Musar su Genesi 47:30

Another principle to be derived from the passage from the Zohar is the importance of clinging to scholars and accompanying them along the way to listen to their words of Torah, for the Shechinah dwells among the upright while they are alive and even after their deaths. Thus we see that in earlier generations people were very concerned about the site in which they would be buried. Yaakov Avinu, for example, instructed, “And I will lie with my father and you shall bury me in their burial place” (Bereishis 47:30). The reason for this is that the souls of the dead hover over their graves and are taught each night esoteric insights from the Heavenly yeshiva. Seifer Chassidim (705) relates an incident involving a certain tzaddik who was buried among the wicked. Every night he would appear to his friends and relations, crying out to them in a tearful voice and begging to be moved from there. He explained that because he was buried among the wicked the Heavenly yeshiva refused to reveal to him any secrets of the Torah. As a result his soul was becoming increasingly desiccated until no moisture remained. He gave his relatives no rest until at last they were forced to exhume him from his grave and bury him elsewhere.

This also explains what Joseph meant when he said: אנכי אעשה כדברך, "I shall do as you have said" (47,30). It should have sufficed for Joseph to say merely אעשה כדברך, without the addition of the word אנכי. With the word אנכי, Joseph alluded to the fact that he in turn would act just like his father and make those responsible swear to take his own remains with them to ארץ ישראל. This also explains Jacob saying: השבעה לי, and Joseph's response being described as: וישבע לו. Jacob said: "Swear to me that you will do for me the very same thing you want to do for yourself."

The entire subject matter under discussion revolves around the spiritual levels of ארץ ישראל and the three levels of היכל השם we have discussed at the outset. This is why, when Jacob noticed that his death was approaching, he called for his son Joseph to instruct him to bury him in ארץ ישראל. When he said: ושכבתי עם אבותי, "I wish to lie with my fathers" (47,30), he intended to answer a question that arises from a statement of our sages in Ketuvot 111, that dying and being buried in ארץ ישראל is not to be compared to merely being buried in ארץ ישראל after one has died outside the Holy Land. The Talmud there describes the scholar Ulla as regularly travelling between Babylonia and the land of Israel though he was resident in the land of Israel. He died while in Babylonia, and Rabbi Eleazar grieved over Ulla's misfortune of having died on unclean soil. When informed that his bier was being transferred to the land of Israel, Rabbi Eleazar stated that this did not make up for Ulla having died in a foreign country. In view of this, Joseph might have questioned the value of transporting the remains of his father to the land of Canaan.