Joseph IV b

What Is Joseph's Plan and Why?

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Jonathan Sacks: Covenant and Conversation: Genesis: Miketz p 271
The first two of the following studies look at the subtle interplay between human choice and divine intervention, traced more delicately and deeply in the Joseph story than anywhere else in Tanakh. The third explores the themes of particularity and universality in Judaism, as exemplified in the conversation between Pharoah and Joseph. The fourth sets the meeting between Joseph and his brothers in the context of three other narratives of recognition and non-recognition in Genesis. This turns out to be one of Genesis's major themes: appearance and reality in human interaction, the difference between who we seem to be and who we are. These three tensions freewill vs. providence, particular vs. universal, and appearance vs. reality) lie at the heart of Judaism, and they reach their fullest exposition in the story of Joseph.

Abridged version of Rav Yoel Bin Nun's article on Joseph:
Joseph's wonder at his father's silence is joined by a terrible sense of anxiety which grows stronger over the years, as seasons and years pass by and no one comes. Joseph's anguish centers on his father: the voice inside him asking "where is my father?" is joined by another harsh voice: "Why did my father send me to my brothers that day?" He concludes that his brothers must have succeeded in convincing Jacob, and he has been disowned. Years later, when Joseph rides in the viceroy's chariot, when he shaves his beard and stands before Pharaoh, it is clear to him that God must have decreed that his life would be lived separately from his family's. He gives expression to this feeling in the name he gives his eldest son, born of an Egyptian wife:
...he called him Menashe, because God has made me forget (nashani) all my labor and my father's house (41:51).
To forget his father's house!
Joseph's entire world is built on the misconception that his father has renounced him, while Jacob's world is destroyed by the misconception that Joseph is dead. Joseph's world is shaken when his brothers stand before him, not knowing who he is, and bow down to him. At that moment, he must question this new reality -
("he remembers the dreams he dreamt about them")
and is thrown back into the past. Stalling for time, he begins a line of inquiry - and action - which is geared to one end: to find out why his father had rejected him, if at all. He plots to keep Benjamin, so that his maternal brother can tell him all that has transpired. This was Joseph's plan to find out what had happened and how to deal with it.
Judah's response was an attempt to obtain Benjamin's release by appealing for mercy for his aged father. In so doing, he tells Joseph - totally unintentionally - exactly what he wanted so desperately to hear, thereby freeing him and eventually Jacob, from their mutual errors.

Etz Chayim Commentary:
The purpose of Joseph's elaborate ruse is not to torment or embarrass his brothers, but to see whether they indeed had changed. Repentance (t'shuvah) is more than regret. It includes finding oneself in a similar situation and responding differently. Joseph needs to know whether the brothers will leave Simeon and/or Benjamin to languish in prison, as they once abandoned him.

Abarbanel:
Yosef had two reasons for making sure that his brothers didn’t recognize him. First of all, he was aware that it was clearly God's plan that he end up in Egypt, become viceroy, and have the ability to save his family from starvation, so his brothers did not deserve the death penalty for selling him into slavery. They did, however, deserve a punishment for their negative intentions. Even though the anticipated result of their action never came to fruition, the intent remained.
As a result, Yosef formulated a plan to punish them measure for measure: They had accused him of spying on their activities and reporting back to their father, so he accused them of being spies as well. They had originally “imprisoned'” him in a pit
with little hope of escape, so he took Shimon as his prisoner, allowing the others to return to Canaan. They had sold him into slavery, so he took Binyamin as his slave.
The second reason for withholding his identity was to test them to determine if their attitude toward him had changed and they actually regretted what they had done to him. Yosef arrived at the decision to test them after eliminating three other possibilities. The first possibility was to never reveal his true identity and to treat them harshly and take his revenge. However, he felt that because so many people were coming from Canaan to buy food, someone else might recognize him. It would be disgraceful for the brothers to find out who he was from a source other than himself.
Also, how could he not reveal his identity, knowing how his father was suffering from his absence? In any case, how could someone who feared God as he did continue to hurt his brothers?.....
Yosefs plan to test them which began with his accusation of spying is precipitated by his recall of the dreams. Here the Torah emphasizes that the dreams were about tbem. They were not intended for Yosef; rather, they were intended to inform the brothers that they should not hate him. Yes, they would bow down to him and he would rule over them, but not in the
threatening manner that they had imagined. When he saw that one part of the dreams had been fulfilled when they bowed
down to him, he needed to find out if his other brother, Binyamin, and his father were alive so that the possibility would exist for the last part of the dreams to be fulfilled. Then they would finally realize that the dreams were prophetic and there was
no basis for their hatred.

