Parashat Vayechi: The Inheritance of Silence

As we started the new week, we started reading Parashat Vayechi, the final portion of the Book of Genesis. With it, the great narrative of beginnings comes to a close: families that are formed, relationships that grow strained, wounds that do not always heal, partial reconciliations, promises passed from generation to generation—and silences that linger in the air. 

Vayechi places Jacob before us at the end of his life. He gathers his children not to distribute possessions, but to leave them words. Because what is truly inherited is not material wealth alone, but memory, moral reckoning, and responsibility toward both past and future. Jacob blesses his sons with honesty. He does not idealize. He does not soften. He does not disguise. He names strengths—and he names failures.

Yet in that decisive moment, there is an absence that weighs heavily: Dinah is not mentioned. She receives no words. She receives no blessing.

I have often taught that just as every word and every letter in the Torah carries meaning, so too do its absences. The silences of the text are not innocent omissions; they are traces—signs of experiences that were never fully processed. Jacob never truly spoke with Dinah after what happened in Shechem. And where there was no word in life, there is none at the end.

Vayechi thus confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: what is left unsaid is also inherited.

That biblical silence echoes painfully in our own time. We live in days when women have been murdered, violated, abducted. And alongside that horror, we witness something deeply disturbing: the difficulty—sometimes even the refusal—of the world to listen to and believe their stories. Suspicion. Relativization. Denial. As though suffering required permission in order to be acknowledged.

Denying credibility is not neutral. It is a form of violence. Philosophy calls it epistemic injustice: denying someone their status as a credible witness—even, and especially, when they can no longer speak. To take the testimonies of these women as truthful is not a political gesture; it is an ethical one. It is a basic affirmation of our shared humanity. There are sufferings that should not be endlessly tested before they are deemed worthy of being heard.

But Vayechi does not speak only of the silence surrounding Dinah. It also speaks of the silence surrounding Leah, another central female figure whose life—and death—remain wrapped in shadows.

The Torah does not describe the moment of Leah’s passing. We are not told what Jacob felt when she died, nor do we hear of her funeral. In fact, we learn of her death only retroactively, when Jacob, near the end of his life, asks to be buried in the Cave of Machpelah:

“There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebecca his wife; and there I buried Leah” (Genesis 49:31).

The verse is striking. Jacob says, “there I buried Leah,” but he does not say, “my wife.” Sarah is Abraham’s wife. Rebecca is Isaac’s wife. Leah, it seems, is not.

The Israeli writer Noia Saguiv offers a deeply revealing interpretation. From the very beginning of Genesis, woman is created as ishah—a partner, a relational counterpart. Only later, when humanity becomes aware of its mortality, does the name Chavah appear: mother of all living. Two dimensions emerge—the companion and the procreator.

For Jacob, Saguiv suggests, Leah was primarily a Chavah. The ishah of his heart was Rachel.

And the text confirms this. When the Torah lists Jacob’s descendants, it says: “These are the sons of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob…” and then, “The sons of Rachel, Jacob’s wife…” (Genesis 46). Rachel alone is called “wife.” Leah is the mother. The one who felt “hated.” The one who lived in the shadow of a love that was not meant for her.

Rachel was the idealized woman—the unreachable star—deeply loved yet distant. So unreachable that she would be buried alone, along the road, outside Machpelah.

Leah, by contrast, is the real woman. The everyday woman. The one who sustains life when there is no poetry. The one who carries responsibility, remembers, persists, remains.

And it is with that woman—the most real of all—that Jacob is ultimately laid to rest.

Vayechi does not romanticize. It forces us to face human complexity: incomplete loves, damaging silences, unheard voices. And as we close the Book of Genesis, tradition invites us to proclaim:

Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek.

Be strong. Let us be strong. And we will strengthen one another.

But this strength is not hardness or fanaticism. It is not the closing of the heart or the dulling of compassion. It is moral fortitude—the strength required to continue defending human values in a world threatened by dehumanization and the trivialization of suffering.

We say chazak not in order to dominate, but in order to sustain.

To sustain listening.

To sustain memory.

To sustain human dignity, even when the world becomes loud, violent, and cynical.

Vayechi does not end with redemption, but with a coffin in a foreign land. Yet it leaves us with a mandate: do not surrender to silence. Do not allow history to close over voices that were silenced.

We cannot speak about silence without naming other silences as well.

Where are the streets of the West filled with protesters demanding freedom for the people of Iran?

Where are the mass demonstrations for the protesters, Iranian women, for political prisoners, for those executed and tortured by the regime? Why do Iranian human rights seem to count for less?

These questions are uncomfortable—because they expose again a double standard.

If this were truly about human rights, the flags would be there. The ships demanding humanitarian treatment would be sailing.Public squares across this country—once so eager to proclaim itself the moral guardian of Western values—would be filled with voices demanding justice.

The same would be true across other nations that proudly label themselves “progressive.”

But that is not what we see.

So perhaps this is not about human rights at all.

Perhaps what we are witnessing, once again, is a familiar and deeply troubling pattern:

when Jews are not involved, there is no outrage. No marches. No slogans. No moral urgency.

This is not new. It is the old antisemitism, dressed in contemporary language. And this silence condemns far more loudly than all the chants, accusations, and demonstrations directed—relentlessly—against Israel.

As we enter Shabbat, we are invited into rest—and even into silence. But not the silence that erases. Rather, the silence that remembers, that honors, that strengthens us within and prepares us to raise our voices when we must.

May we learn to inherit not only words, but also the capacity to listen.

May we not be part of a generation that prays and blesses while remaining silent in the face of horror—or denying it, or amplifying it.

May we have the courage to break the silences that divide, that prevent healing, and that keep wounds from closing—so that we may continue building healthier relationships and more humane societies.

And may this Shabbat, which closes a book and opens a new civil year, find us with the strength and moral clarity to continue standing for the values that sustain us.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Gustavo Geier