Thursday, December 27, 2012

December 29, 2012

Vayechi, Genesis 47:28–50:26

Seeing The Bigger Picture


Joseph reminds us that our perspective of reality is limited compared to the ultimate meaning that God perceives.


Remember the Midrash of the blind people and the elephant? Each one touched a different part of the animal and then described the elephant based on their own particular perceptions.

One compared the elephant to a long, powerful tube. A second portrayed the elephant as an enormous barrel. A third, feeling the elephant’s ears, depicted it as resembling large drapes. Each person described what they knew--accurate as a characterization of part of the elephant, but completely misleading as a representation of the entire animal.

That same discrepancy between individual perception and objective reality recurs every day. All of us view the world through our own eyes, listen to its sounds through our own ears, and analyze what we see and hear through our own blend of personality, culture and training. The world we live with--a filtering of external fact through subjective perception and collective history--is literally one of our own making.

As a result, we often do not recognize the larger import of events because we are chained to our own particularity. The truth is that we plan our behavior from our own perspective, and we analyze the consequences from our own perspective.

The Larger Picture
The result is that we often fail to perceive the larger picture. We become blind to the harmony and unity that links everything that exists to each other and provides coherence by reference to the source of all existence.

That same inability to see the larger picture is exemplified by the fears of Josephs’s brothers. Recall that the entire family--the patriarch Jacob and the eleven remaining sons had moved to Egypt upon Joseph’s recommendation. They settled in Goshen and busied themselves with shepherding sheep. Throughout this time, the courtier, Joseph, treated his family with great honor and love.

But with the death of Jacob, Joseph’s brothers become terrified that there are no longer any restraints on their powerful sibling. Perhaps, they reason, Joseph was kind to us and protected us for our father’s sake, out of respect for his feelings. Now that our father no longer lives, our brother will seek revenge on us for all the evil we did to him.

From the perspective of the brothers, what they did to Joseph was certainly unforgivable. After all, they discussed killing him, and only later decided to sell him into slavery. All of Joseph’s suffering as a slave in Potiphar’s house and in the Egyptian prison was the fault of his brothers back in Canaan. From their perspective, and from him, Joseph had every right to be furious with them.

Response to Their Fear
Yet Joseph’s position as a religious role model emerges from his response to their fear. Rather than restricting his perspective to his own subjective position, Joseph struggles to understand what happened from God’s vantage point. So he says,

"Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result--the survival of many people. And so, fear not. I will sustain you and your children.”

According to Rashi (11th-century France), Joseph is struck by the fact that although his father may no longer be living, the God of Israel still lives, and still commands moral behavior. The standards of Israel’s God, embodied in the Torah and in later rabbinic sources, retain a commanding voice because Israel’s commander still speaks.

From the human perspective, Josephs’ brothers sold their brother into slavery. From the divine perspective, they initiated a process that would assure the survival of countless human beings many years later.

We cannot know the consequences of our deeds. Like Joseph’s brothers, we must be responsible for our own actions from our own perspective. But like Joseph himself, we also need to look to a higher, more encompassing vision of what life can be. Joseph’s response is an articulate reminder that we do not assign ultimate meaning; God does.

May your perspective reflect God’s vision of a world redeemed.

Monday, December 17, 2012

December 22, 2012


Don't Be Quarrelsome On The Way

Joseph's warning to his brothers not to quarrel on their way instructs us as well in our relationships with our families and the larger Jewish community.

By Rabbi Bradley Artson
In Parashat Vayigash, Joseph finally reveals his true identity to his brothers. He loads them with all sorts of riches from Egypt and tells them to return with their families so they can settle in Egypt and survive the famine under Joseph's supervision.

In the midst of their new found wealth and security, Joseph gives them a strange piece of instruction. "Do not be quarrelsome along the way." Why would Joseph say that? And why, especially, in the midst of a joyous reunion, amidst unexpected wealth and success? 

Blaming Each Other

Rashi suggests that each brother would blame the others for having sold Joseph into slavery. Joseph, understanding how guilt and denial operate, anticipated his brothers' need to blame each other, and he therefore instructs them not to engage in recriminations about the past. In effect, Joseph tells his brothers that they will never agree about the past, but they can still live in harmony despite that disagreement. That advice is no less precious today.

Conflicts within families are often magnified by our human propensity to remember the past in a way that makes us look best. As a result, two loving relatives end up not only disagreeing about the meaning of what happened, but even about the facts themselves. By focusing on those areas of disagreement, we lose sight of a shared desire to be part of each other's life.

Joseph's advice still rings true--in such times, it may be best simply to agree to overlook the past, to start afresh in the present. A second possibility, also raised by Rashi, is that Joseph instructs his brothers "not to engage in arguments of Jewish law (divrei halakhah), lest the road become unsteady for you."

We Jews have always argued about our beliefs, and we have always mined out sacred traditions to articulate our visions of how the world is structured, and how we should live our lives.

According to Rashi's second understanding, Joseph's brothers, like Jews throughout time, would spend their time on the road arguing about questions of Halakhah (Jewish law). Caught up in the passions of their discussions, they would lose their way religiously as well as geographically.
Obsession With Ideas

Our Jewish obsession with ideas contains a potential danger--that we will become so excited by the ideas themselves that we will lose any sense of a connection to reality. The ideas will justify themselves, regardless of how they work in the world, regardless of whether or not they conform to what we know of reality.

