This week’s Torah portion, Vayechi, begins with the death of Jacob. Similar to the death of Sarah, which began with a sentence about life (“And it was the life of Sarah…”), Jacob’s death is also introduced with life (“And Jacob lived…”). Life and death are intertwined. We live but we also know that death stands in the doorway. We perplexingly find ourselves here in this world but also know that, under no control of our own, our lives are tenuous.   

This week, I was meeting with a friend and former student of mine who is battling a life-threatening illness. The person has young children and was thinking about how to communicate death to them. I commented that when I was a child I used to ask my mother what happens when we die, to which she would respond, “We go back to where we were before we were born.”   

It is strange that we all must live a life without knowing how it will end. On one hand, this is a kind of torment; on the other hand, perhaps it is precisely the not knowing which somehow makes life the powerful, precious thing it is.    

Our Torah portion, unlike most others, has no space at its beginning. In the language of Torah portions, it is “closed” rather than “open.” Rashi comments on this:

“Why is this section [parsha] totally closed? Because, comprising as it does an account of the death of Jacob, as soon as our father Jacob departed this life the hearts and eyes of Israel were closed due to the misery of the bondage which Egypt then began to impose upon them. A second reason is that Jacob wished to reveal to his sons the date the exile would end, but the vision was closed [concealed] from him.”  

This parsha is closed because it’s the beginning of slavery and also because Jacob wanted to tell his children when it would end but could not. I think that these two seemingly unconnected explanations of Rashi are deeply interconnected. Perhaps if one knows when the exile will end then it is not really exile. Similar to the lives that we lead in this world, the not knowing is by definition part and parcel of its essence.   

Life in this sense is a kind of exile. We are thrust into this world, and its fundamental unknowns—why it began, when it will end, what its truth is—are all part of what makes human life the strange and beautiful gossamer thing it is.   

Perhaps this tenuousness itself, this fragility, is what helps us to appreciate and value life. This is a lesson that Jacob has a hard time with. As he tells Pharaoh in last week’s portion: “My life has been short and bitter…”

While the unknown, mysterious and enigmatic nature of our lives often leaves us with existential angst, perhaps it also colors in the delicate beauty of life itself.