B’SHALLACH – For EUPJ 2026

Rabbi Dr. Walter Rothschild

There are verses in the Torah which are often overlooked, they do not seem so dramatic, but they are significant and sometimes these verses have a habit of jumping off the page and hitting you between the eyes.

One such, for me, is Exodus 13:19. The children of Israel are setting off across the desert (NOT the normal route along the Via Maris, the way of the Sea along the coast) amidst great confusion and haste and ”Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had made the children of Israel swear, saying ‘God will surely remember you, so then take my bones with you.’ ”

This is of course a reference to Genesis 50:24-26 where Joseph – who had been able to take his own father’s body for burial in Machpelah in Hebron a few verses but many years previously – now in his last days demands of them this oath, and states that God will ”bring you up out of this land into the land which God swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.” In consequence, when he dies ”they embalmed him and he was put into a coffin in Egypt.” (50:28)

It is fascinating to think that for the next three to four hundred years or so someone, somewhere knew where this coffin was stored and this knowledge and the promise attached to it were then passed down through the generations.  Not in a  large pyramid but surely in a tomb somewhere? The ”new Pharaoh” in Exodus 1 is indifferent to any famous predecessors but the Israelites are not. They kept their memory and their hope alive. This coffin is their physical link to the Patriarchs and to the Covenant, their hope for a future in a land of their own.

So when Moses takes this coffin with him it is a symbol of both the new start and the continuity with the past  at one and the same time. Through the next forty years in the desert and then during   the conquest of the Land of Israel under Joshua this coffin is somewhere there (albeit not mentioned), along with the other more famous box, the one with the Tablets of the Torah from Sinai. He will finally be buried at the very end of the Book of Joshua (a much-neglected book, I wish we read it every year as the sixth book of the Torah because it is the continuation of the story that has begun in Genesis and Exodus). In Joshua 24:32 ”The bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel had brought out of Egypt, they buried in Shechem, in the parcel of ground which Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor for one hundred pieces of silver…”  This is also truly amazing, for it states that they knew of the place and the contract and the purchase price centuries later and so the favourite son of Jacob is buried not next to his father in Machpelah, but in the land his father had bought all those years ago…..  The Covenant is made concrete, this land was promised, some of it was bought, some was conquered, it is all a part of Our Story and it remains so to this day.

And where are we today? We have a land. A lot of it was bought for cash, for example through the Jewish National Fund, from previous landowners. Any ‘Blue Box’ would tell you which areas had been purchased with the donations given by Jews round the world but properties have been bought since as well. Some of it was simply settled, being just desert, no-man’s land in the Negev or deep in the Jordan Valley where Jews came to build and to farm and to live. And some of it had to be conquered from those who denied our covenantal right to be there – and who deny it still. The arguments rage and from the Bible we can learn that they always have and always will. We also, like the Israelites in Egypt (in essence the first ‘Diaspora’) have to keep our memory and our hope alive and not allow ourselves to be discouraged by those who deny both.

But there is something more. As I write this (in December 2025) a lengthy and painful process has been under way for some months to return not just the living hostages to Israel but the remains of the dead ones, the murdered ones. It has become a part of the national identity, a part of any agreements made, to demand that the bones should be placed in a box and carried to the land of Israel for burial (or, in the case of those from other countries, returned to their own homelands and their own rituals.)  This feels important. One could say, with a shrug, ”The dead are dead, who cares where their bones lie?” – but Jews are different. We DO care. We do build cemeteries and we do visit the graves.

Throughout our history many had no grave, they were burned or drowned or cremated or they died anonymously in extermination camps or death pits or death marches – so it is not universal to have an individual  grave, but it is universal to want one, to want to be remembered, or to have a grave of an ancestor whom one can visit.

This tradition can be traced back to the mummified remains of an ancient patriarch whose box was carried out of Egypt, through the Sea, across the Desert and into the Land.