Yosef and Benyamin, My Dearest Beautiful Boys,
I write this to you amid a grief at your mother’s death unlike any grief the world has ever known. Just yesterday, alive and great with child, giving life to you tayereh Benyamin, and suddenly a great cry goes up from the birthing tent to the Garden of Eden: a scream that can only be made by an avenging angel, and your Ima Rokhel had left us forever.
The burial rites are just completed. Yoseph, you, six years old, carrying yourself like the mensch I know you already are, even if I don’t think you understand what happened, and you, Benyamin, just a day old, watched by Bilpah while we bury the mistress to whom she was lifelong bonded. Bilpah begged me to let her come to the burial instead, but it is not women’s job to mourn the dead, it is their job to take care of the living. Bilpah is now your mother, and just as Rokhel raised Bilpah’s children as her own, she now shall raise you and Benyamin as her own, the children of Rokhel raised by the woman who knew her best. And you shall be a blessing, a light unto my nation just as your mother was until the very day before last.
The days of our lives are threescore and ten, and your father is already a hundred and ten. While there are all sorts of legends of descendents and relatives so long lived that I’ve barely begun to live any more than you dear children, it’s nevertheless difficult to believe I will reach any age when either of you reach majority, and therefore have only so much time to impart any knowledge and wisdom of this earth to which we briefly tend while the Holy One, Blessed Be He, awaits us in his eternal kingdom of beauty, mercy and wisdom.
It is in this document which, for better or worse, you shall learn the strange and troublesome history of your colossal inheritance, the House of Abraham from its inception to the very day upon which I write and perhaps even some after I begin. And by this document, whenever you read you can learn all our many stories and lore, all our events of majesty and grace, and all the ‘family dirt.’
Your great-grandfather, Abraham, was born under a bright star in a cave, and within this cave did he live with his father Terah until he was three years old. The Sumerian Emperor, Nimrod of Ur, received a horoscope which informed him that a baby was to be born within the year who would topple his throne, his dynasty, his Empire, even his gods. Nimrod immediately ordered all infants in Sumer put to death, Terah immediately escaped with his wife Shiela to a cave a few miles outside of Kasdim, their comfortable suburban community itself outside Ur.
The miracle of Abraham’s birth is further compounded because even unto Abraham’s birth, his mother was untouched and pure, a virgin.
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