Parashat Vayechi: Loving Parents and Not Getting Weighed Down By Them
delivered on December 17, 2021 by Student Rabbi Maayan Lev
This week’s Torah portion, Vayechi, is about the death of Jacob, and the expectations he sets for his children while on his deathbed. A lot about the parent-child relationships can be learned from this week’s parashah.
Parents.
We love them.
We are commanded to, and with good reason.
Our parents raise us and sustain us.
They bring out the best in us.
Whenever we are successful, that success can be traced back to them,
and how they set us up for that success.
At least, that is the theory. In real life, it can be much messier. Yes, we are still commanded to love our parents, but love can be messy. Our feelings for our parents can change many times over the course of our lives. Every person has a different relationship with their parent. And while the model might not be true for everyone, I want to propose three main stages in our lives when our feelings for our parents may change.
The first stage is our impression of our parents when we are children. First impressions can be hard to shake off. For many of us, what we experience as kids is what lasts forever. But not always.
Stage 2 is our impression of our parents once we become adults. We have seen what it is like to be an adult in the real world. We have to make tough choices. We may even have children of our own. At that point, we can really evaluate our parents’ choices against our own, and see where we might have differed. We might decide that although we had a happy childhood, we no longer agree with some of the choices our parents made. Or conversely, we might have hated some of the decisions our parents made while we were children, but now that we’ve grown, we can understand where they were coming from, and we realize that there was a lot more to it than it seemed when we were children. For many people, our admiration for our parents either increases or decreases when we become adults, though for some people, the level of admiration remains the same. To be clear, admiration is not the same as love. Nor is obsession the same as love. Of course, there are many high school students who cannot make the distinction.
The third stage of feelings for our parents of course, takes place once they are gone. How do we remember them? How do we want to remember them? How do they want to be remembered? That brings us back to the parashah. On his deathbed, Jacob gathers his twelve sons, and says to them, “Come together, so I may tell you what is to befall you in days to come.”[1] Jacob then goes on to tell each of his sons what will happen to them in the future. Just like the predictions of today’s fortune-tellers, Jacob’s comments to his sons are a bit cryptic at times and cannot be easily understood without context. Context, that the brothers do not have. However, for the most part, Jacob’s “prophecies” were exceedingly positive, or exceedingly negative. Three of the brothers got “cursed,” and the nine other brothers got “blessed.” Even among those who were blessed, some of the blessings were better than others, all of which can cause sibling rivalry.
And what of the three brothers who got cursed, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi? These were Jacob’s last words to them. The last words your parent tells you before they die, can be extremely impactful. If the words aren’t what you want to hear, you might resent your parent for the rest of your life. In some cases, when our parent doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, we can reassure ourselves by emphasizing that our parents were not in the right state of mind when they made these comments. They might not have been themselves. They could be affected by things such as Alzheimer’s, or other illnesses associated with advanced age or mortality. In Jacob’s case though, he made it clear from the start that he loved Joseph more than the others. So when some of his sons heard his negative words, it’s not like these words were coming out of nowhere.
For Reuben, Simeon, and Levi, these words must have been devastating. They weren’t only cursed. They were cursed in front of their brothers, who were blessed! How humiliating! After Jacob’s death, they had a choice: to let their father’s words define them, or to carry on with life, and try to prove him wrong. The Torah does not tell us which occurred, as the book of Genesis soon ends, and when it picks up with the book of Exodus, the brothers have long since passed away.
Needless to say, expectations can have a big effect on our lives.
I want to tell a short story of a very unprofessional teacher, and his three students. One day, a fifth grade teacher conducted an intelligence assessment for the students in his class. When grading the tests, he noticed that most students performed at grade level expectations. Three scores stood out, however. One score was exceedingly high, and two were exceedingly low. The next day, he called those three students into his office, all at once. He said to the first student, “Your score was excellent. You are far superior academically, to everyone else in the class. I expect great things from you when you grow up.”