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Talking to Strangers

Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers
It was really the first and that the second only offered the means of uniting suffering and wisdom The words ‘'to see through’’ may seem irreverent in such a connection. But is there an activity more religious than studying the soul-life of God? To meet the politic of the Highest with an earthly one is dispensable if one wants to get on in life If Joseph had been silent like the grave, and as the grave, to his father all these years, it was deliberate policy and understanding insight into the soul-life of the Highest that had enabled him to be so And his name for his first-born was in the same category. “If I am supposed to forget,” the name was meant to say, “then lo, I have forgotten ” But he had not....
With his heart full of laughing and weeping and dismay he looked at them, recognized every single one despite the beards, which some of them m his time had not yet worn But they, looking at him in their turn, had no such thoughts, for their seeing eyes were wrapped in blindness against the possibility that it could be he They had once sold a blood-brother and shameless brat away into the world, out into far horizons and misty distances That they never ceased to know, they knew it now.

Malcom Gladwell: Talking to Strangers p342
Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation. Each of the chapters that follows is devoted to under standing a different aspect of the stranger problem. You will have heard of many of the examples--they are taken from the news. At Stanford University in northern California, a first-year student named Brock Turner meets a
woman at a party, and by the end of the evening he is in police custody. At Pennsylvania State University, the former assistant coach of the school's football team, Jerry Sandusky, is found guilty of pedophilia, and the president of the school and two of his top aides are found to be complicit in his crimes. You will read about a spy who spent years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon, about the man who brought down hedge-fund manager Bernie Madoff, about the false conviction of the American exchange student Amanda Knox, and about the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath. In all of these cases, the parties involved relied on a set of strategies to translate one another's words and intentions. And in each case, something went very wrong. In Talking to Strangers, I want to understand those strategies analyze them, critique them, figure out where they came
from, find out how to fix them.... This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no
choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren't living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they do not know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers: that's part of the thrill of romantic discovery. Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we cant.
What should we do?....
Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative-to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception-is worse. We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention. The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers....
Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Avivah Zornberg: The Beginning of Desire p306
For Joseph is lost-both to his family and to himself. There is a need to recognize that lostness, to gauge the space he has placed between himself and his memories. And so he names his sons for discontinuity and survival. He defines the real dilemma of 'Let us live and not die,' which is the problem of both giving life and preserving life, of growing corn and preserving it against corruption, of forgetting and remembering. And when his brothers appear before him in the Egyptian court, he enacts the einenu which is his family's account of him, as a means of realizing more clearly the contours of his own absence.
'When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them; but he acted like a stranger toward them and spoke harshly to them' (42:7).
Joseph sets himself to act a role of total alienation. Rashi reads va-yitmaker: “He acted to them like a non-Jew, in his way of speaking- - his language was harsh." He tests his actual alienation, his lostness, by taking it almost to a point of caricature. Conscious of the perils of assimilation, of forgetting his native culture, he acts-more, he speaks in a style and tone barbaric to a Jewish ear. His purpose is hinted in the fact that the root of va yitnaker (he acted like a stranger’) is the same as that of va-yakirem (“he recognized them.)
The root-nakar-means “to perceive by making strange”-that is, to know by breaking up the smooth continuities of things and focusing on the singularity of the object. In order finally to be known by his brothers in a way that will heal the rifts of the past, Joseph makes himself strange to the point of uncanniness. His accusations that they are spies constitute bizarre probes of their responses, while his inquisitorial persona is so incomprehensible that his brothers are freed, in a sense, from any attempt to communicate with him.
He is an enigmatic sovereign presence, his true face unseen, set at distance from them by the presence of an interpreter. In this way, he can for the first time, hear them, as they remember their deafness to Joseph's cries from the pit:
They said to one another, “Alas, we are being punished on account of our brother, because we looked on at his anguish, yet would not listen as he pleaded with us. "Then Reuben spoke up and said to them, “Did I not tell you, Do no wrong to the boy'? But you would not listen." They did not know that Joseph understood [lit.,zas listening], for there was an interpreter between him and them.(42:21-23)...
This has not, apparently, been a listening family. In a quasi-therapeutic situation, Joseph understands (this secondary meaning of shama [to hear'] is the primary meaning in this context) and accepts* his brothers appalled memory of their refusal to understand and accept him. Acceptance means allowing the other strange, singular as he is--into one's heart: the brothers speak not of active cruelty-murder, the sale of Joseph--but of a negation, a blankness, where acceptance should have been.....
The nexus between their realities is God, who has choreographed their relationships, their absences and losses, in order to “save life.'' He is the One who “sent
Joseph to Egypt. The word is used three times, to express God's purposeful perception. From the human perspective, Joseph was eineinu, he had ceased to be in the line of sight. From God's perspective, he had been just where he was meant to be, swallowed up, giving and saving life. This is Joseph's therapeutic narrative, full of expressions of relationship, unblinking of the basic facts of the distance between “you'' and “me",) but allowing God to take up the slack of that distance. Out of the brokenness has come a rethinking of the past, a redeeming of the past, a hope for wholeness in the house of Jacob.