Judaism has always reflected this tension--adherence to timeless standards, but always renewing those standards in the light of developing communal understandings and ongoing social need. We must take care never to stop our passion for ideas, but we must also be on our guard, lest our ideas cease referring back to reality, to questions of how to live a more moral, more holy, more fully human life.

A third possible reading of Joseph's warning is that Joseph sees that his brothers are now wealthy because of his gifts. And wealth brings tensions that are often unexpected. Worried that his brothers might feel the pressures of their wealth and therefore begin to quarrel about how they live together, Joseph urges his brothers not to allow money to divide them.

We, too, face that challenge. American Jewry is a comfortable community. As one consequence of our wealth, we have raised up a large number of different organizations, movements and institutions, all vying for our attention, our energy and our resources.

Can we see those different movements and institutions as complementing one another, contributing to a communal life that is multi-layered and profound? Or will those movements and institutions perceive each other as competitors, in which case a great deal of energy will be wasted on trying to impede the growth and health of each other's ways of being Jewish?

As we travel on the road, we do well to remember Joseph's advice: "Do not be quarrelsome on the way!"

Monday, December 10, 2012

December 15, 2012


Mikeitz, Genesis 41:1–44:17

Two Kinds Of Intelligence

To be fully educated and human we must study a range of disciplines--humanities and sciences, secular and Judaic.

 

Pharaoh has endured a night of terrible dreams. To make matters worse, neither he nor any of his ministers understood what the dreams were about. The only person able to interpret those dreams is a Hebrew prisoner in an Egyptian jail. That person is Joseph.

Seven Years & Seven Years


After hearing the dreams described, Joseph announced that Egypt would enjoy seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of universal famine. In advance, Joseph argues that Pharaoh should appoint someone "navon ve-hakham," discerning and sage, who will store enough food to ensure the survival of the population.

Why did Joseph use both words, discerning and sage? Wouldn't either one have sufficed to describe what type of person was needed? Our traditions regard each word of the Torah as necessary. Any apparent redundancy must be there to teach a specific lesson. Each of these words, our Rabbis taught, refers to two different kinds of knowledge.

Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, the Ramban (13th Century Spain) comments that the two types of knowledge apply in different spheres of learning. "Discerning" refers to knowing "how to support the people of Egypt from his hand with bread" and "how to accumulate wealth and money for Pharaoh."

In other words, the first category of knowledge pertains to social policy. A government official must understand how to develop programs that will actually accomplish their stated goals (without bankrupting the government in the process). Discerning, in this case, reflects the ability to match goals with the appropriate means of achieving those goals.

Good intentions are not enough; nor are mere pronouncements. A vision of how to relate policy with purpose is the key qualification for any level of leadership.

The second category--"sage"--refers to knowledge of "how to preserve the produce so that it should not rot." According to this standard, the prospective bureaucrat had to know more than just how to govern. He also had to have an expertise in his field--in this case, how to store the grain for seven years without any loss of grain during the intervening years.

Continue reading.

Monday, December 3, 2012

December 8, 2012


Anger Management

The brothers could not speak peacefully with Joseph because they allowed their anger and resentment to control them, rather than asserting their control over their anger.

 
By Rabbi Neal J. Loevinger


Parashat Vayeshev begins the concluding drama of the book of Genesis, the story of Joseph and his 11 brothers, their estrangement and eventual reunion. Joseph is the favored son, and acts like it, so his brothers conspire to throw him in a pit, then sell him into slavery, then tell Jacob that Joseph was attacked by an animal. He ends up in Egypt, as the servant of a powerful man, Potiphar.

Meanwhile, his brother Judah is having problems of his own; his sons die childless, and he refuses to give his daughter-in-law Tamar to his youngest son so he may have children. She dresses like a prostitute, entices Judah to sleep with her, and she is vindicated as having acted correctly in the end, and bears children.

angry fist punching a wall Potiphar's wife desires Joseph, and when he refuses, he is thrown into prison, where he ends up interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh's servants, which will eventually bring him to the attention of Pharaoh himself.
In Focus

"His brothers saw that it was he [Joseph] whom their father loved more than all the brothers, and they hated him, and they could not speak with him peaceably." (Genesis 37:4)
Pshat

A familiar pattern in the Book of Genesis repeats itself in the story of Joseph and his brothers: one son is favored over the others, and there is tension, jealousy, and eventual estrangement within the family. In this case, Joseph brings "bad reports" about the brothers to their father, and they see Jacob giving Joseph special treatment, such as his ketonet passim, [a striped or more likely an ornamented/embroidered] coloured cloak. The brothers are angry, jealous, and resentful, and thus alienated from each other. 

Drash

What struck me about this verse is the Torah's description of the emotional state of the resentful brothers: "they could not [lo yachlu] speak with him peaceably." It's not quite clear what that last phrase means.

Rashi says they didn't speak with him at all, whereas other commentators say that they spoke to Joseph resentfully, or spoke amongst themselves in non-peaceful ways against Joseph. Rashi at least tries to give the other brothers a little bit of credit by pointing out that at least they weren't hypocrites: they didn't pretend to love him while hating him in their hearts, but rather avoided him altogether.

Continue reading.