This week’s Torah portion is one of ends. It’s the end of Genesis, and along with the end of the first book of the Torah comes the end of Jacob’s life, thus also ending the of the story of our patriarchs. Jacob’s death stands out from the past deaths we have come across. When Abraham died, the focus of the story was already on Isaac, and when Isaac passed on the story had already passed on to Jacob. Yet, unlike his father and grandfather, Jacob remains central to the story up until his final breath. Jacob’s story has always been one of restlessness, any attempt at settling down resulted in tragedies like Joseph’s disappearance; even now, while on his deathbed, Jacob cannot just stop and take a break. Perhaps he fears that stopping even now will lead to disaster, leading him feeling a need to pass on blessings and instructions to his children. His perseverance is really something else. Throughout his difficult life, Jacob never gives up, and through him, we can learn to not do so ourselves even if we too have violent subversive children and a brother that wants us dead. However, I think a deeper lesson can be learned in Jacob devoting his final moments toward blessing his children. All of his children.
Jacob makes his first set of “blessings” individualized to each of his children. At first glance it appears untrue that all the children receive a blessing, since the “blessings” for his first three sons, Reuben, Simeon and Levi, are not flattering. It even looks as if he is cursing Simeon and Levi. In truth, he curses their behavior, not them. While the words he has for those sons may not be the kindest, in the end the text states that he blesses each of the sons of Israel, “each man according to his blessing” (49.28). He “blesses” each child independently first, showing that each future tribe will have it’s own distinct destiny, yet he also passes on to each child that most important blessing that came down to him from Abraham through Isaac. The blessing that has until now only passed to one child, he now passes onto all his children. What makes this so amazing is that Jacob, who is openly aware of the flaws of certain children, is willing to overlook those flaws and still hope the best for them. Isaac was blind, and blessed Jacob when he thought he was blessing Esau. Even after Jacob received the blessing under false pretenses, Isaac tried his best to give a strong blessing to Esau but, this is not the same thing, since Jacob actually mentions his sons’ mistakes in the process of “blessing” them.
We learn from this just how important it is to look past the faults of others and see them for who they really are. Sure Reuben, Simeon and Levi made a few errors in judgement, who hasn’t wanted to sell their little brother into slavery, or in my case, convince them they were adopted? Does that make us bad people? So Levi and Simeon may have committed genocide, wiping out an entire city, but they were doing it out of an extreme sense of justice after the king’s son raped their sister. We can go back and forth for hours studying the actions of these ancestral figures, trying to figure out their intentions, but in the end we also have to trust in Jacob that he would not have grouped his little monsters in with his little angels. while blessing them. The thing is, we can point a finger at every one of Jacob’s children, accusing them of some error: Judah slept with a harlot, Joseph had extreme pride and married an Egyptian, the others also took Canaanite wives and they were all involved in selling Joseph. All of them except Benjamin, I can’t find anything wrong with him, but turn to the book of Judges if you want to see how well his descendants turned out. Anyway, Jacob blesses them all showing that he can look past those errors.
So maybe we can try to learn from these blessings in a few ways. The first lesson can be the importance of forgiveness: These guys sold Jacob’s favorite son then told him he was dead, yet Jacob is still willing to give them all a pretty big gift. I’m not saying to go out and grant a blessing to the project member who barely helped and showed up to group meetings drunk, and you probably shouldn’t buy the person who dumped you a car, but you can’t hold a grudge against people forever either. If we can try to understand Jacob’s sons and what makes them good people deserving of a blessing, surely we can also do this with the people in our lives. He may have done me some wrong, or I may have heard that she did someone else a wrong, but we still need to try our best to look into who those who have wronged us really are on the inside.
One of my teachers, Rabbi Miller, told me a few weeks ago that there could be a man living in a city who has killed five people yet has a higher chance of earning a place in the World to Come than either of us because he didn’t kill a sixth person. This person was put in an environment and in situations in which he could have killed six people, meanwhile I have been given the chance to give my time to worthy causes and the study of Torah, and I admittedly haven’t done nearly enough of either. We need to look at each person according to who he or she is, not who we want them to be. Even with his last breath, Jacob feels a need to teach us forgiveness, but more importantly, through also giving each child an individualized “blessing” he shows us just how important it is that we look at each person with an open mind and an open heart.
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David Gutbezahl is a recent graduate of Ramapo College in Jersey.