Jonathan Sacks: Covenant and Conversation: Genesis: Miketz p 297
Four scenes, four disguises, four failures to see behind the mask. What do they have in common?... It is only by not being recognised that Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph can be recognised, in the sense of attended, taken seriously, heeded...Only when they appear as something or someone other than they are can they achieve what they seek – for Jacob, his father’s blessing; for Leah, a husband; for Tamar, a son; for Joseph, the non-hostile attention of his brothers...Do the disguises work? In the short term, yes; but in the long term, not necessarily....What we achieve in disguise is never the love we sought.
But something else happens. Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph discover that, though they may never win the affection of those from whom they seek it, God is with them; and that, ultimately, is enough. A disguise is an act of hiding – from others, and perhaps from oneself. From God, however, we cannot, nor do we need to, hide....This is a matter of immense consequence when we compare Jewish and (Hellenistic) European thought...The word “person” entered English via the Latin “persona, meaning a mask:” It originally signalled the part played by an actor on the stage, in a culture - Hellenism-in which the theatre played a central part in the portrayal of the human condition. It then became a role played by the individual within society, because of the metaphor of society-as-theatre. It was then generalized to mean any individual within society. But it still bears traces of its theatrical origins (“He was one person at work, another at home”) It therefore becomes deeply problematic in Western philosophy, especially in Existentialism, as to what remains of the self once all the social roles have been subtracted. Biblical Hebrew has no word for “person' precisely because it rejects the metaphors of society-as-theatre and self-as-part-played-upon- the-stage. This is no mere rejection: it goes to the very heart of Genesis's conception of the individual and the human condition. We are not the masks we wear; we are the individuals whose innermost thoughts are known to God. We are what lies behind the mask...
Hence the centrality of these four narratives - of Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph - in Genesis, the book of first principles. It is as if 'appearances” - identities as the masks we wear - stand to genuine relationship as idolatry does to worship of the living God... Just as idolatry involves worshipping an image of God instead of God Himself, so inauthentic human relationships involve mistaking someone's appearance for what they truly are, mistaking the mask for the self. In the aftermath of the disguises of Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph, there is no healing of relationship but there is a mending of identity. That
is what makes them not secular narratives but deeply religious chronicles of psychological growth and maturation. What they tell us is simple and profound: those who stand before God need no mask, no disguise to achieve self-worth when standing before humankind.

Eric I Lowenthal: The Joseph Narrative in Genesis p67
In verse 8 the Hebrew for "recognise" also means "understand/know". If thus V8. means "They had not known him", then these sentences make it possible to understand why, after Joseph heard their voices (cf. v.7d), he, for the first time, understood his brothers' and realized that in the past the brothers did not know him": Joseph recognized that the Ten had resented his precociousness, pertness and egocentricity just as much as the father's favoring him. It dawned on him that their resentment had become hatred when he received the tunic and that their hatred had increased when he told them his first dream. While to him, it meant the confirmation from on high of his father's destining him to become the chieftain, to them it reflected his ruthless ambition to dominate them. While to him their sheaves forming a ring around his sheaf and bowing had previously meant that they would acknowledge him as their chief, he now sees it as meaning that though they would plot against him before, in the end, they would be grateful to their “keeper” and provider. What caused their misinterpretation, he now knows, was their hatred and their projecting on him their overweening pride.

