My friend Kobi recently helped his mom move to an eldercare facility near his home in Raanana. He wistfully told us how her personality has changed: “She used to be so decisive,” Kobi said. “Mom would always tell us all what to do and how to do it – and now she just kinda sits there, waiting to be told what to do next.”
What does it feel like for a parent to reach that stage? Is it freeing, or sad, or a little of both? Yaakov, when he needs to ask Yosef for a burial in Israel in this week’s Torah reading of Vayechi, behaves differently than he did years earlier. Novelist Thomas Mann, in his masterwork Joseph and His Brothers, picks up on the language with which Yaakov addressed his son: im na matzati chen be-eynecha… ve-asita imadi chesed ve-emet, “please, if it finds favor in your eyes… do me this favor…” This is not the Yaakov who ordered the young Yosef to find his brothers at the start of Vayeshev. Yaakov is obsequious: a few verses later, the bedridden patriarch actually bowed to his son. The commentators struggle to explain, notes Rabbi Dr. Yonatan Grossman, whether Yaakov bowed to God or to his son – this may have been the fulfillment of Yosef’s dream – but he was definitely acting differently.
Things change: when the Torah tells us of how long Yaakov spent in Egypt, Rabbi David Kimchi, the Radak, notes, “Yosef spent seventeen years under the protection of Yaakov; so too did Yaakov spend seventeen years under the protection of Yosef.” But how did Yosef experience this reversal? Wordsworth famously taught that “The Child is father of the Man,” but what does that child feel?
Candance Dellacona, host of the podcast “The Sandwich Generation Survival Guide,” notes that 23% of Americans, or some 70 million people, find themselves in the Yosef position of parenting their children while simultaneously caring for their parents. It can be a lot to handle.
But even so, the opportunity it presents those of us blessed to be in that situation, the chance to model kibud av va-em to our children, is golden. Many of us know the story told by the Brothers Grimm of the little boy who watched his father move his own aging (and increasingly clumsy) father away from the dinner table as grandpa continually broke their china bowls. The boy watched as his father gave his grandfather a wooden bowl, which his grandfather tearfully accepted. Then, one day, the father watched his son working with some wood and a penknife. When he asked his son what he was doing, the boy replied, “I’m making a wooden bowl to give you when you’re old and I move you away from the table.”
Hashem gives challenges to those of us who are lucky enough to be sandwich generation people, but they are just as much opportunities. Let’s make the most of them.
Shabbat Shalom.
Jeffrey Kobrin is the Rosh HaYeshiva/Head of School at the North Shore Hebrew Academy in Great Neck, New York. He has bachelors and masters degrees in English literature from Columbia University, semikha from RIETS at Yeshiva University, and a PhD in English education from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He lives in Riverdale, New York, with his wife, Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin, and their daughters.