Shabbat Table Talk

Parashat Vayigash

Erev Shabbat, 17 December, 2004
Week of 12 to 18 December
Torah portion: Gen. 44.18-47.27
Haftarah: Ezek. 37.15-28
Sunday Readings, 19 December: Isa. 7.10-16; Ps. 80; Rom. 1.1-7; Mt. 1.18-25

In this week’s parashah, the drama of Jacob/Israel’s family reaches a dizzying climax. In chapter 37, the storyteller introduced us to a 17-year-old Joseph, whose name has a double meaning: ‘God has removed’ or conversely, ‘God has added.’ He outlines reasons why Joseph’s brothers hate him: he was a tattletale; he was clearly his father’s favorite; and he unabashedly recounted dreams where he played the lead role and they, the supporting cast.

As the saga progresses, Joseph’s father sends him to Shechem to report on his brothers, who are there tending sheep. Not finding them, he encounters a stranger who asks him what he is looking for. When Joseph responds with ‘my brothers’, and asks about them, the stranger (messenger/ angel), points him in a direction that leads him to the pit of despair and a calculated reversal of everything that had given him identity. In the pit, he learns the true character of his brothers. While they plot his murder, Joseph becomes ‘God has removed.’ Sold as a slave and sent into captivity, his life is spared, but he is not spared an insight into the cruelty of his brothers’ hearts.

But appearances can be deceiving, and as events unfold we witness how Joseph’s descent evolved into an ascent, and how the set is readied for the scenario his prophetic, teenaged dreams had foretold. His God-given ability to interpret dreams catapults him from prison to Pharaoh’s court and his graces. Pharaoh aptly renames him Zaphaneath-Paneah: ‘God speaks and He lives (41.45)’.

Joseph marries a priest’s daughter and has two sons, Manasseh (‘He who made me forget all my hardships, all my father’s house’), and Ephraim (‘God make me bear fruit in the land of affliction’). His sons’ names would lead one to conclude that Joseph has selective memory. He affirms his God, but not his past, homeland, or family. In other words, while God remains a constant in his life, he does not experience him as ‘God who has added’ (41.51, 52).

However, the stranger’s question from long ago—‘what are you looking for’—was not about to go away, and would prove to become more than a search for his brothers. In the plot development that leads to their reconciliation, Joseph not only finds brothers, he, and they, also find themselves. Joseph has an epiphany and realizes their lives have been little more than an act within a cosmic play: the divine drama of God’s saving purpose for the world.

The parashah opens with his brother Judah—whose name means: ‘giving thanks’—approaching Joseph, the man they believe to be Zaphaneath-Paneah. As spokesperson, Judah’s stated mission was to obtain the release of his brother Benjamin, detained on the trumped up charge of stealing Joseph’s cup. But there is a subtext: Judah has interpreted the nightmarish events in Egypt as nemesis, as divine retribution for the brothers’ crime against Joseph. Judah’s impassioned soliloquy is imbued with pathos. There seems little to be thankful for. The repetition of naming, and rehearsing the lines of the key players, (‘my father’, ‘my lord’ and ‘your servant’) underlines the single-mindedness of Judah’s request.

Alter characterizes Judah’s remarkable speech as a systematic undoing, morally and psychologically, of the brothers’ earlier violations of fraternal and filial bonds. It is a speech calculated to win Joseph over and to ease the burden of guilt Judah has lived with for 22 years. What Judah could never have counted on was the depth of the response it would evoke in the man in whose presence he stood. What Joseph heard was not simply a reiteration of the past, but for the first time he hears the tale his brothers had spun to cover-up their crime. He hears how his father had never stopped suffering, and how he lamented that he would go down to Sheol in mourning if his youngest son did not return.

Earlier, the story teller had recounted events that hold clues explaining Judah’s change of character. Pain and humiliation experienced in his immediate family circle had undoubtedly softened him and enabled him to feel compassion for his aging father. He too had suffered the loss of sons. He too had been the object of deception and (justly) shamed. He too knew what it was like to have children and not claim their mother (38).

Judah had been reconciled to the fact that Jacob, his father, considered Rachel to be his only wife, with no thought of his own mother, Leah. He accepted that Benjamin was now Jacob’s favorite son. His own life had prepared him to give up the hatred that had informed his treatment of Joseph and to exercise compassion. Judah has come to a point of acceptance that love can be unpredictable, arbitrary, and seemingly unjust. In many ways, Jacob’s passion story was also his.

Twenty-two years earlier, Judah had been instrumental in selling Joseph as a slave; now he was ready to become a slave himself. For 22 years he had stood by silently, knowing that the bloodied robe they had given Jacob had been the prop for a fictionalized account of their crime. The cost of hatred had been high. Jacob’s grief could not be assuaged, and Judah and his co-conspirators were weighed down by the burden of guilt and fear of divine retribution. Up to this point, Judah had been too emotionally paralyzed to confess the truth; now he would do anything to see that his father not suffer again or to be further burdened. He needed to become the man who could ‘give thanks’.

As Joseph listens to the outpouring of Judah’s heart, he also hears the deep regret and pain. Judah was not only exercising compassion: his proposal was morally and emotionally cathartic. He had found the means to free himself and thereby find himself. It struck a deep chord in Joseph and the stage is set for reconciliation. Joseph who had thought of himself as ‘God has removed’ and had lived with a changed name, reveals himself and reclaims his name. ‘I am Joseph’, he declares. As Joseph discloses himself for who he really is, he also makes God known for who He is, has been and will be. He is Joseph to whom ‘God has added’. He has not only found himself and the family he mentioned to the stranger; he has also had the remarkable experience and realisation of divine sovereignty: of being God’s son.

The story of Joseph that began with Jacob concludes with the son sending for his father. The father arrives with God’s blessing, and as they reunite, Jacob’s lament of Sheol turns into a Nunc Dimittis (46.30). Joseph and his family are blessed, while between the lines we sense that this is not the end, but the beginning of a new act in salvation history (46.3,4).

Reflection: [1] The Lectionary Gospel reading discusses another Joseph, son of Jacob, of the lineage of Judah. Reflect on the appropriateness of his name, and motifs in his story that are also found in this week’s parashah. [2] Our names do not have the weight and significance of Biblical names, but reflect on why you were given the name you were: Have you ever been called by a different name? Why? To what extent has your name(s) shaped who you are?

Bibliography: Alter: Art of the Biblical Narrative (New York, 1981); Fox: The Five Books of Moses (New York, 1995); Plaut: The Torah, A Modern Commentary (New York, 1981).

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This week’s teaching commentary was prepared by Rev. Renate Koke M.Div., Ph.D., Toronto, Canada; Bat Kol alumna, 2003.