PETER J. HAAS
most often forgotten, because it is common knowledge and obvious.” Jacob, in the story in Bereshit Rabbah, knew that his twelve sons understood the tradition of the one God discovered by their great grandfather Abraham . But in the day-to-day struggles of everyday life, this was a simple truth Jacob feared they would forget. In his perennial and maybe even quintessential Jewish fear, Jacob became in late antiquity the progenitor of what was to become the ethical will, the passage of wisdom from the experience of age to the new generation that will have to carry the religion forward.
I want to close with an observation ascribed to Rabbi Kushner in Jack Riemer and Nathaniel Stampfer’s collection. Kushner cites Jacob in Genesis 46:30, when upon seeing Joseph he says, “Amuta Hap am[1 will die this time].” Kushner goes on to say that all human beings owe life one death. But if a person leaves behind no one who remembers his values and his character, if a person is
forgotten as if he never was, that person dies a second death...” May we be as successful as Jacob in passing along to the next generation not only the techniques of being Jewish , but the moral and emotional wisdom of Judaism as well.
Notes
2. Bereshit Rabbah(Vilna edition) parashah 08:3: Theodor-Albeck, parashah 99. For the version in Devarim Rabba, see the Vilna edition Parashah 2(Lieberman, parasha v’etchanan, Paragraph 1).
3. The dating of these midrashim is still a matter of some controversy. Leopold Zunz dated Bereshit Rabba to the sixth century. His view has been carried forward without comment by H. Freedman in the Introduction to Midrash Rabbah Genesis 1(London : Soncino, 1939), pp. XXiX. Jacob Neusner has argued for a slightly earlier date, to about 400 C.E. See, for example, his Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis: A New American Translation, p. Xi. As for
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