by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

January 1, 2009

On the face of it, Genesis ends rather happily: about to die, Jacob ensures his own burial just the way he wants it: back home in the Land of Israel, not Egypt. Then, he surrounds himself with his adoring children, each one receiving his final words of blessing.

But below the surface, things are not so rosy. The funeral part works out fine, but not the rest of the story. What Jacob offers most of his children is hardly a blessing. Reuven will lose his first-born primacy. Simeon and Levi are actually cursed. Issachar will become a serf. Dan will barely survive. And so on. When Reuven, Simeon, Levi, Issachar, and Dan said their final good-byes, they could hardly have been overflowing with filial adoration. If Jacob deserves any praise for this deathbed scene, it must be for the cool composure with which he announces the unhappy future of his less fortunate offspring.

Jacob summoned up more resignation than most of us would, but he had help. Except while mourning for Rachel (says the Midrash), he was visited by the spirit of God (ruach hakodesh) and (according to the biblical commentator Malbim) God even added a few days onto his life to make up for that period. Virtually his whole life, then (his whole life, actually, if you count the added days) he was gifted with prophecy. Knowing his children’s future in advance, he had lots of time to accept it.

We, however, who must manage without prophecy, are loath to write off our children so quickly. Their future is open, we say; we pray they will have the good fortune to shape their own destiny. At our deathbed conversation (if we are fortunate enough to have one), we would like to leave behind whatever wisdom we have gained in our lives to guide them in theirs.

What would be our final words to our children as they hold our hands and help us die? Probably not “Buy low and sell high!” We would restate our love, I imagine; make peace if there was enmity between us; and if we had it, offer up moral and spiritual advice, something of our deepest selves to remember us by.

Medieval Jews (from the 12th century on) did not leave this to chance. They arranged their spiritual estate no less than their material one. By 1926, the great scholar Israel Abrahams was able to collect some 300 spiritual wills, and the number was surely much larger — 300 accounts for just the ones that survived. Parents did not wait for the last minute, either. Not knowing when they would die, they began their wills when their children were young, and added to them as they (and their children) grew older.

Sometimes, like Jacob, they laid down their own burial wishes — Eleazar of Mainz (14th century) very touchingly says he wants to be buried “at the right hand of my saintly father. If the space be a little narrow, I am sure he loves me well enough to make room for me.”

But mostly, they left personal advice for their children. Eleazar, whom Abrahams calls “an average man” — no rabbi at all — follows his burial request by instructing his daughters to “respect their husbands and be amiable to them.” His sons, too, should “honor their wives more than themselves and treat them with tender consideration.” Both sons and daughters should study and give charity. Shabbetai Horowitz (17th century) tells his daughters, “If your husbands become angry, leave them, and after the time of wrath has passed, rebuke them for their conduct.”

By the 18th century, the wills do more than offer advice. They supply actual statements of faith to guide the lives of the authors’ children. Many quote Maimonides’ 13 principles of faith. But the most interesting example, perhaps, is David Friesenhausen (c. 1750-1828), who says, “I believe with perfect faith that the whole human race, Jew or Gentile, wise or ignorant, righteous or wicked, will enjoy felicity at the end, after bearing the punishment due to each according to his acts.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that after we die, our children will know what we hold dearest? Not only do we not write it down; we do not stop long enough to get straight what it is we would write down in the first place.

I know: you will surely read this and promise yourself that you will do it tomorrow. You probably won’t — who wants to face up to our own mortality and come to terms with what we really believe, on faith? To be honest, even as I write this, I realize I have not yet fully taken my own advice. But I intend to; I really do. I don’t want to die spiritually intestate.

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).

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