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The Sefas Emes, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, extends Rashi’s teaching. He adds:
Following Rashi, we find further difficulty in Midrash Exodus Rabbah 1:8, “And Joseph died and all his brothers and all that generation (Exodus 1:6). This teaches that as long as one of those who originally went down into Egypt were alive, the Egyptians did not enslave Israel.” From this we infer that the slavery bagan a short time after the death of Jacob. It is also probable that the actual physical slavery did not begin immediately whereas the spiritual slavery did begin with the death of Jacob.
The Jewish people were unaware; they did not see or feel how Egyptian culture began to penetrate and influence them. What was really going on was not evident. The eyes and hearts of the Jewish people were closed, until finally their eyes were unable to see and their hearts unable to feel anything but superficiality. And this is the core experience of exile.
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As we read from the final parashah of the Book of Genesis, both Rashi and the Sefas Emes are sensitive to how the Torah text itself is presented in the traditional Sefer Torah - the hand-written scroll out of which the Torah is read in the synagogue. Parashat Vayechi is the only portion of the Torah which begins in the middle of a paragraph, rather than on a new line. Such a section is called stumah - “closed”. A section which begins on a new line is called p’tuchah - “open”. Both commentators notice that Vayechi is the only closed parashah, and this must, therefore, have some significant meaning.
This is an opportunity for the commentators to leave the literal meaning of the text and look for an alternative understanding, in this case, coming from its appearance. Rashi suggests that the “closed” text relates to the closed eyes and hearts of the Israelites, so closed because of the oppression imposed upon them by the Egyptians. With Jacob’s and Joseph’s passing, the days of privilege and power came to an end and Israel was almost immediately subject to the slavery which would oppress them for the next three centuries.
The Sefas Emes accepts this idea, but takes it one step further. He divides Israel’s descent into slavery into two steps, the first marked by the death of Jacob and the second initiated by the death of Joseph. The Sefas Emes draws on a midrash from Exodus Rabbah (1:8) to determine that the actual physical slavery did not begin until sometime after the death of Joseph. However, it was just after the death of Jacob, the patriarch and spiritual father of Israel, that the spiritual slavery commenced. The eyes and hearts of the Jewish people were closed, making the people of Israel unaware of the powerful pull of Egyptian culture and practices, drawing the children of Israel in and influencing them to abandon their own beliefs and way of life. Joseph, living life fully as an Egyptian, had already taken the first step. Jacob’s adoption of his grandsons Ephraim and Menashah was an effort to stem this tide of Egyptian assimilation. While slavery was yet to begin, the exile, both physical and spiritual, was fully in effect.
Lessons for Today
Our commentators’s attention to form as well as content teaches us that there are many ways to learn from a text, and it only begins with the pshat or the literal meaning of the text. We must pay attention to every detail. The importance of studying Torah with others, and reading the comments of those who have gone before us, helps draw our attention to that which we may, on our own, overlook. How many of us would have noticed ourselves that this is the only closed parashah?
But both Rashi and the Sefas Emes use the device of the closed parashah to draw a much more important lesson from the text, one that is still powerfully relevant to us today. The experiences of spiritual slavery and spiritual and physical exile are still very much with us, and the inevitable outcome of assimilation is self-evident. Integrating into the greater society in which we live is not, in of itself, bad, but losing our own distinctive culture and beliefs - losing ourselves - as part of that integration, is tragic. It becomes the responsibility of the Jacobs of our generation - those in a patriarchal and matriarchal role - to teach and lead and joyfully share the riches of our tradition, to keep it alive and, more importantly, to enrich the lives of those who come after, so that they will appreciate the importance of passing it on again.
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