Miketz: Remembering Ourselves, Reaching Out to Others

At the end of this week’s Torah portion, Miketz, Joseph is second in command over all of Egypt.  As such, he is extraordinarily wealthy and powerful, with access to nearly unlimited resources.  So why doesn’t he take the opportunity to reach out to his aged father Jacob, to let him know he is alive?  The commentator Nachmanides notes that dwelling in Hebron, Jacob is only a six days journey away.  Surely Joseph could at least have written him a reassuring letter!

Rabbi Yael Shy offers a psychologically-astute response to this question that speaks to the challenges of our own time.  She writes: 

Joseph's behavior is directly in line with most trauma victims, who repress large swaths of memory in order to numb the raw, un-integrated, and overwhelming traumatic experiences from their past. Joseph is doing his best to dissociate, consciously and unconsciously, in order to move forward with his life. He is building a new life, complete with new job, wife and children. His trauma, however, is still locked within him, untouched and unprocessed.

For Joseph to heal, for him to be able to forgive his brothers, he must first remember who he is. By the time Joseph's brothers appear before him in Egypt, Joseph has reconciled himself with himself. He has opened the door of his heart to the totality of his painful past, placing his trauma in a much larger framework. He tells his brothers: “I am Yosef your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. But now, do not be pained, and do not let upset be in your eyes that you sold me here! For it was to save life that God sent me on before you...So-now, it was not you that sent me here, but God.” Joseph sees his journey - every shameful and painful part of it, as part of his path and God's unfolding.

Conversation Questions:

Are there parts of your identity and experiences from your past that you are actively trying to forget or erase?  How and when might you be ready to approach those difficult places with self-compassion and forgiveness?

Vayeshev: A Time to Speak and a Time to be Silent

When we first meet Joseph, in the beginning of this week’s Torah portion Vayishlach, he is a gifted and arrogant seventeen-year-old.  We see his brilliance in his capacity to envision the future by interpreting his dreams.  His egotism is evident in the way he speaks to his older brothers.

We read: “Once Joseph had a dream, which he told to his brothers. . . He said to them, ‘Hear this dream that I have dreamed.  There we were, binding sheaves in the field, when suddenly my sheaf stood up and remained upright.  Then your sheaves gathered around and bowed low to my sheaf.’” 

It doesn’t take a trained analyst to grasp the intention here; the text continues: “His brothers answered, ‘Do you mean to reign over us?  Do you mean to rule over all of us?’  And they hated him even more for his talk about his dreams.”

Joseph’s dream isn’t wrong; it is, indeed, predictive of events that will unfold over the following chapters, in which he eventually becomes Pharaoh’s right-hand man and his brothers unwittingly find themselves begging him for food.  The problem isn’t the vision—it’s Joseph’s youthful insufferable insistence on sharing it.  As the Italian commentator Sforno notes, “Not only did he tell them his dream in passing; instead, he insisted on their hearing it, which could not fail to intensify their animosity.”

In other words, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak.

The challenge, of course, is to recognize which is the proper course in any given moment.  Eventually, Joseph will learn to be more circumspect when needed, and his brothers will also grow in their ability to speak with respect.  That is the work of a lifetime.

Conversation Question:

Reflect on times when you mistakenly chose to speak rather than to listen.  What role did your ego play in your insistence on sharing what you might have better kept to yourself?  How do you better distinguish between times for speech and silence?

Vayishlach: Heels and Godwrestlers

In Torah, a change of name usually indicates an irreversible change of fate. Avram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of the Jewish people.  Hoshea ben Nun becomes Joshua, who will deliver us into the Promised Land.  Upon his rise to power, Joseph assumes the Egyptian name of Zaphenat-Paneah, by which he will always be known to the Pharaoh who makes him his right-hand man.  

In this week’s portion, Vayishlach, Jacob follows in this line.  After he prevails in a night-long struggle with a divine being, he is blessed with the new name Israel—the “Godwrestler.”  The patriarch whose original moniker means “heel” or “supplanter” becomes the rightful heir of the covenant and assumes his place as a mighty spiritual forefather.

Except. . . just a few lines after he becomes Israel, Torah again refers to him as Jacob—and continues to do so for the rest of his life. 

Unlike Abraham and Sarah, who change their identity and never look back, Jacob/Israel vacillates between his two selves until his dying day.  He is both the man transformed into a heroic Godwrestler and the unreconstructed Heel/Deceiver, a deeply human mix of hope and failure, sacred and profane.

As such, Jacob is us.   Our Jewish tradition affirms the possibility of teshuvah—of real change—but also recognizes this sort of conversion is incremental and imperfect.  We take two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes we embody Israel, fulfilling our higher destiny.  And sometimes, even many years after undertaking personal transformation, we lapse back into Jacob, the old self that we had hoped to leave behind.

So we bear our two names—bayt Ya’akov, the house of Jacob, and b’nai Yisrael, the children of Israel.  We are earthly connivers and wrestlers with the divine, fallen and angelic, striving for holiness and sometimes settling for a great deal less. In other words, we are humans, doing our best to grow.

Conversation Question:

Who is your inner “Jacob” that you seek to grow beyond?  The “Israel” that you hope to become?  And how do you navigate between those two senses of self, between the vision toward which you aspire and the current human reality?

Vayetze: To Know the Dark

For this year’s E-Torah cycle, we will approach the weekly portion as a springboard for a learning conversation.  Each week will offer a brief commentary, followed by a prompt for discussion, which you can do with a family member or a friend—or on your own as a sort of internal dialogue/reflection.

Unto God let praise be brought
For the wonders God has wrought

At the solemn hour of midnight. . . 
-Yannai

Toward the end of the Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah, we find a medieval liturgical poem entitled B’Chatzi Ha-lailah—And It Came to Pass at Midnight.  In it, the poet, Yannai, recounts an array of miracles and redemptive acts that occurred in the middle of the night, including the exodus from Egypt, which is a harbinger of ultimate liberation for all of humankind.  The message is clear: hope is often born of adversity, under the cloak of darkness.

This is certainly true in the life of the patriarch Jacob, who stands at the center of this week’s Torah portion, Vayetze.  Almost all of the defining events of his life take place under the veil of darkness.  He uses his father Isaac’s blindness to secure the blessing intended for his twin brother Esau, then encounters the Holy One on two fateful nights, first in his dream of a ladder connecting heaven and earth, and later in a nocturnal wrestling match that earns him the new name of Israel—One who struggles with God.  In order to fulfill his destiny, Jacob must embrace the darkness as the vehicle for his transformation.

We tend to associate the dark with danger, fear, and suffering.  Yet our portion reminds us that darkness is also the space where new life and unexpected possibilities most often incubate.  As we settle into the coming winter, with its grey days and long nights, it is good to remember the promise of Jacob’s path, which the contemporary poet Wendell Barry eloquently describes in his poem, “To Know the Dark”:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

Conversation Question:

What paths of growth might you anticipate in entering, or dwelling in, the darkness?