ETHICAL WILLS

Peter J. Haas

There is an old and familiar midrash about how the Shema came to be.' On his deathbed, Jacob called in

his twelve sons and said to them," Listen, the God of Israel that is in the heavens is your Father, for I fear that there is doubt [ the word is mahloket] in your hearts about the Holy One, Blessed be He." They responded," Hear, Israel , our father, just as there is no doubt in your heart about the Holy One Blessed be He, so there is no doubt in our hearts, but the Lord is our God , the Lord alone." At this point, according to the midrash, Jacob said under his breath what has become our traditional response to the Shema," Baruch Shem Kvod Malchuto...[ Blessed be the glory of His kingdom]." In this moving death scene, we have what we might call the first ethical will, the beginning of what was to become a long Jewish literary tradition.

In fact, of course, the situation is much more complex. The story of Jacob's last words to his sons is not found in the Tanach itself, but in the much later midrashic literature. In fact, the earliest mention of this story I could find is in Bereshit Rabbah and Dvarim Rabbah.2 As best we can tell, both these midrashim are Palestinian and date from around the eighth or ninth century of the Common Era.³ It is interesting to speculate on why this particular story would appear just at this time and in just this form- that is, in the form of a last will and testament, an ethical will. I shall return to that question in a few moments, but before doing so I want to say a few words about the tradition of ethical wills as we have come to know it.

The literary phenomenon we today know as ethical wills is not a universal Jewish literary type. In fact, ethical wills occur in what we regard to be their classical form only in the thirteenth century or So, and then only among Ashkenazic Jews of southern and central Europe . Even more narrowly, they appear to have been composed