Robert Alter: The Art of Biblical Narrative: chapter 8
The preeminent instance of biblical narrative as a fictional experiment in knowledge is the story of Joseph and his brothers, for in it the central actions turn on the axis of true knowledge versus false, from the seventeen-year-old Joseph’s dreams of grandeur to his climactic confrontation with his brothers in Egypt twenty-two years later. This theme of knowledge is formally enunciated through the paired key words, haker, “recognize,” and yado’a, “know,” that run through the story (the French connaître and savoir may indicate the distinction between the terms better than these English equivalents).
Joseph is, of course, the magisterial knower in this story, but at the outset even he has a lot to learn—painfully, as moral learning often occurs. In his early dreams, he as yet knows not what he knows about his own destiny, and those dreams which will prove prophetic might well seem at first the reflex of a spoiled adolescent’s grandiosity, quite of a piece with his nasty habit of tale-bearing against his brothers and with his insensitivity to their feelings, obviously encouraged by his father’s flagrant indulgence. The heretofore shrewd Jacob on his part is just as blind—and will remain so two decades later—as his old father Isaac was before him. He witlessly provokes the jealousy of the ten sons by his unloved wife Leah and by the concubines; then he allows himself to be duped about the actual fate of Joseph, at least in part because of his excessive love for the boy and because of his rather melodramatic propensity to play the role of sufferer. Finally, the ten brothers are ignorant of Joseph’s real nature and destiny, of the consequences of their own behavior, of the ineluctable feelings of guilt they will suffer because of their crime, and, climactically, of Joseph’s identity when he stands before them as viceroy of Egypt. Events, or rather events aided by Joseph’s manipulation, force them to knowledge and self-knowledge, this arduous transition providing the final resolution of the whole story.....
What is even more prominent as an introductory note is the fact that this segment of the story starts with the brothers inactive, made the object of a rebuke. There is a hiatus of silence between verse 1 and verse 2, between “Jacob said” and his saying again, a silence that tends to confirm Jacob’s charge that his sons are simply standing there staring at one another when urgent action has to be taken...
They are unaware of what the narrator reminds us of, flaunting his omniscience in order to underline their ignorance, that their essential identity is as “Joseph’s brothers” (verse 6), and that it is Joseph who is vizier and dispenser of provisions. Their ignorance here of Joseph’s actual identity is an ironic complement to their earlier failure to recognize his true destiny. The opposition between Joseph’s knowledge (which is also the narrator’s) and the brothers’ ignorance is focused through the insistence of a key word that figured earlier in the story: he recognizes them, they recognize him not; and in a pun characteristic of the bibical use of thematic key words, he makes himself a stranger or seems a stranger to them, vayitnaker, a verb with the same root, nkr, as“recognize,” haker.
Verse 9, in which Joseph remembers his early dreams, is one of those rare moments in the Bible when a narrator chooses not only to give us temporary access to the inward experience of a character but also to report the character’s consciousness of his past. That unusual note is entirely apt here, both because Joseph himself is struck by the way past dreams have turned into present fact and because he will force his brothers into a confrontation with their own past. The two previous episodes of the Joseph story (Genesis 40 and 41) had been devoted to knowledge of the future, Joseph’s interpretations of the dreams of his two fellow prisoners, then of Pharaoh’s two dreams. Chapter 42, by contrast, is devoted to knowledge of the past, which, unlike knowledge of the future, is not a guide to policy but a way of coming to terms with one’s moral history, a way of working toward psychological integration. No causal connection is specified between the fact of Joseph’s remembering his dreams and the accusation of espionage he immediately levels against his brothers, a characteristic biblical reticence that allows for overlapping possibilities of motive. The narrator presumably knows the connection or connections but prefers to leave us guessing. Does the recollection of the dreams, coupled with the sight of the prostrate brothers, trigger a whole train of memories in Joseph, from the brothers’ scornful anger after his report of the dreams to his terror in the pit, not knowing whether the brothers had left him there to die? Does Joseph now feel anger and an impulse to punish his brothers, or is he chiefly triumphant, moved to play the inquisitor in order to act out still further the terms of his dreams, in which the brothers must repeatedly address him self-effacingly as “my lord” and identify themselves as “your servants”? Is he moved chiefly by mistrust, considering his brothers’ past behavior?
Perhaps none of these inferences is absolutely inevitable, but all are distinctly possible, and the narrator’s refusal to supply specific connections between Joseph’s remembering and his speaking conveys a sense of how the present is overdetermined by the past; for in this characteristic biblical perspective no simple linear statement of causation can adequately represent the density and the multiplicity of any person’s motives and emotions. Joseph is not unknowable either to God or to the narrator but he must remain in certain respects opaque because he is a human being and we, the readers of the story, see him with human eyes...
The narrator, as we have noted, began the episode by emphatically and symmetrically stating Joseph’s knowledge and the brothers ignorance. Now, through all this dialogue, he studiously refrains from comment, allowing the dynamics of the relationship between Joseph and his brothers to be revealed solely through their words, and leaving us to wonder in particular about Joseph’s precise motives. Whatever those may be, the alertness to analogy to which biblical narrative should have accustomed us ought to make us see that Joseph perpetrates on the brothers first a reversal, then a repetition, of what they did to him. They once cast him into a pit where he lay uncertain of his fate; now he throws all ten of them into the guardhouse where he lets them stew for three days, then, as they did before, he isolates one brother—“one” of you brothers like the “one” who is said to be no more—and deprives him of his freedom for a period that might prove indefinite. (When Jacob eventually learns of Simeon’s absence, he is quick to make this equation: “Me have you bereaved./Joseph is no more and Simeon is no more.”)

