Finding Comfort On Our Way: Va-Yeishev

Finding Comfort On Our Journey

D’var Torah for Parashat Va-yeishev

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

I found myself mourning today.  Fifty years later, with all the changes the world has seen and gone through, with all the changes that I have gone through, one fact alone remains unchanged:  Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

I was fourteen, barely two years in America.  At school, after the announcement of President Kennedy’s death was made on the P.A., after a moment of stunned silence, one of my classmates turned to me and said, “You don’t even care. You aren’t even American.”

I was thinking of that remark earlier today, a grey and wet day.  Traffic wasn’t moving, and the drops that fell on the windshield and windows of my car simply slid down the smooth surface, leaving trails behind them.  Even fifty years later I found myself caring deeply.  I felt strangely moved.  When I examined my feelings, I realized I was grieving for more than a dead President.  After all, it was so long ago; and I didn’t even know President Kennedy. 

I did see him once, though.  A few months earlier, on a fine Shabbat morning, I was walking with my family to synagogue for the bar mitzvah of a family friend.  The many motorcycles that suddenly appeared alerted us to stop and look.  And there it was, the motorcade and the President’s limo.  We saw him quite distinctly.  I remember waving, and I remember seeing him wave back.  There was no one else near us at that moment.  It was definitely us he was waving to.

It was a good period in our life.  We had settled in, had friends, school; my father had a good job; there was much to look forward to.  America, too, was doing well then (or so it seemed to our innocent eyes).  The Peace Corps had begun doing its good work around the globe, spreading President Kennedy’s theme of “Camelot,” a vision of a world of hope, a world where all the nations were seated at a round table, round as the earth itself was, with no walls or boundaries between them.  It was a vision inspired by the Lerner and Lowe musical Camelot, which in turn was inspired by my favorite book of the time, T. H. White’s marvelous retelling of the Arthurian legends, The Once and Future King.

Of course, the real world wasn’t anything like that.  The Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer to a nuclear Armageddon than ever before.  America’s military involvement in Vietnam had already begun.  Racial unrest was about to turn violent on the streets of our cities.

One could easily ask how it was possible for the President to hold on to a vision that seemed to be slipping farther and farther away.  Certainly he could see that the dream, if not already dead, was surely disappearing in the smog of reality.

In a similar way, in reading this week’s Torah portion, Va-yeishev (Genesis 37:1—40:23), one could ask why Jacob refused to be comforted after he learns of Joseph’s supposed death. 

Judaism teaches us not to remain lifelong mourners for anyone or anything.  The Jewish three-step mourning process—a week, a month, a year—is designed to help the bereaved move onward, back to a productive life.  Yes, annual visits to the gravesite are made; we continue carrying our sadness with us, and our memories remain with us to our very last breath.  However, the demands of reality and life insist on our full attention, calling on us to focus on the present rather than the past.

So why does Jacob refuse to be comforted?  Why does he continue mourning?

And why, fifty years later, do we go on weeping for a President felled by a madman’s bullet?

Jacob had returned to his homeland not much earlier.  En route, he had lost his beloved wife Rachel, but he went on.  Jacob knew he had promises to keep—to God, to his father and mother, to his wives, to his children.  He knew he had to raise his family.  He had already chosen a successor on whom he would bestow the blessing of God.  The blessing, first given to Abraham and then to Isaac, would continue with Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph.  Joseph was, like his father, a dreamer.  He had visions of power, grandeur, even of a role in the world’s redemption.  To Jacob, Joseph represented hope and eternity.  The striped coat of many colors that Jacob gave him was like the rainbow that God had given humanity; it was a symbol of peace, of harmony, of balance restored.

Despite all his losses, Jacob continued believing in this dream.  Long ago he had learned of the imperfections of the world.  He knew about loneliness and loss, and he sensed the cold, murderous hatred that brothers could hold for one another.   He knew that in order to get ahead in this world, you sometimes have to barter and trade, sometimes beg, and yet at other times take by force.

But Joseph represented hope.  For Jacob, Joseph was a dream, a vision of a better world, a future in which stability was restored and peace between brothers was possible.  The torn and bloodied cloth he now held in his hands, which once had been Joseph’s splendid rainbow-colored tunic, represented to Jacob the irretrievable collapse of all his dreams.

Jacob mourned not only the loss of his beloved son.  He grieved for the loss of innocence, for what he saw as God’s betrayal of a promise made long ago.  He mourned defeat, the utter breakdown of hope and faith.

Of course, we, the readers of the Torah, know the ending of this story.  We know that Jacob will be reunited with his beloved Joseph.  We know that Jacob will laugh again, bounce his grandchildren on his knees.  And we know that Joseph will yet play the role he was destined for, as the redeemer of his family and people. 

In the same way, fifty years after the assassination of President Kennedy, we can find hope in the fact that his dreams are not yet gone; that the Peace Corps survives, that nations do sit at a round table to discuss cooperation and peace—dreams as distant and fragile today as they were in the days of King Arthur and his famous knights.

And despite our losses, like Jacob, like President Kennedy, we too can take comfort.  We can rediscover hope as we continue working towards our ancient ideals, as we pick up each broken piece and connect it with its mate, as we go on building bridges between a past that had once existed and a future that has yet to be created.  

We may not mourn forever.  It is forbidden.  Rather, we must rise and carry on our sacred task, creating structures and edifices to house the values we believe in—the blessings of peace, of harmony and of a world with its balance once more restored.

It is so that we honor the past in the best way we can.

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman