+[Note that this is an exchange between me and the gentleman who wrote the first two comments. My words are the response, a couple of pages along. - Michoel Reach]
Vayeshev
This week's portion is pretty juicy. It includes two stories full of extraordinarily dysfunctional characters.
In the first story, we have Jacob and his sons. Let me just give you a catalogue of what's wrong with them:
Jacob: Jacob is not your model father. He strongly favors the sons of Rachel -- Benjamin and particularly Joseph, over the others. He doesn't hesitate to rub their nose in it either. A lot of commentaries also talk about Jacob sinning in the depth of how bereaved he is when he thinks Joseph has died. He says he'll never stop grieving.
Joseph: Joseph considers himself above his brothers and even above his parents. He doesn't just have dreams that imply this; he tells the family in a way that earns him a rebuke even from his father. He acts like an idiot. He tells the brothers one dream, and they make it clear they hate him for it, but he doesn't hesitate to tell them another one.
All the brothers: First, of course, they're fratricidal. Then they're cruel: after throwing him in a pit in the desert, with no water in it, they sit down to a meal -- no remorse, no second thoughts. Then they're impetuous
and indecisive: they decide to kill Joseph on the spur of the movement, in the time it takes from recognizing him in the distance, to when he reaches them. Then they change plans twice. Not only do they hate Joseph, but they have no regard for Jacob. They know how he'll react, but only care about how to divert the blame from themselves.
Judah: He's the leader of the brothers, so he's chiefly responsible for the crime. When he decides to sell Joseph instead of let him die of thirst, it's clearly out of greed and fear of the sin; not out of pity.
Reuben: He at least doesn't want to kill Joseph, but he's too weak to stand up to his brothers, so he plots a surreptitious rescue that of course fails.
In the second story, which really centers around Tamar, Judah's bad qualities keep multiplying. He combines terrible judgment with moral weakness. He marries badly, producing two sons who G-d disapproves of and kills. Then he assumes the deaths are Tamar's fault. Then he lies to Tamar, leading her on about a marriage to the third son. Then he lets himself be seduced by Tamar, and stupidly gives her his precious items (the seal, cord, and staff). When he finds out that Tamar is pregnant, he orders that she be burned, without a second thought.
So the question is: what kind of an example are these people for us? Why are their bad deeds and misjudgments highlighted? And why are they the patriarchs that come after the patriarchs, the bridge between the beginnings of the Jewish people and Mt. Sinai?
I want to suggest two answers:
1) They are pre-Mosaic, and therefore operating without the benefits of the law. Their bad judgment and the ease with which they fall to temptation, highlight for us the need for the Torah.
2) Each story ends with redemption. Joseph tests his brothers, and his brothers come through. But the story doesn't read like a cold-hearted process, where he tests them and then accepts them once they pass. He's also overcome with emotion. To borrow from the next parasha, the text reads:
"Yosef could no longer restrain himself in the presence of all who were stationed around him, he called out: Have everyone leave me! So no one stood in attendance upon him when Yosef made himself known to his brothers. He put forth his voice in weeping: the Egyptians heard. Pharaoh's household heard."
In the Tamar story, the redemption isn't quite as dramatic. Still, after Tamar reveals to Yehuda that she's pregnant by him, we read:
"She said: pray recognize whose seal and cords and staff are these? Yehuda recognized them and said: She is in-the-right more than I. For after all, I did not give her to Shela my son!"
It's through these painful, humbling processes that these two leaders earn their right to leadership.
Also, notice that there are a lot of near-death experiences in these stories: the brothers almost kill Joseph, but in the end they refrain. Jacob would die if Benjamin was taken away, but he lives. Judah is ready to put Tamar to death, but he repents. But none of the evil or stupid actions the characters take actually do result in death. The deaths that do occur, Judah's first two sons, are explicitly caused by G-d, not by human action.
As long as the sins and misjudgments aren't fatal, there's an opening, an opportunity for redemption, and in both cases, the lead actors take that opportunity, even though they are humbled by it.
What can we in our role as the budget and finance committee take from these stories? It seems to me that there are two things:
First: we need to be willing to humble ourselves. That means to question our own decisions, to be strong enough to see through the pain of admitting that we're wrong, because otherwise, the fear of that sort of pain can cloud our judgment, and bias us toward justifying past mistakes instead of admitting them and heading in a new direction.
The second, is that we can afford to make mistakes, but we can't afford to make fatal mistakes. In our context, that means being extremely careful about anticipating the possible consequences of decisions, and taking great care that we don't unwittingly make choices for the school that are wrong AND fateful.
Best,
M
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Dear R' CD,
Thank you for forwarding this email to me. I got a lot out of reading it; I don't know that I have ever seen a clearer summary of the issues facing a reader of these parshiyos. Your cousin is obviously a very careful and insightful reader. I appreciate being included. Ya'asher kochacha.
I hope none of you would take it amiss if I would, (more or less) uninvited, inject some of my own thoughts into the discussion.
With all due respect, you are being much too hard on the family. Each of your statements took what might be a personality flaw, and presented it as being a dreadful dysfunction.
Probably you would respond: Well, those were indeed dreadful dysfunctions! These things are not normal stress and strife. How many families do we know where the brothers do these kinds of things to each other? Only ones in jail.
I think that you're omitting one factor, which makes all the difference in understanding them. Think about what it is like to be a member of a royal family. In such a family, as you know, strife over the accession is the rule, not the exception. Very often whoever becomes king kills his own brothers and their families to protect himself. For royal families, this is unfortunately normal; people in the family know that their relative positions are matters of life and death. Even King David's family was not in any way immune.
