Genesis 49: Jacob is not well. He has taken to bed, and summoned his sons to attend him. His elaborate blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh (or is it Manasseh and Ephraim) is complete, and he now has nothing left to do but bless his own sons and die. Thus begins a great deathbed scene, arguably the greatest in all of Torah. It represents both the death of Jacob himself, the founding and consecration of the twelve tribes and the death, in a way, of every Jew that ever was, is or will be.

What’s more, per the Talmud, this is the primordial deathbed scene in the history of the world — the not only the greatest, but the first ever! The gemara under discussion in Bava Metzia 87a makes this extraordinary claim:

עד יעקב לא הוה חולשא

Before Jacob, there was no illness (leading up to death.)

The Breslovers take this even further in their writings:

Until Jacob, there was no illness prior to death. A person would sneeze and his soul would depart.

(Yikes!)

The image of Jacob as the first ill person is not the only treasure to be found in Bava Metzia 87a. We also learn that Abraham was the first to age (he kept getting confused with Isaac and prayed for a solution) while Elisha the Prophet was the first to ever become ill and recover. (Prior to that, all illnesses were death sentences!) All three firsts (agining, illness, healing) are described in the Talmud as “mercies”, though one of the three seems more obviously a mercy than the other two.

But there is a kind of grace in illness before death if one considers what the alternative would look like. I have often heard people wish for their own death to be sudden, supposing such a death to be less cruel than one presaged by illness. For my part I’m not so sure, since the price of an instant death is not being able to say goodbye. Maybe the real cruelty lies in not being able to know or choose.

***

ויקרא יעקב אל־בניו ויאמר האספו ואגידה לכם את אשר־יקרא אתכם באחרית הימים

And Jacob called his sons and said, “Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you in days to come.“

Genesis 49:1

Here we are told of Jacob’s true purpose. He wishes to tell his sons their destinies, or at least how their lives will intersect with some larger story. The last two words — באחרית הימים — “days to come” are sometimes translated as “the world/time to come”, which is to say the messianic era.

Many commentators (Rashi, Ramban) look to Pesachim 56a for direct commentary on this verse.

As Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said that it is written: “And Jacob called his sons and said, Gather around and I will tell you what will occur to you in the end of days”. Jacob wanted to reveal to his sons when the complete redemption would arrive at the end of days.

But something goes wrong. As Jacob is about to open his mouth to reveal this pivotal information, he finds himself unable to prophesy. In Rashi’s words:

He wished to reveal to them the end of Israel’s exile but the Shechinah departed from him and he began to speak of other things

This sparks a kind of moral terror in the dying Jacob. He felt sure that he would be able to tell his family what was to become of them. He felt sure he would be able to tell us all how long Israel’s suffering would endure. He feels sure that something about his sons — some defect in them (us) — is the reason why the spirit has departed. The Talmud:

He said: Perhaps the Divine Presence has abandoned me because, Heaven forfend, one of my descendants is unfit, as was the case with my grandfather Abraham, from whom Ishmael emerged, and like my father Isaac, from whom Esau emerged.

But now something extraordinary happens. According to Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, the children raise their own voices in reassurance. “Lisen, Israel” (their father.) “The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” In other words — the God in your heart is the same as in ours. Your goals are our goals. Your dreams are our dreams. We will carry on what you have started. Jacob replies in relief, in the quiet voice of one who is dying, “Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.”

This is of course the Shema, Judaism’s central prayer-not-prayer, and the Baruch Shem, its response. We say these verses daily, the Shema in a full voice and the Baruch Shem in a quiet undertone, as if we too are dying. The Shema appears in Torah directly in Deuteronomy 6:4. There, it issues from the mouth of Moses in booming address to the nation as Israel is about to cross into the land without him. But the Baruch Shem is missing from that address, and this gemara concerning Genesis 49 is widely regarded as its origin story. However I think it can be seen as an important, and different, way to think of the Shema more generally. Often I think of this prayer as a kind of wake-up call, an admonition to be hyper-aware of the centrality of God in our lives and tradition. Lest we ever forget. But here it functions differently. It is addressed to a single individual, a dying parent. It is meant not to awaken but to reassure — to build bonds of family solidarity that are stronger than death. It is less a grand Mosaic order than a quiet, intimate plea. It is spoken not by the dying one (Moses) but to Jacob. Hear me, dying one. I am calling you by your own name. Things are going to be alright! And that to me feels like a usefully different angle on this prayer.

Rebbe Nachman comments on the fact that we say Baruch Shem quietly:

Jacob saw that the Final Redemption would not take place until even those who were furthest from God would return to Him … Despite the importance of “Baruch Shem …” we must recite it quietly, until such time as the sparks of holiness will be rectified and it can be recited aloud.

(Likutey Halakhot I p. 244)

Until the world is healed — if, how and whenever that may be — we can only praise quietly what we can only partially see. Our patriarchs and matriarchs are reassured by their descendants (us), but are nonetheless unable to tell us for sure what will become of us. The world is broken. We can’t fully understand each other. Death will come for each of us, and we do not get to choose when or how. Each of us has a destiny, but it’s not ours to know. This is the subject of one of our other great prayers — the Unetanneh Tokef recited on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This prayer which includes much beauty apart from its rather famous litany of ways to die (see the Leonard Cohen song below) concerns our individual fates as human beings. It is able to hold within its verses two truths: that we know nothing about what will become of us, and that all is already known.

You [God] remember all that is forgotten. You open the book of records, and from it, all shall be read. In it lies each person’s insignia.

We come from dust, and return to dust. We labour by our lives for bread, we are like broken shards, like dry grass, and like a withered flower; like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that passes, like dust that scatters, like a fleeting dream.

Yom Kippur is also the only day that we say the Baruch Shem response out loud. There are various explanations for this, but I return to the deathbed scene, and to Jacob’s quiet relief. He repeats the Baruch Shem under his breath because he is able to take his children at their word — they will continue the essential project of Israel. Or so he must believe. But on Yom Kippur, the day that in the mystical imagination lays bare the moral structure of the universe, belief is no longer required. It is no longer relevant what we suspect, hope or fear about the purpose of our lives — we can know the full story for sure.

[Yom Kippur] is the day on which we feel ourselves sufficiently holy to proclaim aloud that the earth itself is the realm of Adonai. … Here we encounter God’s oneness in and through the world, not despite it. Each flower, each blade of grass each human soul is a new manifestation of divinity, a new unfolding of the cosmic One that ever reveals itself through its multi-colored garments, in each moment taking on new and ever changing forms of life.

(R. Arthur Green, Seek My Face, pg 4-5)

On Yom Kippur we all find ourselves on the deathbed. Jacob’s example has become our own death. Our fates are there before us. And on this day we can say out loud, and with confidence, what Jacob could only whisper.