The Transition into History

The concluding parashah of Genesis has two roles: it provides closure through a burial theme, and it creates a bridge to the Exodus story. In Parashat Va-y'chi, Joseph swears to his father, Jacob, that he will deliver Jacob's body to their ancestral burial place, the cave in the field of Machpelah, facing Mamre (Genesis 49:30), first acquired by Abraham (see Genesis 23:7-20). In this sense, the Joseph story, which serves as a bridge to Exodus-explaining why Israel moved to Egypt in the first place-also allows for Jacob's burial to take place on what was considered ancestral ground. But this close tie to the land of the forbearers is only half of the quotient at play in this scene. Genesis tells us that Jacob lived 147 years (47:28). More than twenty of those years were spent in Padan-aram (Mesopotamia), and the final seventeen years of his life passed in Egypt. In effect, Jacob was a Jew of the Diaspora. While his entire retinue accompanies his bones back to Machpelah (50:8), none remains there. Indeed, not a single Israelite from the generations of the Patriarchs is portrayed as settling and remaining in the Promised Land. Half a millennium later, Joshua arrives very much the way Abraham arrived-as a newcomer.

Echoing this focus on burial in the Promised Land, Joseph "made the sons of Israel swear" that they, too, would transfer his bones "homeward" (50:25). The Torah's editors would use this oath as a vehicle for linking together the various parts of the extended story that extends from Genesis to Joshua. In Exodus 13:19, we learn that"Moses took with him the bones of Joseph," and in Joshua 24:32, when the people finally settles in their designated homeland, those bones are placed to rest in Shechem.¹

The concluding parashah of Genesis, then, leaves one part of the original covenant unfulfilled-land acquisition. I have noted at various points in these essays that the individual stories and the anthologizing process that produced Genesis occurred prior to the formation of the Torah's big picture. That is, the discrete stories emerged from a literary context that was unrelated to the program that ultimately motivated the redactor. The freestanding origins of our Genesis stories sometimes result in thematic dissonances within the narrative. The failure to have the Genesis story conclude with the fulfillment of all three aspects of the covenant is an example of such a thematic dissonance.

Covenants are imagined; people's lives unfold as they will. The authors of the Genesis narrative sustained their allegorical representation of Jewish diaspora living through to this very last parashah. They hoped people would identify with the generations of old-generations that overcame the challenges of "exile," ultimately to reassemble in the ancient lands. The readers were supposed to see themselves as living a life not unlike that of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, a reading strategy that becomes explicit in Deuteronomy with the notion that even future generations are, in some sense, present throughout the wilderness experience (Deuteronomy 29:14ff).

Sensitivity to the plight of the Diaspora dweller emerges throughout Genesis. Even with the tender depiction of Jacob's burial, we are reminded of the Jew's tenuous exilic existence. Mourning for Jacob takes place not in the homeland, but at Goren ha-Atad, "which is beyond the Jordan" (Genesis 50:11)-that is, in the Diaspora. Burial in one's ancestral lands would remain an ideal for Jews throughout the centuries. The bitter historical reality, however, was that most Jews would die "in exile" and most mourning-like that for Jacob by the entirety of the Israelite nation-would take place wherever the passing of a loved one occurred. Thus, the force of the narrative is to reflect upon the lives of the patriarchal and matriarchal generations, lives that unfolded predominantly in exile-their idealized burials notwithstanding. Prior to the founding of the modern State of Israel, their lives reflected the realities of most Jews throughout history.

Epilogue
There is no feasible way to establish with certainty the relative significance of any given cause in history without being able to replay the events with different variables in place. History permits no such experimentation. Theories of dynamical systems-of which history is certainly one-often bring to bear the notion of"sensitive dependency on initial conditions." This is commonly called the"butterfly effect,"² a term coined by Professor Edward Lorenz, formerly of MIT. The idea is that even the most seemingly innocuous flapping of a butterfly's wings can have implications for the unfolding of events around the globe. Alternatively, this means that we cannot know what consequences will derive from which conditions, because the sheer number of variables at play-most of which will remain invisible to us-is simply too great. We are left to ascribe causality to those things we can see, and we do not even entertain those causes that are outside of our immediate field of vision. Even among those factors we can perceive, our ability to understand which serve as pivotal among the infinite array of historical forces is minimal. In a given scenario, factor may appear meaningless; a slight shift in focus renders factor a determinative force.

Today, approximately 2,500 years removed from the authors who framed Genesis, we might wonder what the history of Judaism and the world would have been like had this book never been written, or had it been written differently, or had it not succeeded in achieving canonical status. Some might say such speculation is a banal exercise. The reality of Genesis, they might argue, and its history of interpretation are historical facts not to be toyed with on the basis of some hypothetically reengineered history.