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Moving Away: Drawing Near and the Object of Divination and Individual Strength

Nahum M. Sarna: Understanding Genesis
Benjamin is accused of stealing Josephs Divining object, the sacredness of which makes object makes the crime all the more heinous. Divination by means of pouring liquid into a cup was widely practiced all over the ancient world; it is interesting that it should appear in the Bible specifically in a story in which the setting is pagan and in which the practitioner passes himself as an Egyptian.

Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch: Bereshit
V.5. He is not to mention the object concerned, is to take it for granted that as soon as they see that they have been pursued they must know quite well what it is about.אשר נחש ינחש בו. nachash related to נחץ to go after something with all precipitate haste, נחש with ש to go for the goal without having to overcome the ordinary intermediate steps, to try to achieve your purpose directly without having to overcome the natural intermediate obstacles, either (a) to bring about something leaving out the ordinary links or (b) to recognise something without the natural intermediate links of cause and effect, for instance to get to know the unknown, the future by means other than by conclusion from natural premises, both are ניחוש. Perhaps that is why a snake is called נחש, it glides away from that which lies in the middle, or it goes about by an indirect course. Here, either, 'he uses it for hidden magic arts'', ''and so you ought to have been afraid'', but then as they had it now in their possession, there would be no reason for them to have been afraid on that account, o probably either, ''my lord will use magic powers to find out the whereabouts of the goblet and who had stolen it, or, and this seems the most probable: 'the goblet has a special value to him, it is irreplaceable, for he is superstitious about it, has a ניחוש about it, that apart from its actual loss, he will be unlucky without it. In accordance with that we can understand Joseph saying later to them Did you not know, then, that a man like me is superstitious, has ניחוש Not, of course, that all superstitious people can find a nice example in Joseph, but Joseph was addressing them in his role as an Egyptian lord, an Egyptian magnate, not as a son of the House of Abraham. The higher, the greater a man has become, the more marvellous his fortune has been, the more superstitious he becomes, the more he believes in ניחוש)
- one has only to think of Napoleon - he is surprised at his good luck. The ordinary man does, after all, have quite a lot to thank his fate for, but when we reach the stage of believing that we have not to thank צדקות, our moral worth, for our good fortune, then we easily ascribe it to mysterious supernatural forces (my speculation turned out to be lucky because a black cat crossed my path as I left home IL.) and it is because of the demoralising effect of ניחוש that it is forbidden. For as soon as we believe that we can do something to effect our fate other than by being good, have to be afraid of something else than of doing wrong, we are at once in danger of becoming bad, omitting being good on account of WM), or doing bad trusting to ניחוש?. Then we no longer weigh our actions on the scales of the Torah, cease to do that which we ought to do, because we believe we can do something else to obtain our objects.

