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Vayigash
Dr. Barry Leff

This week’s parsha opens with the most powerful piece of oratory in all of scripture: Judah’s impassioned plea with Joseph not to imprison Benjamin.  Joseph, overcome with emotion, reveals his identity, and there is an emotional reconciliation between the brothers.

When Joseph reveals his identity, he tells his brothers not to be grieved or angry with themselves that they sold him into slavery.  Within a few short verses Joseph repeats not once, not twice, but three times that it was not his brothers that sent him to Egypt but God.

Many commentators through the ages have taken Joseph’s statement literally.  That by selling Joseph into slavery, Joseph’s brothers were fulfilling God’s will.  God wanted this to come about.  According to this point of view, everything that happens, happens because it is the will of God.  There are statements elsewhere in the Tanach that promote this theology: in Isaiah God says of Nebuchadnezzar, the Assyrian king who conquered Israel, “I will send him against a hypocrite nation.”  It is interesting to note that this year while our Christian neighbors are feasting on the 25^th of December, we will be fasting: the Tenth of Tevet, which falls on December 25 this year, is a fast day to commemorate beginning of the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar.

Some Chasidic commentators elaborate on this by saying it is impossible that Judah and his brothers, the founders of the tribes of Israel, could have done something so horrible, God forbid!  Instead, on some level they knew they were fulfilling the will of God by sending Joseph off to Egypt.

I believe this theology, that even really terrible things that happen are the will of God, was sorely lacking to start with, and I believe that the Shoah, the Holocaust, killed it off completely.  There is nothing that the Jewish people could have done in the years leading up to the Shoah that was so terrible that the Nazis could somehow have been fulfilling the will of God with their affliction of the people Israel.  Such an idea is repulsive; such a God I would run away from.

So we are left to find another explanation for Joseph’s troubling words.  Sforno in his commentary on this verse echoes the Rambam, who said everything is attributable to God’s will, because everything has a cause, and ultimately you get back to the “First Cause,” what Aristotle would call the “Prime Mover,” and everything that happens is therefore ultimately caused by God, and therefore is God’s will.

This explanation is still somewhat dissatisfying to me.  While I can accept it intellectually, it only works because it’s making Joseph’s statement about God’s will indirect.  In effect it says that it’s God’s will that we should have free will, and so bad things we do with that free will are, at least indirectly, the will of God.  However, it does not seem genuine to me that at this critical juncture in Joseph’s life, at the moment of  reconciliation with his brothers, he would choose to give a philosophy lecture.  Joseph must have had some other motivation for making this speech, and especially for repeating it three times.

Perhaps Joseph was just trying to make his brothers feel less embarrassed by their repulsive behavior by saying that it’s OK, everything turned out fine in the end.  But this is a very problematic ethical position.  If a person does something evil, and there is a good unintended side effect, it does not make the original act any less evil.  Besides, we can’t even really say that this was the best possible outcome.  We don’t know what might have happened if Joseph hadn’t been sold off.  I’m sure that since God wanted to give us the Torah, God could have found another way to do it even without our living in slavery in Egypt for hundreds of years.

We can learn a completely different lesson from this episode.  Joseph was, in some ways, a modest person.  Despite his fancy jacket and great abilities, he was always careful to attribute his good fortune to God.  When he was introduced to Pharaoh, he said his ability to interpret dreams came from God.  When he reveals himself to his brothers, he attributes his great success to God’s plan, not to his own abilities.

Yet Joseph does demonstrate some remarkable abilities.  One of the most important things we learn from Joseph is that his spirit was never crushed.  He never gave up.  He would always bounce back from whatever hardship life threw at him.  Sell him into slavery, he becomes the top slave.  Put him in jail, he becomes the assistant warden.  He goes from being a slave to being the number two man in all of Egypt.  Joseph appears to have taken to heart General Joe Stilwell’s motto: Illegitimis non carborundum (don’t let the bastards grind you down).

With his message to his brothers not to worry, Joseph is expressing a sentiment very similar to one that Rabbi Akiva expresses in the Talmud.  R. Akiba said “A man should always accustom himself to say ‘ ‘Whatever the All-Merciful does is for good.’  R. Akiba was once out on the road and came to town.  He looked for a place to stay, but had no luck, everyplace was full.  He said ‘Whatever the All-Merciful does is for good’, and he went and spent the night in the open field. He had with him a rooster, a donkey, and a lamp. A gust of wind came and blew out the lamp, a weasel came and ate the rooster, a lion came and ate the donkey. He said: ‘Whatever the All-Merciful does is for good’. The same night some bandits came and carried off the inhabitants of the town. He said to them: Didn’t I tell you, ‘Whatever the All-Merciful does is all for good?

We have all helped friends or loved ones through difficult times, through being laid off or fired, or divorced.  Some people seem to fall apart when struck with disaster, others, like Joseph, pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go back to work.  Joseph’s life also seems to follow a theory my ex-wife Cheryl came up with: Fluty’s law of compensatory rebound.  The harder you are hit by disaster, the stronger your recovery will be.

Joseph’s example shows us that the recovery to a better position doesn’t just happen by itself.  He kept the faith—in both God and himself—every time disaster struck.

My blessing for today is that we may all share Joseph’s strength and resiliency, and when life throws a challenge our way, we not allow it to crush our spirit.

Shabbat Shalom.