Vayechi: And He Lived

Vayechi | Rabbi Michael Siegel | January 13, 2025

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Vayechi: And He Lived
Remembering President Jimmy Carter, Warts and All

Rabbi Michael Siegel
January 11,  2025

Oliver Cromwell was an English statesman, politician, and soldier, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in British history. When sitting for a portrait by artist Sir Peter Lely, he asked to be depicted with pimples, warts and everything. Over time, this phrase has come to be shortened to warts and all. In essence the great Cromwell wanted to be depicted in an honest way, refusing to hide any flaws in his likeness, including facial imperfections.

How should we remember our leaders after they die?  What picture shall we paint?

Should we sanitize their story, expunge those embarrassing moments, mistakes made focusing attention on only those parts that embellish the memory of a person?  Or should we show the whole picture of the person: warts and all?

This week we read the portion of Vayechi: and he lived.  The title refers to the life of Jacob who is described at the end of his life. The final portion in the book of Genesis records Jacob’s preparation for death, the blessings of his children and then his burial in the Kver Hamachpala.

Amongst all of this, the Torah records a telling conversation between Jacob and Pharoah. It begins with a seemingly innocuous question from Pharoah:

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר פַּרְעֹ֖ה אֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֑ב כַּמָּ֕ה יְמֵ֖י שְׁנֵ֥י חַיֶּֽיך

(8) Pharaoh asked Jacob, “How many are the years of your life?”

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יַעֲקֹב֙ אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֔ה יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵ֣י מְגוּרַ֔י שְׁלֹשִׁ֥ים וּמְאַ֖ת שָׁנָ֑ה מְעַ֣ט וְרָעִ֗ים הָיוּ֙ יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵ֣י חַיַּ֔י וְלֹ֣א הִשִּׂ֗יגוּ אֶת־יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵי֙ חַיֵּ֣י אֲבֹתַ֔י בִּימֵ֖י מְגוּרֵיהֶֽם׃

And Jacob answered Pharaoh, “The years of my sojourn [on earth] are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my ancestors during their sojourns.”

Aside from the fact that Pharoah received a longer answer than he was expecting, Jacob’s answer reveals a very different, very Jewish, world view than the one that he was accustomed to.

In the Egyptian mind, the Pharoah was considered to be a god.  When they died it was necessary that their burial reflect their divinity.  The pyramid was a place, a grand place of opulence, reflective of the grand life now lost. The mumification was based on the belief that the God Pharoah would join the pantheon across the river Styx.  The walls of the structure contained the history of their reign, their mighty deeds captured in hieroglyphics.  There was nothing objective about this history that was being told. Rather, each was a study in the glorification of their leadership.  Nothing negative. Nothing critical. Nothing that would lead someone to believe that they ever made a mistake.

How different for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah.  The Torah regularly points to their humanity and is unsparing in portraying the failings of our Matriarchs and Patriarchs, as well as their successes.  The difference between the two cultures is that, for Jews there is only one God, which allows for all of us, including our greatest leaders to be, well, human.

Of all of the characters in Genesis, we know Jacob the best, and, in many ways, the most human. We thrill at the moments when he transcends the Jacob of his youth and becomes Israel, and we cringe at those moments when Jacob succumbs to his worst instincts.   The same man who victoriously wrestled an angel can be cruel and self-focused.  All of those factors come to the fore in the title of the Parasha: Vayechi, and he lived. Jacob’s life was put on full display: the good, the bad and the ugly.  A portrait of a leader that Cromwell would appreciate.

It is appropriate that our Torah reading calendar has us reading this Parasha the same week that an American President was laid to rest in his hometown of Plains, Georgia after a grand ceremony in Washington.  Vayechi: And Jimmy Carter lived.  A man who came from humble beginnings, President Carter was a deeply religious man who served his country with honor as a Lieutenant in the Navy, was a trained scientist, a successful peanut farmer, served as Governor of the State of Georgia, who fought racism during his tenure, who attained the Presidency, and won a Nobel Prize for undertaking peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel, campaigning for human rights, and working for social welfare.

President Biden spoke beautifully about President Carter when he described his life as:

The story of a man who was at once driven and devoted to making real the words of his savior and the ideals of this nation. The story of a man who never let the tides of politics divert him from his mission to serve and shape the world. The man had character.  Jimmy held a deep Christian faith in God. And that his candidacy spoke and wrote about faith as a substance of things hoped for, and evidence of the things not seen. Faith founded on the commandment of scripture. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy soul. And love thy neighbor as thyself.

Easy to say, but very, very difficult to do. In his life, in this life, any walk of faith can be difficult. It can be lonely. But it requires action to be the doers of the world.

As a Jew, in the spirit of the portion of Vayechi, and a Torah that acknowledges our successes and our failings, I believe we have an obligation to see the whole man.

In his Presidency there is much for Jews to praise about Jimmy Carter. Here are a few:

In 1978, President Carter established the US’s Holocaust Memorial Council to discuss ways to remember the Holocaust and educate future generations.  As a result, there is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Since its opening in 1993 there have been 47 million visitors.

In 1979, with President Carter’s encouragement, the United States passed the Israeli Anti-Boycott Act, which allows individual US states to make it against the law to boycott Israel or companies that do business with Israel and makes it a federal crime to boycott Israel.

When the Shah fell in Iran and the Radical Islamic Fundamentalist took over the government, President Carter created a special visa allowing Iranian Jews, as well as Christians and Baha’is, to remain in the US and gain political asylum. Approximately 50,000 fleeing Iranians – primarily Jews – were granted American citizenship as a result of Pres. Carter’s action.