To the other two students, he said, “Your scores were terrible. You should be ashamed. You will never amount to anything, and you should temper your expectations about any success you may wish for yourself later in life.”
When the students left the office, the two who had scored poorly were understandably upset. Their teacher didn’t live to see these children grow up. After the kids graduated from fifth grade, they never saw him again.
And 40 years later, the children had grown up: the overachiever was doing alright for himself. He wasn’t necessarily struggling, but he hadn’t achieved any of the expectations that were foretold for him. He was capable, but he had gotten lazy and complacent. He had seen others surpass him, and rather than be happy for their success, or becoming more motivated to work harder, he had made the decision that if he wasn’t going to be acknowledged for his talents anymore, he should stop working hard. To him, there was no benefit to being talented if his talents were not going to be acknowledged.
Then there were the children who scored low. The two could not have turned out more differently. The first of these two children ended up inheriting a life as miserable and unsuccessful as his teacher had predicted. He said to himself, “It’s not my fault. My teacher was right about me all along. This was predetermined. I never had a chance, so why on earth should I have wasted my days trying to reach goals that were never a possibility for me anyway?” But he was wrong. The truth was, his abilities had bloomed quite a bit since school. Perhaps he had always had these great abilities, and the test just wasn’t designed to play to his strengths, which were many. He had all the potential to achieve his goals, but because he accepted his teachers’ words as the indisputable truth, and let those words define his life, those words became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But not for the third child. Yes, the teacher’s words insulted her, but that never caused her to give up. In fact, she became extra motivated to prove her teacher wrong, to break through the glass ceiling, and to achieve what her teacher told her she had no chance of accomplishing. This child, whom the teacher condemned, ended up becoming the most successful of all 3 children. While we can all have our own opinion about the Torah portion, I really think the words that Jacob said on his deathbed were highly wrong.
Abarbenel states, and I agree with him, that “Jacob decided to pass his leadership down to the son that was most qualified. He assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each child, and then shared his evaluations with all of them at once.”
But Jacob didn’t really know the truth about all of his sons. He only judged them based on what he knew. I imagine that there were plenty of great moments that the sons had when their father wasn’t around! Take Reuben, for example. He got cursed for his earlier sins, but in Genesis 37:22, Reuben intends to save Joseph from the pit! It didn’t end up happening that way though, so Jacob never heard about it.
Love for our parents can be a powerful thing. We are often raised to adore them, and we want them to love us back! We are expected to love our parents, and we should! But sometimes certain parents can make that obligation very hard for us, particularly if they raise us to fear them.
Let’s compare that expectation to love our parents, with the command to love G!d. Our relationship with G!d, and also with our parents, works best if it relies on love, not fear. Rashi explains this:[2]
“And you shall love G!d. Perform God’s commandments out of love. The one who performs the commandments out of love, cannot be compared to the one who performs the commandments out of fear. If one serves their master out of fear, when the master sets a great burden upon them, they will run away.”
So yes, we should love our parents. It is both a commandment, and a wonderful thing to do. But not all of the commandments are so easy to follow. Parents can make it easy on their children, by showing their children that they truly care for them. Jacob didn’t follow this blueprint, and if his final words to some of his children are anything to go by, he made it very hard for his children to follow this commandment.
Like all words in the Torah, we have this story so we can learn from it. Let’s all be the best that we can be. As parents, let us show love. And as individuals, let us not allow other people’s expectations to weigh us down. Love yourself, and be the best that you can be, no matter what someone else says.
I want to close with perhaps my favorite quote from any Jewish text. It comes from Psalm 118, and is part of Hallel.
בֶן מָאֲס֣ו הַבונִ֑ים הָ֝יְתָ֗ה לְר֣אש פִנָֽה׃
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone.
No matter what anyone says about us, we can still do it! We just have to convince ourselves that we can!
Shabbat shalom!
[1] Genesis 49:1.
[2] Rashi on Deuteronomy 6:5, s.v. “And you shall love.”