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What We Carry With Us

February 2007

It may be an apocryphal story. But so it goes that a young aspiring Rabbinical student was facing his acceptance interview to the Jewish Theological Seminary. This experience is daunting, to say the least. And his interview committee was chaired by none other than Abraham Joshua Heschel, of blessed memory, one of the great thinkers and scholars of our time. So it goes that Dr. Heschel began the interview with the following question: “Young man, if you knew that you would be stranded on a desert island, what two things would you take with you?

The student, hoping to impress his soon to be teacher with his piety and Jewish commitment, responded: “Tallit and tefillin of course”.

Dr. Heschel supposedly stared him down and then quietly quipped, “And what would you eat?”

The question of what to “take with you” must have exercised the minds of our ancestors as they were told to leave Egypt in the middle of the night. According to the Torah most of the Israelites spent their final moments in Egypt getting their just deserts from their Egyptian taskmasters and neighbors. According to Exodus: 12-35-36, they despoiled the Egyptians of gold, silver, and clothing presumably as payment for the years of slavery. Indeed this seems to have been Moses’ instruction to the people before they left.

Yet Moses himself saw to a different task. He took the mummified remains of Joseph for burial in the land of his forefathers as Joseph himself had asked of his brothers as his deathbed wish: “When God has taken notice of you, you shall carry up my bones from here” (genesis 50:25).

So while the Israelites concerned themselves with material possessions, Moses saw to the undying legacy of Jewish history and continuity as represented by the very bones of Joseph our ancestor. Moses yet again taught all of us valuable lesson about what it is that we should “carry with us” through life. It is the history of our people that, taken with us, guides us into the future. You carry with you in your bones the legacy of a rich past and the potential for an even brighter future. The Jewish people always need to carry with it Joseph’s bones, as it were.

In the recent years science has discovered serious Jewish genetic diseases that many of us carry with us as a legacy from our past. (Indeed each of us should be tested to see if he or she is indeed a carrier!) But in a real sense we are carriers of something far more important: the grand and glorious heritage of our people. The test for being such a carrier is not scientific; it is spiritual. Too often, like the genetic material that we carry, the spiritual carrier’s legacy remains silent, inactivated, and dormant. When we connect with other Jews, in synagogue, in marriage, in life itself, we activate the dormant genetic legacy of Joseph’s bones and we become full partners in the enterprise of Jewish survival and continuity. Moses certainly understood this and through his selfless act of carrying Josephs bones taught all of us that the legacy is with us, in us, part of us. If you have not yet activated your genetic legacy, do it now! The bones of Joseph wait for you! Carry them proudly into the future.

With blessings,
Rabbi Barry Starr