Jacob Recited the Shema Before He Embraced His Son

The Procession That Stopped the Road

Joseph had sent word ahead: anyone who failed to come out and honor his father's arrival would be put to death. The nobles of Egypt did not test the proclamation. They dressed in byssus and purple and came out in full court order. Musical instruments sounded the whole length of the road from Goshen. The women of the city climbed to the rooftops with timbrels and cymbals. Joseph himself wore Pharaoh's crown and descended from his chariot when he was fifty ells from the old man's caravan and walked the rest of the way on foot. Every prince and nobleman behind him dismounted and walked too.

Jacob saw the procession from a distance and did not yet know who led it. He only knew that something of enormous importance was moving toward him. He bowed before he recognized his son. This detail lodges in the tradition as a small error with long consequences: for allowing his father to bow to him without stopping it immediately, Joseph would die before his years were complete.

A Reunion Interrupted by the Shema

Joseph reached his father and fell upon his neck and wept. Jacob did not embrace him back. Jacob was reciting the Shema.

He had believed Joseph was dead for twenty-two years. He had mourned him without comfort, had refused to be consoled, had told his sons that he would go down to Sheol still in mourning. Now Joseph was alive in front of him, weeping on his shoulder, and Jacob would not stop the prayer he had begun. He had opened his mouth in the Shema and he finished it before he said a word to his son. He chose the declaration of God's unity over the emotion of reunion, and the tradition treats this not as coldness but as an act of profound priority: at the moment of the most intense human joy Jacob had ever felt, he placed God first.

When he finished, he spoke. He said that he was ready to die now. He had seen Joseph's face again, and he could die in peace.

The Blessing That Raised the Nile

Jacob was presented before Pharaoh. He was a very old man by then, bent by a life of labor and loss and grief, and the Egyptian king asked him how old he was. Jacob said: the days of the years of my sojourning are a hundred and thirty years. Few and difficult have been the days of my life. He did not say it proudly. He named the years as a weight he had carried, not as a boast about duration.

Then he blessed Pharaoh. The rabbis note that this is what a lesser person does for a greater: the lesser blesses the greater. And yet here was a wandering shepherd blessing the king of the most powerful nation in the world. The blessing held: the Nile, which had not flooded to its full measure during the years of famine, now rose again. The years of drought ended with Jacob's arrival in Egypt. His blessing reached into the water table and changed it.

The Preparations He Made Before Dying

Jacob lived seventeen years in Egypt after the reunion, the same number of years he had raised Joseph in Canaan before the boy was taken. The symmetry was not lost on the tradition. He spent those years in Goshen, in the good land Joseph had secured for the family, and at the end he called Joseph to him and made him swear a specific oath: do not bury me in Egypt. Carry my bones back to the land and bury me in the cave of Machpelah, where Abraham and Sarah lie, where Isaac and Rebecca lie, where Leah lies. He made Joseph place his hand under his thigh, the oath of the patriarchs, and swear it out loud.

Joseph swore it. Then Jacob bowed on the head of his bed toward the Shekhinah, the divine presence, and gave thanks. He had found his son. He would go home to his fathers.