What we love, what we leave, what we save: Parshat Vayechi
This d'var Torah was given on Shabbat Parshat Vayechi,
January 2025 at Hinenu Baltimore.
Note: It would be the failure of my career if anyone heard this sermon and felt condemned for not having a child, by their own choice or not. This is my story, and I want to hear yours. There is no one way to build for our future, and our art, teaching, care, and work, our students, niblings, and child friends are our legacy, not just children that come out of our bodies or our families.
So you know what we're getting into, and you can make a choice about whether or not you suddenly need to go use the bathroom:
Some of the themes of my drasha tonight include discernment about having a child, wildfire, climate change, COVID, the potential death of parents and living grandparents.
We are a community where we're not going to pretend that we're okay while we're having a full meltdown. It sometimes means you have to actively stand up and leave because you need to take care of yourself and it feels nervous. Access is never awkward. Taking care of yourself, let us say it could never be awkward. So if that's not a drasha you need to hear tonight, please go gossip in the hallway. That is why Hashem created synagogues with hallways to gossip in.
So from October 25th to November 1st, 2020, Ever and I stayed in a snowy cabin in Belmont, Vermont.
You may remember that November 3rd was the presidential election, Biden v. Trump. So tension was high. And we were there in Vermont for the baby summit.We had been married for many years and we're saying, it's a time we want to have kids. Is it time? Let's push it off.
So we said we're going to have a baby summit and we're going to talk about how and when and all of the details of raising children. And I had a full meltdown.
I had a full sobbing, emergency calls to my therapist, like unprepared for the level of meltdown that I had had because my whole life I had said and known that I wanted to raise children. But it was a tense time.
And in this beautiful little cabin, I was overcome with fear for our planet, for what kind of future I could promise a child, wondering if he would be mad at me for bringing him into this world.
And I always have loved children. I love how weird they are. I see my own weirdness in children. I've always loved teaching children. I knew I desired them. I wanted to raise children with ever and I couldn't find an ethical way through. And so I fell apart.
And again, this week we have fallen apart as we witnessed the collapse that overtook my imagination and my nervous system.We are witnessing the climate change that we are afraid of, that we have said is coming, that is here. I read someone say there is no off season for fire anymore in California.
And just as we prayed for incarcerated firefighters, if there are beloveds of yours in the path of harm's way or who have evacuated whose names you want to lift up, I just want to pause.
[Room shares names, omitted from recording.]
So this week in a completely different mindset than in the cabin in Vermont and with my eyeballs glued to the news on my phone, let's be real, two members of our congregation, Acadia and Robin came to talk about the Hinenu Archives— that doesn't exist yet, they're making it.
They both work in museums, Acadia works at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and Robin works across the street in the Baltimore Museum of Art's print catalog archive. Talk to him about paper, he gets very passionate and aggressive about it, it's great. And Acadia gets like really big eyeballs talking about like synagogue pamphlets. And these are the two exact people that you want to keep the memory of your synagogue. And they said we have to save seven years of Hinenu’s history, it's worth remembering.
And it felt impossibly both at the same time, like what, you want this like board agenda that I wrote panicked notes on the side of for the archives and simultaneously yes, like what we do here is important and is something that deserves to be remembered.
And I was toggling between these two places of “I am but dust and ashes” and “the whole world was created for Hinenu.” And Robin said this incredible gift, as I was spinning out he said, “we don't get to decide what the future thinks is important.” We don't get to decide what the future thinks is important.
We don't get to limit the choices the future people engaging with our work will make by throwing things out, or by getting rid of the board report with a panicked thoughts on the side.
In this week's Parsha, Parshat Vayechi, we witness Jacob's death. The Parsha begins with Jacob asking Joseph to promise to not bury him in the land of Mitzrayim, the land of Egypt where the whole family has relocated. And then he has his son place his hand under his thigh, actually his genitals, to make an oath, a vulnerable place to ask someone to promise you something and to promise someone something.
Now I promise there's a reason for sharing with you the location of this oath.
And perhaps it is because he is saying don't leave me in this place, but also don't let the generations that have come from me, that have come from my body, don't let our story end far from home. Don't let our generations, don't let us surrender who we are to a larger culture or story. In Torah study this morning, Anna shared so beautifully that this moment that Joseph also follows is a symbol of our traditions changing over time.
Because yes, Jacob is buried somewhere that is not the cave of Machpelah with his beloved, one of his beloveds and his ancestors, but he gets there eventually. And yes, Joseph is embalmed, but eventually he is carried out of the land. And she described this as making choices that are different than the generation that came before us made in an effort to protect our traditions. The way that a tree or a building moves or a bridge in order to stay intact.And I think about the image of a quilt that is our inheritance of Judaism.
That if left by itself unchanging over time, the holes would take over and become irreparable. And so instead we sew over it with patches and innovation and new pieces. Love that we find outside of our own religion, interpretation or wisdom that comes from rising to meet times that the people before us couldn't have imagined.
So then Jacob blesses Ephraim and Menasha, Joseph's own sons as his own. See when Jacob died, when Jacob was told that Joseph was dead, his whole world ended. The world was over. It was an apocalypse and Jacob died too. There was not a future that he could have imagined.
And now in the fullness of his age, sure with fear about what will become of his descendants, but with faith in the God and the angel that traveled with him his whole life, Jacob has what we all wish for a good death.
And it says in our parasha in chapter 48, and Yisrael said to Joseph, I never expected to see you again. And here God has let me see your children as well.
I did end up deciding to try to get pregnant, spoilers.
A month after the baby summit, my parents got COVID and this was before the vaccines before just as remdesivir, a COVID treatment drug was coming. My mother suffered first going into the hospital for a few days before coming home. My father became very, very sick going into the hospital for what would ultimately be five weeks in this community. Your hands are at my back the whole time, taking care of us, feeding us, yelling at us to stop answering email. We were certain in brief flashes of frantic panic that he was going to die.
And when my dad made it out by the talent of his team of doctors and nurses and orderlies, and from the great mercy, luck, miracle and circumstance and blessing of the Holy One, I thought, well, we can't control much, can we?
How do we raise children on a burning planet? How do we decide to bring children onto a planet whose future looks so bleak? Into a tradition that is being misused to wage genocide on our own cousins?
How do we trust in the resilience of our Jewish tradition to be able to grow, to expand into new times and new value sets and wisdom, new loves outside of Jewish tradition?
How do we work to leave our descendants, our children, our students, our art, our world, a world that it can grow into?
We don't get to decide what the future thinks is important.
So we save it all.
The papers and the emails and the early sermon outlines with nervous scrawling. The tradition, though it warms us in places and suffocates us in others by mending and reinforcing the quilt with innovation to last and last and last. We save the beloved beings that move through us, be it the children we birth or raise or teach or tend to. And we try to save the planet as it shakes and sputters and roils and rises up. But we don't get to decide what the future thinks is important. So we save it all. And we make it all.
May those who come after us, those who we cannot imagine, those who we cannot wait to meet, those who will stay in the world of imagining, the work that we can only pray to have the opportunity to do, may it all remember us from a future with compassion.
May we do our best and may they see the best of us.
Amen.