words of Talmud’s rabbis, who – upon leaving the house of study – would say to each other:

“May you live to see your world fulfilled in your life,
May your destiny be for worlds still to come,
And may you trust in generations past and yet to be.” (Talmud Berachot 17a)

Each time, our hearts filled up with memories of the world we had inherited from our parents a generation ago, and with our hopes for the one we would soon hand down to our babies. May they never know the wars we knew, the terrorism that defined our generation, the strife we witnessed, or even the Blockbuster late fees, the plaid flannels, Woodstock ‘99, and so on.

Each time, we recalled our loved ones whose presence was in memory only and entrusted those memories to our children in the form of names – first ones, middle ones, Hebrew ones, and last ones too.

And each time, we prayed that our children would someday surpass each one of those namesakes in every way imaginable, that their ancestral inheritance would represent the floor, not the ceiling, for what each of them would go on to become in their lives. For what each of them might someday (God-willing) bestow upon their own wrinkled newborns, blessing them beyond measure with words, with stories, with love, and by bequeathing a world that is better than the one they were born into. If nothing else, that’s every parent’s dream, right? To give their kids a life, a world, better than their own?

“And he lived…”

Of all the Torah portions to be titled “Vayechi” (“and he lived”), you’d think that one book-ended by death might not fit the bill. Ironically, the same goes for “Chayei Sarah” (“The Life of Sarah”), which opens with – of all things – Sarah’s death. Naming conventions aside, though, the point isn’t lost: there is no life without death, no death without life. It’s how our ancestors responded to death that’s most instructive: they became most fully alive.

As Jacob’s days near their end, he summons his favored son, Joseph, to his bedside and asks him to swear that he would see to it that his remains are buried not in Egypt, but rather that he would be gathered with his ancestors in Canaan.

His request is not a simple one; it’s a harrowing journey which requires Pharaoh’s permission and a great deal of fanfare, too. In the end, Joseph’s trek to Canaan and back would be his life’s last great adventure. The text tells us that once he completes this mission, he returns to Egypt to live out the balance of his days.

And what does Joseph do as his years come to an end? Exactly what his father did. He gathers his brothers and asks them to carry his remains to the place where he just buried their father. His bones would later emerge (in the midrash, at least) from the depths of the Nile, summoned by Serah bat Asher so that Moses could carry them to the doorsteps of the Promised Land before entrusting them to Joshua, who fulfilled his ancestors’ promise and took them to their final resting place.

Inspired by the untold story of Serah bat Asher, Rabbi Hara E. Person wrote:

“Endless life, for Joseph’s life.
I became the family historian,
the keeper of tales,
the finder of bones,
the weaver of loose ends.
That is my gift from my grandfather,
to revisit sufferings and joys and wanderings
anew with each generation,
to observe endless cycles of loss and hope and pain,
of births and deaths,
never to rest, never to finish, only to witness. . . .”

(Rabbi Hara E. Person, “Serah bat Asher,” in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, p. 280)

For all the blessings that Jacob bestowed upon his children and grandchildren (and they were many), the burden of his bones was not a light one. And so too, that of his son Joseph.

Those bones meant something: a promise yet to be fulfilled, a freedom yet to be realized, a border yet to be breached.

Along with those bones came stories of loss and grief, relentless cycles of youthful optimism and age-earned regrets. With those bones came the witness of a nascent nation and the responsibility to hold that witness for their own children to someday receive.

“You spend the first part of your life collecting things…and the second half getting rid of them.”

– Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende

Over the past couple weeks of winter break, I spent some time culling our family’s home, doing my own version of “Marie Kondo-ing” the place. But instead of asking whether or not any given tchotchke brought me joy, the question at hand was: will this become a burden on our children someday? In other words, the world they’re inheriting – the bones, as it were – will be heavy enough…do they really need to schlep this thing around with them?

Emboldened by the license that this question afforded me, I was downright ruthless; my old clothes that I had thought about saving for my son went right to the donations pile. Toys that the kids have ignored for a while? Donations pile. Do I really need three hammers in my tool set? No. Also, why do I have three hammers?

But the place where I did the most damage? My home office, replete with wall-to-wall sets of Torah, commentaries, Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, and every other volume that a certain rabbinical student studying for a year in Jerusalem might have purchased for his rabbinic library (confession: I shipped 17 boxes of books back on a container ship because that was the only method that would accommodate the sheer weight of books I had accumulated).

Given that many of the items in my home library were duplicates (yes, I have another library in my office office; I’m not an ascetic…yet), I was thrilled to box these up and hand them off to a couple of rabbinical students in the Boston area, who assured me that my books would meet a happy fate in the hands of their friends or on the shelves of the Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern they both frequent for food and Jewish learning.

Separately – and with significantly less wistfulness – I parted with the many duplicate volumes of PJ Library books we’ve received over the years. Somewhere on a “Free, Take One” cart outside of a synagogue library near you, Biscuit is celebrating a belated Hanukkah, Sara is waiting to find another Mitzva with some new young family, and Vashti is breaking out her Comfy Pants once again in preparation for Purim.

Good Bones

I don’t know what kind of world our children will inherit; anybody who tells you they know what’ll happen tomorrow, let alone a decade or two from now, is fooling themself. I don’t know if the world will still be divisive and ugly, or if the recent wave of antisemitism will eventually subside as generational tides recede once again. I don’t know if my daughters will have the same rights as my son, at the rate things are going these days. And I don’t know if either of our homelands (America and Israel) will inspire a resounding sense of pride and faithful spirit of service in them as it has for my wife and me. I just don’t know.

I do know that our intention is that – whenever they receive that world, and whatever condition it is in — they’ll have more than enough to carry into it. They’ll carry the dreams and the lamentations of their ancestors, the inherited memories and peculiar predilections whose origins they might not even be able to trace, but whose yearnings they will viscerally feel.

They’ll carry the blessings we gave them when we first welcomed them into our People and all the ones we’ve given them since: every Friday night, every first day of school, every last day of anything, every departure, every arrival, every day of their young lives. Blessings like those carry more weight than a shelf full of Talmudic tomes.

And I hope that – someday, God-willing many years from now – they’ll carry the blessing of very few, feather-light, clearly-labeled boxes out of our family home. And that every item gracing the inside of those boxes helps them to live better lives, to love more deeply, to be of greater service to one another, to their neighbors, to themselves, and to God, and — of course – to leave this world at least a touch better than it was when they first got here. And if anything in there doesn’t, they’ll know that it’s just stuff…the meaning behind all of it is already deep inside their bones.

“Good Bones,” a 2016 poem from author and poet Maggie Smith, touches on the struggle felt by many parents as they hand off a less-than-perfect world to their children, doing their best to protect them from its rougher edges. She closes:

“I am trying to sell them the world.
Any decent realtor…chirps on about good bones:
This place could be beautiful, right?
You could make this place beautiful.” ¹

Travel light, my dear ones. Travel light.

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