The narrative of the Torah makes it clear that this particular family had been assigned a unique status. The heads of the family were prophets of G-d, who were promised a special relationship with him and growth into a great nation. They lived their lives with a enormous perception of destiny: They were building the central framework for the future of humanity. A royal family indeed.
Throughout B'reishis this potential destiny warps and twists the people involved, turning brother against brother and against father, from Kain and Hevel through Shem, Cham, and Yefes, and Yitzchak and Yishmael. B'reishis cannot end until it has developed Peretz and Zerach, Efraim and Menashe, who can accept their roles without jealousy. Sh'mos will begin with Moshe and his brother Aharon, who sees his brother's elevation over him with "joy in his heart".
Back to our story: Right before of the brothers' eyes was the example of their uncle Esav. He had been outclassed by their father Yaakov, demoted, and eventually cast off entirely. By now he was no longer part of the family, or the inheritence of G-d.
This is what they saw happening to them as well. Of them all, only Yosef was the "ben z'kunim". Our sages say (among other things) that that meant that he was a reflection of his father. They were sons of Patriarchs, but Yosef was actually worthy to be a Patriarch himself: He alone fathered tribes. He was able to learn his father's wisdom more than the others, and his father recognized it. He received prophetic dreams of his superiority. I don't know that he repeated them in a mean way; it could be he thought that he was supposed to. But they felt themselves deeply threatened, and in grave danger.
There was another source of stress in that family. Completely against his will, through the providence of G-d and the treachery of Lavan ("Lavan tried to destroy my father"), Yaakov had ended up married to two wives, one his soul mate and the other with older sons. The breach this created split and eventually destroyed the first kingdom and will be cured only when Meshiach comes.
G-d put this family under enormous pressure.
I'm not saying they did the right thing! On the contrary, it was exactly the wrong response. A frequent theme in the Torah: Someone tries to control events by doing the wrong thing - they bring about exactly what they feared. We see this with Kain, with the generation of the Dispersion, with Yishmael. And we see it here. By trying to safeguard their position, the brothers came within a hairs-breadth of losing it entirely. They took steps to get themselves expelled from the family in disgrace.
Let me comment on some of the details you discussed (some I've touched on already):
"Jacob ... strongly favors the sons of Rachel ..."
The Torah gives a different reason: "ben zekunim", the child of his old age. He was the baby of the family. Everyone understands what that means. He may have overdone it with the special coat, especially because the brothers had this fearful sensitivity, but I don't think he was "rubbing their noses in it." He tried to get Yosef to quiet down about the dream-prophecies, though he himself took them seriously.
"Sinning in the depth of how bereaved he is": Where did you see this? Interesting, but I'm not sure I see a complaint against him here. Losing a grown son is terrible.
"All the brothers: ... cruel: after throwing him in a pit in the desert, with no water in it, they sit down to a meal -- no remorse, no second thoughts. Then they're ... indecisive..." I guess I had understood these verses differently. They hated him, but they were very torn by what was happening. As they sat there eating, they were consumed by second thoughts. Eventually one of them put them into words, in a way designed to convince the others - What is the profit if we kill him...let us sell him...let our hand not be upon him... Yehudah was beginning to pull himself back out of the pit. Eventually, when they experienced how their father felt, they pulled away completely. Yehudah offered himself as a slave to avoid hurting his father again.
"Reuben...plots a surreptitious rescue that of course fails." Why "of course"? On the contrary, a fascinating dynamic is at play here. Yehudah thinks he's saving his brother's life. Nothing of the sort. "They lifted their eyes and saw, and behold, a caravan of Yishmaelim..." G-d is giving Yehudah a last chance to save himself. Yosef is in no danger; Reuven will save him. The rest of the brothers were in grave danger, though, for they would have been revealed as attempted murderers of their own brother.
[Were this letter not far too long already, I'd describe an idea of mine on how your point here explains the wording Reuven and Yehudah used to try to get their father to send Binyamin with them.]
I would feel very wrong to try and sell you the opposite of what you suggested: that the sons of Yaakov were all saintly and without flaw. Your points were well taken. I think, though, that if you take the harsh edge off your descriptions, you'll see what the Torah is presenting here: an incredible opportunity to watch how saintly individuals developed. Modern books about tzaddikim cannot show this; they are written by students and tend to present the tzaddik as full-grown. "From the time he was five he already knew the gemara by heart. From his youth, he was never known to complain..." The Torah is different. We watch these tzaddikim grow up, under tremendous pressure, failing and rising again, until they reach full growth and reconciliation. Remember, they had as much free will as any human being. If they had made what you beautifully call "fatal errors" they could indeed have ended up like Esav the wicked.
We don't even have to guess at this; the Torah spells it out. Yehudah, as the representative of the other brothers, had at least three chances to destroy himself. One I've mentioned already, at the pit. The second is in the story of Tamar, where (as you mentioned) he had to accept humiliation rather than lose everything that made him great. The third time was with Yosef and Binyamin. Again, he could not know what was involved in his choice. Binyamin was not going to be a slave, but Yehudah would have been the one who abandoned one brother after selling another. Their father Yaakov would have been informed of all this by Yosef, before the brothers could get to him. I don't know what kind of position in the family the brothers could have retained after that. But G-d in his providence and mercy gave the brothers their chance, and they managed to climb out of the pit they had dug for themselves.
At the same time, Hashem arranged that Yosef should get to observe their struggles and their growth. As they changed, so did he. He, too, was pulled back into a loving relationship with the family.
Anyhow, I've gone on very long, and even at that didn't get to many of your points. But there's so much here; this is one of the most exciting stories in the Bible. Only Megillas Esther can match it for machinations behind the scenes and cliff-hanger drama.
Thank you again for your observations, and for letting me join in the discussion.
Best wishes,
Michoel Reach