Vayechi: January 2, 2021/18 Tevet 5781

We've made it to the end of the year and the end of the first book of the Torah. This week is Parashat Vayechi, the last portion of the book of Genesis and with it, the conclusion of the Patriarchal narrative. Jacob, now 137 years old, has come to the end of his life, and he wants to bless his children. First, he summons Joseph and his two sons, Ephraim and Menashe. He blesses his grandsons, elevating them to the status of his own sons, who will go on to found tribes. In what appears to be a pattern throughout the period of the Patriarchs, Ephraim, the younger son, is given precedence over his older brother. 

After blessing Joseph's sons, Jacob assembles his 12 sons and pronounces a long narrative blessing for all of them, with a section for each son. While the blessings for the younger sons are fairly standard affairs, with some wordplay that is lost in translation, the blessings for his older sons have an interesting aspect. Jacob's oldest children are blessed not just for their positive attributes but also for their negatives. 

Reuben is praised as Jacob's firstborn, but this praise is tempered by the memory of his impropriety with his father's bed (potentially involving having encroached on the sexual exclusivity of Jacob's concubine). Simeon and Levi's blessing, which they share, is all negative. Jacob says of them, "Simeon and Levi are a pair of brothers. Weapons of violence are their tools." He distances himself from their violent scheming, noting that "in their anger, they kill men, and in their pleasure, they maim oxen" (referencing the episode where they, in defense of their sister Dinah's honor after she was seduced by Hamor, son of the chieftain of Shechem, massacred the population of that city). Jacob "blesses" his two sons with a curse upon their wrathful natures and a wish that they should be scattered amongst the Israelites. While nobody's perfect, one might expect that a blessing would highlight the positives. Why, then, does Jacob bring up negative qualities in blessing his sons?

When I was living in Israel, I became involved with a developing Masorti community in Holon, the city where I lived for seven months. We didn't have our own building, we didn't have more than a couple regular attendees, and all we really had was a monthly Kabbalat Shabbat service organized by the rabbinic intern, and we couldn't even get a minyan for that. In order to drive more attendees to the service (we met in a local community center, so there was a reasonable audience of potential attendees), we started having musical services - by having the Kabbalat Shabbat early, before the sun set, we could have instruments to accompany the songs. And there were songs - not just the traditional psalms that make up the liturgy of a normal Kabbalat Shabbat, but popular Israeli songs relevant to the themes of the time of year or Shabbat in general. 

One of the most popular songs and one of the few that I really knew well enough to sing along to was a song by Omer Adam entitled "Modeh Ani." The song takes its title from a twelve-word prayer meant to be the first thing one says upon waking: "Modeh ani lefanekha, melekh chai vekayam, shehechezarta bi nishmati bechemlah. Rabah emunatekha." "I am grateful to You, Eternal Sovereign, for having compassionately restored my soul to me. Great is Your faithfulness." In the song, the singer recounts all the things for which he is thankful - for his house, his clothes, his food, and his family. Then, in the last verse, he changes his tone. "For all my failures, I am grateful, for my disappointments, my fears, and my challenges. They are all for my benefit." What does it mean to be thankful for one's failures? Sometimes, failure comes with a silver lining.

In my senior year of high school, I spent one quarter in Hod HaSharon, Israel attending the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program. The original plan was that I would spend the summer in Israel, then stay for the first quarter, only returning to my school in CT halfway through the fall semester. Then, that fell through. AMHSI notified us that, due to lack of enrollment, the fall session would be canceled, but I would be able to attend another session that year. I ended up going in February, and I made some great friends there. But the real blessing hidden in the setback would only become apparent a decade later. Under the original plan, I would have been in Israel for just over four months, long enough to require a visa. At that time, my status as a derived citizen of Israel would have become known both to me and to the Israeli government, and a bureaucratic nightmare involving the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Defense Ministry (at 16, I would have had to apply for an automatic indefinite deferral of compulsory military service as a non-resident citizen) would have ensued, potentially trapping me in Israel while my status was sorted out.

It isn't just silver linings that make us grateful for our failings and setbacks. As I was writing this d'var Torah, I was talking to my mom, who expressed her pride in my sticking with golf, which I picked up over the pandemic. In the past, I didn't have much resilience - I tried something, found I was not good at it, and I gave up pretty easily. When I was 5, I wanted to play the violin, so I took some lessons, I was terrible, and that was the end of that. The same thing was true of soccer and the trumpet. I suffer from ADHD, a fact that went unnoticed by medical professionals for 23 years. I suspect that a major part of why it took so long to diagnose my issues was that the most prominent symptoms for me are not the well-known presentations of hyperactivity or inattention but rather executive functioning deficits and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It is the latter of those two that connects to our discussion. For those of you not familiar with RSD, the simple version is that I am especially sensitive to failure and rejection, both from other people and from myself. I often describe it as my brain not knowing how to distinguish between "I failed" and "I am a failure." If I do something wrong, it means I'm a bad person, and I will never succeed at anything ever. Of course, intellectually, I know that this is not true, but that's how it feels. 

So, what does this have to do with golf? Well, golf is hard. Only a little more than half of all golfers will ever record a score in the double digits, and even the top professionals will have their bad days or their blowup holes (see Tiger Woods'10 on the par-3 12th hole at the 2020 Masters). You'd think that golf would be the last thing that someone with RSD would want to try, but by subjecting myself to the constant barrage of failure (mixed with the occasional moment of brilliance), I learn to deal better with failure and understand that it is all for my own good, and that is a lesson we all can learn. I'm not saying everyone needs to go out there and grab a pitching wedge, but recognize when life gives us lemons, we can look at it as a surplus of lemons or as an opportunity for lemon meringue pie, lemon squares, lemon curd, lemon poppyseed muffins, lemon chicken, fish and chips with lemon on the side, and yes, also lemonade.