Zvi Grumet: Genesis p407
Together with Joseph's new reading of dreams comes a new understanding of self. Just as dreams do not represent unalterable fate, neither do the waking events in our lives. We are not hapless victims of the stars; we can direct our destinies. Joseph can no longer present himself as the victim of other peoples actions. He must own his behavior and take responsibility for how it impacts his life. Once he stands before Pharaoh, he never again refers to himself as a victim. When speaking with his brothers he repeatedly and confidently states that, despite their bad intentions, God was behind all the events, providing an opportunity for him and his family. And from the time he meets Pharaoh, Joseph does not cease to invoke God's name and presence. When Pharaoh says, “I hear about you that you can hear a dream and interpret it, Joseph responds, “Not I! Only God will answer for Pharaoh's well-being” (41:16).
THE EGYPTIAN VICEROY
Joseph stands before Pharaoh wiser than ever - not about dreams but about himself. He has learned to be humble, and in his humility he embraces the role that God plays in his life. Like his father, Joseph discovers himself and finds his own way of incorporating God into his selfhood. His rehabilitation seems complete, and with it he rises in Pharaohs house..

Avivah Zornberg: The Beginning of Desire p342/350
Joseph as master knower, with his eyes in his head to examine and organize the apparent formlessness of the world, uses the vocabulary of investigation. His aim is clarity, evidence: what he sees he will believe. The basis of this experimental approach is the tact that people are not transparent: one cannot master them at a glance, or verify that their words correspond to reality Therefore, Joseph's strategy is to set them to act in ways that will test the credibility of their words. This strategy is conceived as a response to the real problem of emunah, of verification, of knowing when and what to believe (that your words
may be verified"' ve-ye'amnu [42:20). Even Jacob, after all, did not believe his sons, when they told him that Joseph was alive and ruler in Egypt: lo he-emin-he could not grant credence, he could not say amen with his whole being. To “believe, then, is to say "yea", the word amen, if its letters are shuffled, becomes ma'en, to refuse, to say, "Nay" - He refused to be comforted” (37:35). These are the binary positions of human response to language: at some subconscious level, Jacob could not accept his sons story of death and mangling; but after twenty-two years, he could not quite accept their second story of resurrection....
Confronted with Judah, and with Judah's anger at being the object of knowledge, Joseph is compelled to let the whole therapeutic project collapse: “he could no longer control himself?" - armor himself against the force of his brother's words, his self-creation. Joseph can no longer hold his stance of intellectual immunity. The habit of “control, of a self-contained, observatory power, that had informed all his actions till now, shrivels in the heat of a different way of seeing. A rigidity dissolves as he reveals, uncovers, a Joseph never before seen. He speaks many words, achieving the purpose-not of know
edge--but of giving his brothers and his father a narrative- questionable, not entirely credible-a re-description of the meaning of their lives. His radical desire at this point is to have them able to speak to him-
Only then were his brothers able to talk to him? (45:15)-to overcome the paralysis, the dangerous shame of those who know themselves observed.....
Between Joseph and Judah remains, then, an unbridgeable space. For an instant, Judah overwhelmed Joseph with his tull, generous use of language to redescribe himself, with his personal, imaginative vision and re-vision of his reality. But the union of the two modalities-the Joseph quest for a final vocabulary,’ for metaphysical certainty in the relations between human beings and reality, and the Judah ironist' sense of the contingency of all vocabularies, a sense that only increases his responsibility to create a personal vocabulary- is a "union of approachings" of vayigash, in appeasement, prayer, and belligerency Like the two trees that are brought close to one another, in Ezekiel's prophecy (37.15-20) -the tree of Joseph and the tree of Judah and they will become one only in some ultimate, messianic time, and in the hand of God. In this world, the tension between the two remains, a source sometimes of frustration, sometimes of fruitful confrontation