I didn’t have much time to prepare, but here’s a short vort I saw. I don’t have a chumash in front of me so if I am misquoting, I would appreciate being corrected.
In this weeks parsha, Parshas Vayechi, we find that after Yaakov Avinu was niftar, on the way to his burial in Eretz Yisroel, the mitzrim mourned him in Goren Ha’atad. The pasuk continues that the kna’ani saw the Egyptian mourning in Goren Ha’atad and said this is a great mourning for Egypt.
The Kli Yakar asks what the importance of goren ha’atad was and why did the fact that the mourning took place there cause the Kna’anim to take notice? He answers that the words Goren Ha’atad means a food storage silo which is surrounded by thorns. He goes on to explain that the seven years of hunger had been cut short after just 2 years when Yaakov had come down to Mitzraim. Now that Yaakov was niftar and therefore his zchus was no longer there, the famine resumed. When the Egyptians came to this goren, this food storage silo, they saw that it had miraculously become surrounded by thorns and there was no way to enter it and access the food inside. The famine had returned. That was when they realized that the famine had been halted in Yaakov’s zchus and they began to mourn the loss of this tzadik in who’s merit they had had food.
He continues to explain that not just in the case of Yaakov avinu and the Egyptian famine but always in all times and all generations the bracha of parnassa comes to the world in the zchus of tzadikim. The gemara brings down that one of the amoraim said that the entire world is fed in the zchus of my son chanina.