Rabbi’s Message, January 5, 2026
“Last Words and Living Legacies”
Based on Rabbi’s Lauren’s Sermon for Parashat Vayechi & 1 Kings 2:1–12
(Want to experience more fabulous sermons in person? We would love to see you at Shabbat!)
In both this week’s Torah portion and its haftarah, we are invited into a holy and tender space: the final moments of a life ends. Jacob — now called Israel — lies on his deathbed, surrounded by his children. King David, aging and aware that his time is drawing to a close, summons his anointed successor, Solomon. These are the final moments of a life, as recorded by our sacred texts.
The Torah records:
“Jacob called his sons and said: Gather, and I will tell you what will befall you in the days to come.” (Genesis 49:1)
The haftarah of 1 Kings echoes this moment almost exactly:
“When David’s days drew near to death, he charged his son Solomon, saying…”
(1 Kings 2:1)
Two great ancestors. Two sets of final words. And a shared, urgent question beneath them:
What truly lasts when we no longer can act?
What is striking is what neither Jacob nor David focuses on. Jacob does not distribute wealth. David does not summarize accomplishments. Instead, Jacob offers blessings and moral discernment, tribe by tribe — naming strengths, dangers, unfinished work. His words are deeply personal, sometimes uncomfortable, often tender. Legacy, here, is not flattery; it is truth spoken with love. Likewise, David does not say, “Remember me.” He says:
“Be strong and show yourself a man. Keep the charge of the Eternal your God: walking in God’s ways, keeping God’s laws, commandments, ordinances, and testimonies…” (1 Kings 2:2–3)
David understands something essential:
Legacy is not what we leave behind — it is what we leave alive in others.
One of the most counterintuitive truths about legacy — confirmed both by Jewish tradition and modern psychology — is this:
You do not build a legacy at the end of life. You build it as you live.
Jacob’s blessings are possible only because he has spent decades living, wrestling, failing, reconciling, and returning. David’s charge to Solomon emerges from a life shaped — sometimes painfully — by teshuvah, moral reckoning, and working towards accountability.
Jewish tradition insists on regular reflection, not heroic last acts. Each year, we take a Cheshbon hanefesh, a moral accounting of the soul. This was never meant to happen only at the end of life, but weekly, monthly, seasonally, yearly (especially at Yom Kippur). And Shabbat itself is a legacy practice: a recurring pause that asks us, again and again, Are we living toward what matters most? Are we honoring the holiness within ourselves and others?
This rhythm matters not just spiritually, but psychologically as well. Contemporary research on meaning and legacy shows that people experience a stronger presence of meaning when they engage in ongoing reflection tied to values, rather than episodic self-assessment (Steger et al., 2006). Meaning, like legacy, is cumulative, and often not as dramatic as we sometimes think. Similarly, developmental psychologist Erik Erikson identified generativity — the commitment to nurturing others and contributing beyond oneself — as a central task of adulthood. Importantly, generativity is sustained through repeated relational acts, not grand gestures (Erikson, Childhood and Society). It’s the small mitzvot that shape our days, the kindness shown, the volunteer hours clocked, the help offered when needed.
Jacob and David tried and failed and tried again to model exactly this. As they could clearly see the end of their lives, they understood their failures and weaknesses, but they also hoped to pass on modeling of resilience in the face of difficulty, caution and care with the challenges that a complicated life can bring, and the resilience and reconciliation that trying to always return to living by our values requires.
The blessings and advice given in both this week’s Torah and haftarah portions may not always be comfortable, but in this case, I would like to think that compassionate honesty and loving concern guides this moment for both Jacob and David. I would like to think that for them, legacy requires truth-telling without cruelty and love without denial of reality and responsibility. Psychologist Dan McAdams, whose work on narrative identity shows how we construct meaning through life stories, emphasizes that healthy legacy formation depends on integrated narratives — stories that include both failure and growth, rupture and repair (The Redemptive Self, 2006). Jacob and David model this type of integration. They neither erase harm nor withhold blessing. They each teach their children how to carry both.
David’s words to Solomon are often read as stern, even harsh. But read carefully, they are less about control and more about continuity; as David says:
“So that the Eternal may fulfill the promise God spoke concerning me…” (1 Kings 2:4)
David understands that his legacy will not survive through charisma, military strength, or poetic brilliance. It will survive only if Solomon embodies the values David learned — sometimes the hard way.
Modern psychology echoes this insight. Studies on values transmission show that children and students internalize values not through instruction alone, but through modeled behavior repeated over time (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994). David is not asking Solomon to imitate him.
He is asking him to live toward their covenant with the Divine, the connection of values that ties Jacob through to David to us today.
Most of us will not have deathbed speeches recorded in sacred texts. But Vayechi insists that our legacy is being written now, quietly, repeatedly, relationally. Through the actions we take each day, through the rituals of love and care and holiness that we build each week, and through the practice – not perfection – of our values lived in the real world.
When we consider legacy, our rabbis teach in Pirkei Avot:
“It is not upon you to complete the work—but neither are you free to desist from it.” (Pirkei Avot 2:16)
Jacob and David do not complete the work. But they did their best to hand it forward. To their children, and through the generations, to us here in this moment.
As we move through this week, I invite you to a simple legacy practice. Ask yourself:
What value am I practicing repeatedly enough that it might outlive me?
Who is learning — explicitly or implicitly — from how I live?
If my life were distilled into a few sentences, what would they be teaching?
This week, our sacred texts remind us of this gift of legacy: not the anxiety of final words, but the gift of another week to align and realign with the values that speak deeply to us, in our hearts and souls. May we live so that when our words are eventually spoken by others, they are not explanations — but gifts of honest and compassionate legacies.
Wishing you a Shavuah Tov, a good week,
Rabbi Lauren
Rabbi Lauren will be going on Family Leave starting this week, as she and her family usher her mother, Jill Blasingame, to her final rest. She will be taking shloshim with her family.
