D’var Torah: Parashat Vayechi - Delivered January 2, 2026
This past May, I went to a cemetery on my birthday. I went to the cemetery to visit someone you all actually know. It was Andy Warhol. It was always on my list. I wanted to see his actual grave. If you have been to the Warhol museum, you may know that there is a live camera that is always fixed on the grave and you can see people walking over to it. It, in a way, is a Warhol-esque live piece of art that is constantly changing by the people who walk into the frame and their reactions, if you can see them.
Okay, I admit it. I went back to the video archive the after I visited it and even found myself in the video. It was amusing, but I think I was also recapping the experience that I had just had. If you haven’t been to his grave, I do highly recommend that you visit it – well, wait until the spring when it is warmer. You will be more comfortable and will be able to appreciate the beautifully kept flowers and landscaping which surround his grave.
I have a penchant for visiting cemeteries, both newer and older cemeteries … although one especially finds something particularly engrossing within the older cemeteries. It feels as if one is traveling back in time. If you have traveled around any area that has very old relics, particularly in countries which have histories that visibly go back thousands of years, you may have felt this connection as well in ancient ruins or standing on an archeological site. In Ireland, they have a term for these places and they call them the “thin places.” By this, they mean that there is a thin veil between the world we inhabit today and the world beyond. Perhaps this is a connection between heaven and earth, between what is mortal and what is eternal, or between what is tangible and visible and what is unknown. There is a mysticism that surrounds all of this, and we, as humans, who can never be all-knowing are caught, in the in-between.
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Vayechi, is the final portion of the Book of Genesis and it concludes with moments of farewell to two of our most prominent members of the generations featured within the book. First, we say goodbye to Jacob, the third of the patriarchs, and then at the end of the portion, we say goodbye to his son Joseph, who also happens to be the most mentioned person in the Torah following Moses. Both Jacob and Joseph make a request to their descendants that in due time, the people will return their remains to the land of Canaan and bury them back in their homeland. Amazingly so, these requests actually bookend the very beginning and very end of this portion. Jacob directly asks to not be buried in Egypt, and Joseph, in his manner as the eternal dreamer, first predicts that the Israelites will once again be remembered by God and returned to the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He then requests that once God has seen to this, that his bones should be taken from Egypt and returned to the land.
Joseph’s bones represent the memory of the Israelites’ past, and while we know from our vantage point that the history of our people will stretch out over a very long period of slavery in Egypt followed by wandering in the desert – the Israelites hold fast to their promise. But, it actually is a little more complex than this, and thus a midrash responds to the question of where and how Joseph’s bones were found at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, as this is at least a generation or two thereafter.
As you have likely experienced many times in your life, sometimes when we look back on a different period in our life, no matter the time or distance that has taken place between the two, it can feel like ancient history. We are perhaps no longer living where we used to, no longer in the same situations in our life, and no longer connected to those who surrounded us at that time for any myriad of reasons. Long after Joseph’s death, according to one Midrash, the Egyptians sunk Joseph’s coffin into the Nile, burying it so that the Israelites would not be able to find it, making them never able to leave without his remains. But, one descendant of Jacob did recall the location of the coffin, and this was Serach, the daughter of Asher, and granddaughter of Jacob. It is said that she was blessed by Jacob for a very long life after she told him that she knew Joseph was still alive. Serach, now one of the elders, is said to show Moses where the coffin is located, fulfilling the promise made to move his bones out of Egypt.
I feel that the Torah often positions itself to help us focus in on what it wants us to notice. This is sometimes by repetition of words, by highlighting words or phrases in the system of cantillation, or by using certain language that catches both our eye and ear. Earlier in Genesis, in Parashat Chayei Sarah, we read the well-known portion which begins with the death of Sarah and ends with the death of Abraham. These are significant moments in the early timeline of the saga of our earliest leaders. Here, in the final portion of this first book of the Torah, we once again have this framework of bookends – the death of Jacob followed by the death of Joseph. The Torah wishes us to focus on the meaning and value of their lives and all that they have brought to the Israelites and, in turn, to the Jewish people.
As I was browsing around on Facebook in the final days of the year we have just ended, I came upon this meaningful quote from the Tony award-winning musical Maybe Happy Ending – a quote that seemed to find its way to me right at the most appropriate and opportune time. It reads:
“We all have a beautiful moment here in the universe, where we light up the darkness or make the air vibrate magically, and then we are gone. The question is only what we do with that knowledge. Do we love harder? Is loving someone intensely worth the pain that follows? How do we live fully, knowing all the while that everything is always changing, that everything must pass?”
And, so as we say as we end every book of Torah –
Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazeik.
Be strong, be strong, and may we all be strengthened by everything Torah brings to us today and in this new, secular year ahead. Amen.