Word: ויחי, Vayechi “And he lived”
Context: First verse of the parsha: “Jacob lived 17 years in the land of Egypt, so that the span of Jacob’s life came to 147 years.”
Root: חיה, to live
Message: This is the end of Yaakov’s life. What kind of life did he live? A life well symbolized by the rock he placed under his head many parshas ago, a very hard life, a life full of struggle and suffering, from childhood through to the end of his life – he strove, fought, feared, cried and mourned. By his own admission, he tells Pharaoh that the years of his life were “few and hard.”
But this is still חיים, chayim, a life. The Torah still says of him: Vayechi, And he lived. This is important. We want only happiness, “only simchas,” as they say. We tend not to tolerate the difficult emotions, to have little respect for their aliveness, their chayut.
What if, the next time you are sad or anxious or hurt or angry or even exhausted, you paused and reflected on the aliveness of these feelings, the way they remind you that you are alive, the way they feel intense and living inside you, with some energy of their own, even if it is an unpleasant energy? What if we actually conceived of each emotion as a manifestation of the divine life force passing through us at this moment, each one a precious gift from above with some alive truth to it, some of the richness and genuineness of really living saturated into its texture? Each emotion has a pulsation that wants to open you into life, that is life in its own unique way.
Part of what makes these emotions difficult, part of what causes the suffering, is our resistance to them, our attempts to stop feeling them, to squash them and “heal” them and be rid of them. But by rejecting them, we diminish our own aliveness; we cut off a piece of ourselves; we chop down little flowers that are trying to sprout inside us, flowers full of life, even if they also have sharp thorns and a bitterness to them.
To allow them, to embrace them, to know their aliveness and honor it, is to let all flowers bloom, to lead a life that may know pain, but also is always fully alive and sentient.
Vayechi Yaakov. Yaakov lived not an easy, but a full life.
