No-one’s too Great to be Wrong: The Central Message of the Joseph Saga
Taking the following approach leads to an intriguing perspective and vital message:
The leaders of the Ten Tribes were great men. Can it be that one said one to the other: “Let’s kill our brother because our father loves him the most”. Really! Even the most base of people would never say such things. What they might say is “let’s kill our brother because he’s a traitor to the cause” or “We’d better kill him before he kills us” or some such thing. That’s more believable. But because of a nice coat, or a few arrogant dreams? For ten grown men to connive together and agree on such action without fear that one of them would reveal the plan to their father? It’s barely credible.
I believe instead that the brothers were convinced of the justice of their actions, however in the Torah God REVEALS to us the inner depths of their true motivations, that they acted out of jealousy and hatred, NOT that this was their conscious openly-stated reason for killing Joseph.
The uniqueness of the Torah is that it is written from the perspective of God. Even those of our motives of which we are unaware are apparent to God, and when a story is recounted in the Torah it is from the perspective of the One who knows what we are truly thinking and feeling.
The brothers would have totally dismissed the notion that they were acting from any but the purest motivations, and perhaps had I been there I would have been convinced of the need to expel Joseph as Yishmael and Esav had been cut off.
However the message that the Torah is giving us here is that even grown men, leaders, sophisticated people, idealists acting seemingly from the purest of motives, can be actually motivated deep down by jealousy and hate. No one is too great to be above scrutiny, especially not self-scrutiny. And when human lives are involved, we must dig deep to expose any possible ulterior motives.