By: Renée Rockford
President & CEO
We reread Torah every year, and it functions as a mirror that we hold up to our own lives and experiences. Rereading this week’s Parshat Vayigash, Bereshit (Genesis) 44:18-47:27, I see an inverse reflection looking back at me.
The parsha is known as the climax of the 22-year-long battle between Joseph and his brothers and the divine promise of making Israel a great nation. For me, it is also marked by its proximity to the yahrzeit of my eldest brother.
When Jacob’s sons returned from Egypt with the news after so many years that Joseph was alive, they feared that the elderly Jacob might die from the shock: “If we tell him straightaway, his soul will fly from his body. So, they told Serach, the daughter of Asher, son of Jacob, to play on her harp and sing, “Joseph lives, Joseph lives, and he is the ruler of Egypt,” so that he should absorb the message slowly.”
I experienced the opposite in my life. In struggling to deliver the tragic news of my own brother’s passing, my sister and I feared that my father might die from the shock. My father lay hospitalized with heart problems. Already having endured so much – the loss of his entire family in the Holocaust; the loss of a son to diabetes, the loss of his wife of nearly five decades to cancer, and now the death of another son, my sister and I feared that still more loss might just be too much.
In stepped my father’s long-time cardiologist and dear friend, who stood at my father’s bedside to deliver the news with the utmost sensitivity and respect. According to Jewish tradition, when informing someone of a death, it is considered a mitzvah to notify immediate family members so they can observe the mourning rituals.
For many years, I marveled at this mitzvah performed by the doctor and had long considered it a gift to my father—hearing such tragic news from a beloved and trusted friend. Having studied this parsha, I have considered this act anew, and I believe that the mitzvah was a gift to my sister and me, preventing us from being the source of more pain for our father.
As we wrap up the holiday of Hanukkah, I invite you to consider how kindness can be a spark of light that can guide us as we navigate oceans of darkness.
Shabbat Shalom.
Please email Renée Rockford at rrockford@jewishcolorado.org with questions or comments.