Every year, the conclusion of the Torah’s first book, Genesis (Bereishit), feels a touch bittersweet. For nearly three months, we have resided in the familiar mythic cycles of creation and destruction, covenant and crisis, sibling struggle and remarkable reconciliation. We have adjusted to the climate and the landscape, the sand and the stones, the warm desert evenings and the date palms heavy with golden fruit, the thirsting camels and bubbling springs, the bitter tears and unexpected laughter.
At this point, we are equally at home in our ancestors’ sheepskin tents as we are in their profound family dramas. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each wildly dysfunctional family is wildly dysfunctional in its own way. Yes, their stories may be messy, but they are our stories, rich with meaning, layered with generations of interpretation. So, this Shabbat, as we close the first book of the Torah, we do so a bit wistfully, not quite ready to leave the narratives of the forefathers and foremothers.
I had not heard of a “book hangover” until this year, but long before I encountered the phrase, I had experienced it. Who hasn’t finished a book wishing that there was just a little more, feeling not quite ready to part with the characters? How many times have I come to the final pages and settled in comfortably to relish my last minutes in the world of a story? Whether it was in the work of Ann Patchett or Ralph Ellison, I.B. Singer or George Eliot, I have found myself forlorn, knowing that the time has come to say goodbye to the experience of a novel. It should be no surprise, then, that arriving at the final Torah portion of Genesis, I feel those familiar pangs.
It is slightly ironic that this final portion is called Vayechi, which in Hebrew means “he lived,” because the section details the deaths of both Jacob and Joseph. Yet, how else could a sweeping, multi-generational family story end? Both deaths feel close to what many people hope for at life’s end — a passing in the fullness of years, surrounded by family and a sense that one’s life project will be carried forward.
Their lives also come to a close with a sense of miraculous wholeness. The sibling rivalries that have been at the center of so much of the drama of Genesis are seemingly repaired. The reader has experienced the reunion between a father, Jacob, and the son he had thought long dead, Joseph. The aged Jacob is introduced to his grandchildren, Ephraim and Menashe, “I never expected to see you again, and here God has let me see your children as well!”
The book closes with both Jacob and Joseph extracting promises from their family to bury them not in Egypt, but back home in Canaan. Even before Genesis has concluded, we see characters longing for return. “Don’t leave me here.” … “Don’t close the book on me.” … “Carry my bones with you.” We readers are not alone in our desire to keep the story going.
Late in his life, the great German novelist Thomas Mann turned his literary focus to the story of Joseph and his brothers. In the four-part novel that emerged, he writes, “history is that which has happened and that which goes on happening in time. But it is also the stratified record upon which we set our feet, the ground beneath us, and the deeper the roots of our being go down into the layers that lie below and beyond the fleshly confines of our ego … so that in our moments of less precision we may speak of them in the first person and as though they were part of our flesh and blood experience …”
I cannot think of a better way to sum up my experience of finishing the Torah’s first book; these tales feel like the ground that I stand upon. As Mann said, the narratives of Genesis feel like stories that have both happened and go on happening. To read a text, to dwell within it as we have, this is how we end up speaking about it in the first person. We invest in it and lose ourselves in it, such that the stories of the text — of exile from the garden, of a parent’s desperate longing for new life, of wrestling with the Divine — begin to feel like our own.
Reading the narratives of our mythic forbearers each year, I try to imagine what it would feel like to read the text for the first time, to not know what comes next. What if there were no slavery, no Moses, no Sinai or molten calf, no wilderness or doomed generation, no longing for a promised land that lies just beyond the horizon of the scroll?
I try to plant myself in Genesis, in the epic story of a family that lived with the promise that one day their numbers would be great, that a clan would become a nation, that others would experience blessing through them. The unfolding story of Genesis throws into relief all that it is to be human; it is chock full of the yearning, the conflict and the rapture of life (often all at once). The narrative is ambiguous and gorgeous, the characters complicated and mysterious.
As the early 20th-century literary critic, Erich Auerbach, wrote, these tales “express the simultaneous existence of several layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.” The critic reminds us that the Torah that we have inherited is not just a bunch of cute fables; rather, it is a collection of masterful narratives that are rich, complex and deeply compelling.
Great Torah, like all great literature, should be savored, and it will, inevitably, be missed. Yet, unlike Mrs. Dalloway or Crime and Punishment or Beloved, we will pick this text up again in less than a year. So, if we are feeling a bit melancholic for having finished Genesis, we can be heartened by the words traditionally said when finishing a book of the Torah: Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek — “Be strong, be strong, and may we be strengthened together.”
