This is the D’var Torah I gave for Parashat Vayechi, the last reading in Genesis, on January 11, 2025.
This is an original first album of Peter, Paul and Mary from 1962. Does anyone else here have one of these?
I would say if you listed the release years of the music that was played on the record player in the home where I grew up, it would be like this: 1740, 1741, 1742, 1743… 1750….. 1950, 1962, 1972. The artists were Bach, Bach, Bach, then skip to The Weavers, then this album, then Debbie Friedman.
On the back of the album, the text part, three words are in bold: sing! Truth, and Good! Truth and Good are capitalized, and Good is bolded twice. Listen to this: “The Truth is on the record…. Peter, Paul and Mary’s first album is bright with enthusiasm. No gimmicks. There is just something Good about it all. Good in the sense of Virtue, that is. And the news that something this Good can be as popular as this is can fill you with a new kind of optimism. Maybe everything’s going to be all right. Maybe mediocrity has had it. Maybe hysteria is on the way out. One thing is for sure in any case: Honesty is back. Tell your neighbor.”
Wow. They don’t write things like that on album covers today. Not that there are album covers today, but if there were they wouldn’t be like this!
I pulled this album out as a talisman this week, this week of the terrible fires in California, and the funeral of President Carter, and still the wars and the hostages. This week Peter Yarrow died, and I don’t mean to say he was everything that was written on his first album cover. But those words! And also: this autograph. This is an autographed copy of the first Peter, Paul and Mary album, but the autograph says To Alex, Peace and Love, Peter Yarrow, and he wrote something about Paul and Mary. Obviously the autograph is not from 1962; it’s from the 2010s I think, when Peter was the performer at my parents’ synagogue’s fundraiser and they brought their first-edition album to be autographed for their grandson.
I’ve been thinking about this transmission across the generations. Yes, Laurie and I passed down the songs to our kids; they know them and they know Peter, Paul and Mary through their children’s concert too. That part we could do, parents to kids, one generation, and that’s important.
But this other part is harder. Where an album could be identified with Truth and Good and Virtue and “maybe mediocrity has had it.” Which my parents held in their hands and I didn’t even read until yesterday, and now we’re talking about all the generations from 1962 to 2025. How do we pass down that far the memory of a world where saying such a thing on an album, or anywhere, makes any sense?
This is the question of our parasha today. Yaakov Avinu wants to bless his own children before he dies. The Torah says that he has an ethical will for them and he’s ready to tell it, and then he has a hard time speaking it. The midrash says that right as Yaakov is about to bless his children the Shechinah departs from him; he is completely devoid of the Divine spirit. The words he wants to say sound too crazy even in his head to say them – it’s like if I tried to tell you the words on this album cover this morning as though they were mine and I believed them today this minute with all my soul. So the blessings to Yaakov’s first few sons don’t sound anything like a blessing. He can’t get beyond describing their current world, and it’s kind of violent. But Yaakov keeps talking — maybe he’s singing — and eventually he finds his way to say out loud a vision of a future with peace and harmony among his very different, often contentious children.
And that’s just a parent trying to pass down a vision to children. Which they absorb, gratefully, and as soon as Yaakov himself dies they aren’t sure they believe it without him. There’s this fear that the words will die out in the next generation, or in the world of Egypt.
So Yaakov also has this brand new idea, which is to bless his grandchildren, Ephraim and Menashe, telling them about their grandmother Rachel whom they never met and their great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, Avraham and Yitzchak. That’s amazing; that’s a lot of generations. It’s like handing them this album cover. But man, who are these kids of Yosef’s, these Egyptians from literally another world compared to Yaakov’s, and could they even process all that? What would they understand about the language and the world of their grandfather where such hopes made sense? Did they get any of it or did they roll their eyes, or even take the Egyptian equivalent of AirPods out of the ears long enough to notice?
The rabbis of the Talmudic era were preoccupied with this question of how to keep passing down ideals without diluting them along the way, without it just seeming like something quaint or a faint echo. So they found a bit character at the end of Genesis, really just a name, and gave her an interesting backstory.
The name is Serach, daughter of Asher, and it happens that she is mentioned in two parts of the Torah. Once is in Genesis, when the original family going down to Egypt are listed by name. And the other is in Numbers, in the census of Israelites heading into the promised land. The rabbis decide that Serach was the one person who lived for basically 400 years. She could tell every story of every generation in the first person.
So here is one midrash about Serach. We read in the Torah today that before Yosef died, he made all the Israelites in Egypt swear that whenever they finally left Egypt to return to Eretz Yisrael, they should dig up his bones and bury them in the homeland. According to the midrash, this gave the evil Pharoah of down the road an idea for how to keep us around as slaves. He took Yosef’s bones and put them in an iron box and submerged it at the bottom of the Nile. New Joisey mob style cement shoes, we’re talking. They’ll never find him, they made an oath not to leave without him, they can’t leave. The dreams of the past will be buried forever. So thought this Pharaoh.
On the night of the liberation Moshe went to look for the bones of Yosef and couldn’t find them. Well, said the midrash, Serach bat Asher was around, and she saw Moshe wandering around. She said, “My master, why are you so tired” and he explained, “I have been looking for Yosef’s bones for three days!” Serach said: “I saw where Pharaoh buried them.” She brought Moshe to side of the Nile near where the casket was submerged, and she told him that Pharaoh had his magicians cast the bones into the depths. Moshe declared: “Yosef, the time has come to fulfill the oath! Here we are, now do not delay our redemption. You have good deeds on record with the Divine, so now ask for compassion and rise to the surface.” Immediately, the waters of the Nile began to bubble in front of them and casket floated up to the surface.
And with the box from the past in their very hands, the people marched toward their freedom.
Serach bat Asher represents this wish of our Sages that we can hand down the hopes and experiences of the past just as they were originally. Even if the world is different and harder, even if there’s a Pharaoh doing his best to submerge the bones or make the words on the album cover seem absurd – that the bones can rise anyway, the words on the album cover can win out.
For any of you who were around when “something this Good can be as popular as this is” – we need you to recreate that world for us, to make it live, to reach across the decades and put your autograph on the original and hand it over. Actually, before that just give it again to yourself!
And whatever that moment is in my time or yours, a moment of social clarity or inspiration or triumph, that is a blessing we have to pass down to the next generation and the next one, ourselves, even when the words seem crazy to say in the world around us.
As the album jacket says:
Maybe everything’s going to be all right. Maybe mediocrity has had it. Maybe hysteria is on the way out. One thing is for sure in any case: Honesty is back. Tell your neighbor.
So here’s an assignment: Find an artifact. A ticket, a photo, a flyer, a souvenir. Not just a story. Something you can make into a blessing to the next generation, and if you’re not sure, bring it here and we’ll figure out how to do that together.
Shabbat shalom!
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