And yet, the writing of one book and its survival are precisely an accident of history for which we are unable to establish cogent causes. Genesis offered its target generation an idea of how to think of itself. The book situated a minor nation among the peoples of the ancient world and against the backdrop of the world's creation, quite like all other ancient Near Eastern cultures of the time. But of those other cultures, nothing remains. Not a single work from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Canaan developed a history of interpretation that would spawn an ongoing cultural engagement. I believe this fact demands reflection if for no other reason than to consider the potential for emulating today the forces at work behind the promulgation of this literature.

Frequently, pietists explain the longevity of the Torah on the basis of its intrinsic truths. Such people relate to it as the "word of God," and the book's message is thought to be eternal by definition-that is, an eternal being produces an eternal text. As liberal Jews, cognizant of the contemporary study of literature and culture, science and history, such an explanation proves implausible. Besides the fact that books are written by people, not gods, the very notion that the Torah contains something of divine origin or something"unique" for all humanity situates Jews in an unwinnable contest with other cultures that make similar claims about their own literary legacies. Think of this as the literary parallel to an arms race. Based on numbers alone, Jews will come out on the low end of this kind of historical competition. Christians and Muslims could easily argue that the veracity of their literature is far greater and that is why more people have adopted those religions. Jews, as Christianity has long charged, could be portrayed as blind to the truths of Christian Scriptures. The only way to diffuse such arguments-by Jews, Christians, and Muslims-is to deny the privilege of any literature on the basis of some intrinsic characteristic. Why one literature or religion catches on and another wanes is a question for historians to debate. But intrinsic truth or "eternal" characteristic should never enter the discussion. Indeed, throughout history there have been innumerable instances of utterly ridiculous and implausible ideas winning out over far more tenable and potentially provable truths. History is as much a stage for the absurd as for the cogent.

Once this is understood, we are free to turn toward a different set of questions. What function did this book have such that it could foster a civilization faced with the adverse conditions of diaspora? Have other works in our history emulated its model? Can we still produce a literature around which Jews might rally such that we, today, might witness a renaissance of Jewish engagement with survival literature? Once these questions are considered, we can then ponder: How should liberal Jews tell the Story of Genesis today?

These essays have provided one passageway toward appreciating the real-life ideological concerns pursued by the authors of Genesis. Each individual ready to take up the Book of Genesis-or any book of the Torah-has an obligation to develop an interpretive stance regarding the highly charged issues that led to its composition and success in history. My plea in these essays is targeted directly at the liberal readings of text that do not grapple with the notion that all literature at its origins is ideological; that all literature is dependent upon the constraints of a cultural repertoire; that no literature can be read neutrally because no literature is written neutrally. To read any part of Torah as if it were exempt from scrutiny against the ethical and social understandings of our own world is to ascribe to a biblical fundamentalism that will quickly lead to the demise of liberal Judaism. Our religious obligation, which is as central a component to our cultural heritage as the very Torah itself, is to read creatively, ethically, and critically, as if the life of our community depended upon it.

The life of the Jewish community is quite precisely what Genesis is about. The power of this book lies in its author's conviction that a literature can create the basis for solidarity even in the face of hostile historical circumstances. At some level, the details of the stories and their ongoing relevance do not matter; rather, what matters is the cultural vocabulary that emerges when we, as a community, share a single document as the jumping-off point for reflecting upon history, life, and their meanings. Torah was written to create a people in an era of adversity. The fact that the "truths" of history have changed since then, that our historical condition now confronts radically different circumstances, does not diminish the potential for Torah to foster a shared experience for talking about history. It is through that dialogue-that grappling with text-that a common vocabulary emerges and that a cultural repertoire is formed, giving rise to a collective identity and the sense of a shared destiny. Richard Rorty puts it this way: "Human solidarity is . . . a matter of sharing . . . a common selfish hope, the hope that one's world-the little things around which one has woven into one's final vocabulary-will not be destroyed." ³This notion of solidarity, argues Rorty,"has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting." Genesis offers those"little pieces." The reader must make of them a vocabulary for the life of an ongoing community. When that begins to take place, then "perhaps the YHVH, the God of Hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph" (Amos 5:15).

1. The passage reads, "The bones of Joseph, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem, in the piece of ground which Jacob had bought for a hundred kesitahs from the children of Hamor, Shechem's father, and which had become a heritage of the Josephites." The acquisition referred to is noted in Genesis 33:19, but why this was designated Joseph's burial place is uncertain.
2.  "Edward Lorenz, . . . a professor at MIT, was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. . . . [This] ultimately led him to formulate what became known as the butterfly effect-a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" (adapted from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/obit-lorenz-0416.html ).
3. The quotes are from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 92, 94.

Rabbi David H. Aaron received his doctorate from Brandeis University and ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. He is professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation at HUC-JIR, CIncinnati. His most recent book is Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (T & T Clark, 2006). You can contact him at daaron@huc.edu.

© 2008 David H. Aaron