Vayechi

Vayechi - Clive Lawton

Clive Lawton, one of the four founders of Limmud, is now its senior consultant. Clive has been headmaster of a secondary school, chair of a Hospital Trust and Chief Executive of Jewish Continuity. He is currently teaching at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, sits as a magistrate on the Harringey Bench, advises the Home Office and Police Service on Race and other diversity issues, sits on the Board of the JCC for London, is a Director of the Shap Working Party on World Religions and has been Chair of Tzedek, the third world development charity, for more than fifteen years. In his spare time, he freelances round the world as a consultant on community and educational development, emotional intelligence, team management and diversity issues. He's worked on four continents in the last year.

We've already had 'Vayeshev', 'And he settled', and the bitter joke is that, of course, he didn't. And now we have 'Vayechi', 'And he lived' and once again, the bitter joke - it is the sidra in which Jacob dies.

But before he does so he makes his famous valedictory blessings, to Ephraim and Menasheh, the sons of Joseph.

As ever in the Torah, the eldest son cannot rely on preferment just because of his place in the birth order. Jacob deliberately places his right hand on the younger, Ephraim's, head. Even when Joseph, who knows all too well the downsides of promoting the younger, remonstrates with his father, presuming that he's got them mixed up, Jacob makes it clear that the choice is deliberate - no flinching for Jacob from his overturning of the usual order of siblings from his birth to his death.

And so he blesses Ephraim and Menasheh, not Menasheh and Ephraim. The form of his blessing has come down to us through the ages, repeated Friday night after Friday night in many a Jewish household as parents bless their sons 'May God make you like Ephraim and Menasheh' as Jacob predicted/instructed we would/should. How strange the contrast with the girls' blessing. When girls are blessed they receive the more predictable (and comprehensible) wish, that they should be like our matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel (I deeply object to the downgrading of Leah by putting her second as is the tradition. Hasn't she been degraded enough without us adding weekly to the burden?)

Those matriarchs give us good reason as to why we should see them collectively as inspirations. (Individually of course some of them are sometimes a bit iffy!) But Ephraim and Menasheh? What did they do? As personalities they sink without trace. They walk on and walk off like extras in a play.

The one thing, though, that they did do is one of the things we often find difficult. They did not recoil, despite their upbringing in the most sophisticated court in the world, when confronted with their parochial old black-gaberdined zeida from "der heim". Despite all the probable blandishments, these first 'Jewish' boys born in the 'diaspora' did not assimilate, but they threw in their lot with the Israelites and thrived amongst them.

Centuries later, Ephraim and Menasheh would be almost fully fledged tribes in their own right (giving rise to the odd fact that, after the 'Ten Lost Tribes' had been lost in the Northern Kingdom's destruction, there were still three left - Judah Benjamin and Levi (making apparently thirteen tribes in all!)

Indeed 'Ephraim' would become the generalised term for the Israelites in the Northern Kingdom. The endless yearning for the return of those lost tribes was embodied in the tradition that their father, Joseph, would also bring forth a messianic leader. Though history demonstrates that Judah and his descendants became forever the kings and leaders of the Jews (Judah is where we get our very name 'Jews' from), Joseph is somewhere waiting in the wings, to send us too his saviour. Since we now know that Joseph, Ephraim and Menasheh have been assimilated into the nations of the world, we should keep our eyes open for the unrecognisable descendant of Joseph wherever he may come from and, without betraying our Jewish-ness, help that apparently non-Jewish 'saviour' with his work for the world. There's no sign of him yet (I'm not convinced by Al Gore as a claimant!) but my mother was always blessing me with Joseph's blessing, 'Ben porat Yosef, ben porat aley ayin' - 'Joseph is a fruitful vine by a fountain' - with much promise of fullness, peace and plenty.

As a new secular year starts and much turmoil and uncertainty in the world, the time is right for Joseph's descendant to emerge and do what he (she?) needs to do. If such a one does come out, let's hope they can count on the Jews to help them with their holy task.