Sermon 1.6.07 - Parshat Vayechi: Inherited Promises

Now that most of you have met my wife Yael, I can tell you all of the wonderful stories surrounding our wedding. When Yael and I first got engaged, we dreamed of having a small, private ceremony with close friends and immediate relatives. Given the fact that we were deeply in debt and most of our friends lived far away from us in Los Angeles, we thought a smaller affair would suit us just fine. And it was fine, until we received my parents’ list of friends and family they wanted to have invited to the wedding. Did this happen to any of you? Out of the woodwork they came, from Hawaii to England, dozens of names I had never heard of; relatives I never knew existed. From Leonard Bland of Deerfield, Illinois to Hilton Flamenbaum of York, Ontario. Who on earth were these people and why did I need to invite them to my wedding?
I have a similar reaction in reading Moses’ final speech to the Israelites, demanding total obedience to the covenant with God. Moses says,
“I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the LORD our God and with those who are not with us here this day. (Deuteronomy 29:9-14)

What is that? How audacious for Moses to make a promise with people in absentia? According to Moses, the covenant between God and Am Yisrael extends not just to those who heard him, but to all future generations as well. That means you and me. Now, I don’t know about you, but this does not sound particularly fair to me. Since when can a person’s promise be extended to future generations? Lord only knows what my parents, grandparents have promised (most of which I have probably never heard). I always assumed that if a promise is not fulfilled by the time a person dies, the promise is buried along with the person. However, the medieval Torah commentator Abravanel disagrees, saying,
“There is no doubt that if a man receives a loan from another that the duty of repayment falls on him and his descendents. Just as the children inherit their father’s property, so too they inherit his debts. Even though the children were not alive when the debt was incurred, they are still liable to repay it. Similarly, God conferred a privilege on Israel and they were indebted to God for it in that God brought them out from Egyptian slavery.”

Ok. So God brought us out of slavery and for this we and our future generations are forever indebted to God. But for goodness sake, I didn’t even know who Hilton Flamembaum was! I wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman. To this day I still don’t know if I am pronouncing the name correctly.
I get that debts and promises with God can be transferred onto a descendant. But how about debts and promises made by a parent? Maybe my parents were being a bit too self-righteous here and were asking for liberties normally saved for the divine. Only the immortal could request that I invite Hilton Flamembaum to my wedding. Yes, that was it. I would tell my parents that they were obviously acting beyond the bounds of moral plausibility, lest they sought to emulate God. Their request was blasphemous! And just when I was getting my hopes up, I realized that the torah disputes this as well, with the story of Joseph as seen in this week’s Torah portion, Vayechi. As Joseph nears death, he has his brothers promise that their progeny will carry his bones out of Egypt. (Genesis 50:24-25)
And so, 6 generations later, Moses fulfills this request by carrying Joseph’s remains out of Egypt and into the wilderness, towards Israel. Just as the people Israel offer their future generations to secure their promise, so does Joseph offer his brothers and their offspring for his. And thus Hilton Flamembaum reaffirmed her, I mean, his position on the invite list.
The Torah illustrates a pattern of familial responsibility that is eternally passed on to later generations. This is a very foreign concept to modern American culture, which with all apologies to Mr. Abravanel, prohibits a parent’s debt from being passed on to their children, at least not directly. We have other examples of this familial responsibility in the Torah. For example, the Levirite Marriage. We read in Deuteronomy that if a brother dies with no son, it is the responsibility of the living brother to take the dead brother’s widow as his own wife, and to give her children. The Mishnah adds that if the brother decides he doesn’t want to do this, the widow takes off his shoe, spits in it, and curses him. Thus she publicly distances herself from this promise as well, all the while getting to spit a loogie in public. As for the brother, this is quite the punishment for not fulfilling a promise that he had never even made!
So where did this leave me with Hilton Flamembaum of Ontario? Well, I hate to break it to you, but I realize now that much of Judaism is inherited promises. In fact, most of us were never given the choice of being Jewish or not. I know that I most certainly had little choice over a certain event on the eighth day of my life, and possibly less choice over an even more painful memory from my childhood; Sunday school. A Midrash from the Mechilta of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai tells us that when God gave the Torah at Mt. Sinai, he asked for some kind of guarantee that we would keep our side of the bargain by observing the commandments. The Israelites offered the Heavens, but God shrewdly pointed out that he was responsible for the heavens, not them. They then offered the earth, but that brought a similar response. Finally, they offered their children, and God accepted. Obligating future generations as collateral to our promises is a part of Jewish history.
So Hilton Flamembaum was officially in. The fact that my parents helped to pay for the wedding further solidified my inherited responsibility. So years after the fact, I’m doubly indebted to them. As for the rest of us, as Am Yisrael, we carry the responsibility of maintaining our ancestor’s traditions. As Reform Jews, we like to believe that we are ultimately responsible for all of our choices. But we do not live in a vacuum, and surely our beliefs, biases and opinions are reflections of the traditions we have inherited.
Fast forward two years and Yael and I are the proud parents of our own daughter. Without much input on her part, she has already had a traditional baby naming service and will undoubtedly one day enter that social experiment of survival of the fittest known as Sunday school. Mali has inherited the names of our ancestors and with them, the responsibility of continuing our Jewish heritage. And while we hope that she will become an independent and responsible person, we both have some pretty good idea as to what that looks like. And after all of our wedding fears, Hilton Flamembaum and his wife turned out to be wonderful people. Who knows? Maybe eventually we’ll end up inviting them to Mali’s bat mitzvah. And so it goes with the Jewish tradition of inherited obligations. Shabbat Shalom.