Don't Summarize Me
The Future of Memory in Vayechi
“It is no use trying to sum people up.”
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room“And when the time approached for Israel to die, he summoned his son Joseph and said to him, “Do me this favor, place your hand under my thigh as a pledge of your steadfast loyalty: please do not bury me in Egypt” (Genesis 47:29).
Why is Jacob adamant that he not be buried in Egypt? Why is the patriarch after whom the entire nation are named—Israel—so desperate to join his ancestors in the burial site of Machpelah? Classical commentators grasp for rational explanations. Here is Rashi, citing a Midrash:
Because [the Egyptian] soil will ultimately become lice which would swarm beneath my body. Further, those who die outside the Land of Israel will not live again at the Resurrection except after the pain caused by the body rolling through underground-passages until it reaches the Holy Land. And another reason is that the Egyptians should not make me (my corpse or my tomb) the object of idolatrous worship (Genesis Rabbah 76:3).
While these reasons are possible, they are most likely anachronistic. There is no evidence any of the Biblical characters in the Five Books of Moses believed in resurrection of the body. Moreover, if Jacob were afraid of becoming an object of worship, he might have found other ways to protect himself against it besides having his body brought all the way back to Canaan. Jacob does not give a reason for his final wish, which suggests his motivations are more psychological than practical, more figurative than tangible.
That Jacob is named Israel when he offers his final wish suggests a poetic possibility: Israel, the nation, the mission, does not want to be buried in Egypt. That is, Israel does not want to be conflated with or overtaken by another culture or civilization, despite sharing a fate with it. Jacob seeks to guard a legacy by demonstrating with the placement of his own body that no amount of exile, oppression, or assimilation can vanquish it.
The elaborate and painstaking effort it will take to bring Jacob’s body back to Canaan is mostly gestural. It is Jacob’s way of saying to posterity, “We will find ourselves in all kinds of dire places and circumstances, but our ersatz homes will not have the final word on who we are and what we are about.” “I may have ended up in Egypt in this life, but when you take a longer view, my story is not reducible to the circumstances of my end.”
Perhaps it is even an existential command: “Do not summarize me.”
In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf tells us about one day in the life of the friends and family members of Jacob—a man who has died in WWI. The day she picks is the day they come to his room, still cluttered with his things, to divide up his belongings and to memorialize him through the memories his left behind objects summon up. In typical Woolfian fashion, what we get is not a unified view of Jacob, but a piecemeal account of his life from different points of view. We don’t have Jacob to hold the coherence of these views together. We just have Jacob’s room, a bazaar of memories reflecting the complexity of a person who cannot be summed up.
Jacob the Biblical character is a man who has lived many lives. His leitmotif as deceiver suggests this is not coincidental. Jacob is a slippery chap, capable of adjusting himself to radically different worlds. This ability to metamorphose is common in “survivors.” And that’s what Jacob is. But is Jacob only a survivor, or is there some Jacob-ness in him that holds across contexts? Some positive freedom that animates his flight? What is it? I take his plea to be returned to Machpela to be a plea not just to his children, but to us, to know that there is a core to Jacob, if an elusive one. Jacob wants to be buried in Canaan, not to protect his body, but to protect his memory.
Jacob makes Joseph swear that he will fulfill his father’s dying wish by placing his hand on his thigh. This gesture recalls the oath that Abraham makes his servant, Eliezer, take—that he will find a wife for Isaac. What’s the significance of the parallel? Both Abraham and Jacob find themselves in a state of vulnerability, where their succession is anything but guaranteed, but where they no longer have the power to ensure it on their own. Both Abraham and Jacob find themselves in moments of transition where, by definition, the meaning of their lives is no longer up to them, but the next generation. Strikingly, though, the burial of Jacob in Canaan is likened by the literary parallel to the quest to find Isaac a wife. One seems future oriented (marriage, reproduction); the other seems past oriented (memory, legacy). But both are past and future oriented. Without Isaac and Rebecca there can be no memory. Without Joseph’s memory and the memory of Jacob’s descendants there can be no future. Surprisingly, memory is always future oriented. It is an act of belief in some kind of continuity, some kind of responsibility to be handed down.
Jacob calls the act of burying him an act of hesed and emet, kindness and truth. Hesed here means an act done for someone who is in need and cannot do it for him or herself. Emet, truth, suggests an act that is aligned with a higher principle, an act of unconcealing that which might otherwise be hidden or repressed. The image of burial suggests hiding, yet calling it an act of truth implies just the opposite.
It is a common sentiment that kindness and truth are often opposed. In the debate between Hillel and Shammai as to whether one can tell a bride she is beautiful on her wedding day, Hillel says yes and Shammai says no. Apparently, Hillel cares about hesed more than emet and Shammai cares about emet more than hesed. (Of course, it’s possible that they simply have different definitions of emet and hesed). In pop culture, especially online, we find people who make a virtue of the Shammai tendency—those who believe in “telling it like it is,” the listeners be damned. On the other side are those who seek to regulate speech to such a degree that the speaker is held hostage by the audience, regardless of intent. But in the case of Jacob’s request, we are presented with something that is said to be both an act of kindness and an act of truth. Joseph need not be a Galileo or Spinoza or Luther, choosing between conviction (emet) and convention (hesed).
It is an act of kindness to remember the past, an act of kindness to preserve memory. It is an act of truth to do so in a way that maintains its openness, neither reducing it to our prejudices, not letting it be so opaque and abstract as to have nothing to do with us.
The labor of bringing Jacob to Canaan from Egypt is a labor that is not just for Jacob, but for us. It is an act not of burying, but of preserving the living vision of our ancestors. In this non-literal sense, Rashi is correct: when we remember the forgotten we are engaging in a resurrection of the dead. And so it matters not just how someone is remembered, but who remembers them. Who “owns” the memory of Jacob?
So many generations later, Jacob is pure myth. Bible scholars will even say Jacob is a fiction. But something happened somewhere that causes us to read Jacob’s story year after year. And straining towards the “square letters”—as Levinas called the Hebrew Script—or perhaps only in translation—we continue the pledge Joseph made. We continue to bury Jacob so that it might reveal what he was and who we are.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.— Here is my mega thread on Hans Jonas, philosopher, theologian, and historian of Gnosticism. And here is my podcast interview on reason and religion with Rabbi David Bashevkin.
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