President Carter pressured the Soviet Union to allow more “refuseniks” – Jews who wished to leave the USSR – to emigrate. As a result of his pressure, it’s possible that an extra 25,000 Jews were allowed to move to Israel or the US, annually.

President Jimmy Carter’s most notable achievement was the peace agreement that he personally created between Israel and Egypt that stands to this day.  Today, it is easy to take the cold peace that exists between these two countries for granted.  But I lived in Israel the year that the deal was brokered, and I can tell you that it felt miraculous.  Up until the Camp David Accords, Egypt was Israel’s most dangerous foe.  It was the lead army in the War of Independence and the wars in 56, 67, and 73.  There is no question that if it was not for Carter, the deal will have fallen apart.  Menachem Begin said the peace treaty should be named for President Carter, instead of the Camp David Accords.

If President Carter’s career ended with his presidency than my sense is that we would have one story to tell.  But we are all aware by now, President Carter was as active in his post presidency as he was in his presidency.  He well understood the power that he wielded as an ex-President, and he aimed to use it.  He accomplished remarkable things like helping eradicate a dread guinea worm disease in Africa through purified water.  He traveled the world doing good.  He built homes for the homeless well into his 90’s. There is so much to praise.

But as a Jew, I cannot look away from his near obsession with Israel during those years and the manner in which he spoke about Jews in America.

Perhaps it stemmed from his belief that the Jewish community was not sufficiently grateful for all that he had done in his presidency and that Jewish support of Ronald Reagan in the election cost him the race.

Professor Kenneth Stein, a close advisor, the first director of the Carter Center, and a person who co-authored a book called The Blood of Abraham wrote of the President: I realized more and more how deeply angry he was at Menachem Begin for failing to move forward on Palestinian self-rule and for his persistence in building Jewish settlements in the territories. Carter was frustrated that he could not make the changes he believed were necessary outside of the Oval Office. At times, he would express to me and others that if American Jews had not abandoned him, he would have beaten Reagan. Carter placed a lot of blame for his loss directly on Begin’s shoulders.

Carter’s rage was unleashed in his own book in which he holds Israel singly responsible for the unrest in the Middle East.  He made that clear in the title: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.  Here is a passage:

“The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens–and honor its own previous commitments–by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel’s right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.”

Professor Stein was so shocked by the ugly, one-sided nature of the book that he resigned his position at the Carter Center.

The negative reviews of his book were devastating: The New York Times, hardly a proponent of Israel, slammed the work, calling it simplistic, “tone deaf,” “distorted” and filled with “misrepresentations.”  Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both criticized the book as inaccurate and offensive.

Former President Carter’s reaction was shocking.  In the same way that he held Israel solely responsible for the violence and terrorism, he accused the Jewish community of orchestrating the critiques of his book.  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times about his book, Carter claimed he was being victimized by powerful Jews for having the guts to criticize Israel: he called it “politically suicide” for anyone to put forward a “balanced position” about Israel.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the current United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post about President Carter’s responses: Perhaps unused to being criticized, Carter reflexively fell back on this kind of innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government. Even if unconscious, such stereotyping from a man of his stature is noteworthy. When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder.

In the years that followed, former President Carter never wavered from the positions that he took in his book, never placed blame on Yasser Arafat or the P.L.O. for its terrorist acts, and most disturbingly, publicly embraced Hamas.  He met with its leaders and openly advocated for Hamas to serve as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people with American elected officials.  This, for a terrorist organization whose Covenant calls for the destruction of the only Jewish State.  One can only speculate on how the former President would have understood October 7th.  I suppose, in his mind, Israel had it coming for not listening to him years ago.

One can only speculate about source of his animus, but I suspect that part of it stems from his fundamentalist Christian faith.  One story about a meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir stuck out to me in his book:

Later, in her office, I thanked the prime minister for making possible our wonderful visit, and she asked if I had any observations I would like to share. With some hesitation, I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government.  He records her response: She seemed surprised at my temerity and dismissed my comments with a shrug and a laugh.

The arrogance of a young Jimmy Carter accusing the Prime Minister of the State of Israel of being a sinful Hebrew is stunning in and of itself. The fact that he repeats the story years later without the slightest bit of shame leads me to believe that this Born Again Christian, who was to become the president of the United States,  was intimating that the Jews had lost God’s favor and were not worthy to possess the land.  But the book makes it clear that this is more than a case of being tone deaf.

In another chilling passage, former President Carter wrote:  “It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities — the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier.” Jeffrey Goldberg responded to this in the pages of the Washington Post: “There are, of course, no references to “Israeli authorities” in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it “ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians.” He goes on, “In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples. One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis — in their deviousness — somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry.”

I think that it is fair to ask who was Carter’s audience for these Biblical polemics?  Perhaps the former President was ringing an alarm bell for Evangelical Christians to reconsider their support of Israel.  I, for one, am glad that they did not listen.

As the world mourns President Carter, the longest living President in American history, American Jews face a difficult challenge. We can and should acknowledge the good that he did in aiding Iranian and Russian Jews and helping to bring peace to Israel and Egypt. Yet we can’t forget the message of the portion of Vayechi and our obligation to remember our leaders beginning with Jacob with honesty, warts and all.  That includes his demonization of Israel and use of casual antisemitism. The bully pulpit of the American Presidency is a powerful one.   For a past president to vilify Israel and to touch the third rail of Christian anti-Semitism is a very dangerous thing to do.  Vayechi: Let us remember President Jimmy Carter as he was in life: warts and all.