Joseph V

Guilt, Shame and Regret and what’s between them

Prof Efraim Meir: Dialogical Thought and Identity p148
The reader is already acquainted with my opposition to the idea of the self as merely a package of needs. The higher, real self is not the trivial, isolated and self-oriented self, it is the self that is oriented to the other and realized in “self transcendence."....
The real I is not the knowing, describing and mastering I. It is rather the answering and relational I, affirming the other, not in order to strengthen the self, but for the other's sake, in order to recognize him and to be present for him....
The real I is awakened by the call of the other, It is the I that actively turns from a banal, selfish life to a being exposed to the other. The hideouts of the I are multiple, but only by facing the other and answering his call, by doing the good, "for its own sake", by being present for the other, does one find one's authentic truth.

Brene Brown: Daring greatly
Based on my research and the research of other shame researchers, I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful – it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.
I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.
I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behaviour than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.

Avivah Zornberg: The Beginning of Desire p333
Or Ha-chayyim offers a simple, but totally convincing answer: Joseph is paralyzed by the prospect of his brothers' shame, if he reveals himself to his father. This is a genetic sensitivity: his mother, Rachel, according to a classic midrash, had been so horrified at the idea that her sister, Leah, masquerading as Rachel, would be shamed on her wedding night, that she gave her the secret signs that Jacob had given her, to prevent just such
a deception (Rashi, 29:25) To prevent his brothers' shame, Joseph has, like his mother, kept silent, while his heart yearned to express itself. When his brothers actually appear before him for the first time, passivity and silence are neither possible nor necessary. From this point on, Joseph engages in an active project of discovery, the aim of which is to produce evidence that will allow his brothers to endure his “'resurrection'' without shame.
For while shame, in classical theological thought, is often considered s forerunner to a positive rearticulation of one's life it is also a volatile potentially dangerous response. The lowering of the brothers morale threatens to have self-fulfilling effects; it may drive them to silence -even to murder the source of their shame, It is for this reason that Joseph, seeing that his first attempt at self-description is generating just that response that he had most feared, engages in a much fuller, more elaborate attempt to create himself, to discover a vocabulary at his brothers will be able to appropriate for themselves in their future narratives of their history....
But he defuses some of the tension of this memory by describing himself -in spite of everything-as 'your brother'. He then tells them: "Now, do not be distressed or reproach youselves because you sold me hither." He lets them know that he understands
their ambivalent response to his reappearance...,
Joseph's strategy is essentially to reveal to his brothers a Joseph empathic with their inner conflicts. The main thrust of his speech serve to show them his loving interpretation of his own history: the sale was for the sake of life, his cruel experience was, in fact, a mission to save his family from starvation in the famine years. God’s plot is the only level.
the narrative that matters to him, he tells them. And ultimately, the purpose of his speech is to provide them with a narrative to tell their father, to defuse the shame of their situation. The core of his speech is: "Now, hurry back to my father and say to him: Thus says your son Joseph...*(45.9)a message to his father that will proclaim Joseph's
personal credo, his vocabulary of self-creation. This is the central point: Joseph's speech of reassurance is full of references to God--unlike Judah's speech. It seems replete with theological propositions. But in fact Joseph is not making sententious, theoretical statements; he is talking about his personal perspective on his own life, and he is doing so in order to provide his brothers with the only stratagem that will help them to scotch their own shame. He gives them a story to tell their father, to ground the electric furies of their own humiliation. Formally, his message to his father includes only assurances of economic security in Egypt. Implicitly, however, Joseph's whole speech is intended to convey to Jacob-as well as to his sons-that Joseph has discovered a vocabulary in which to articulate his life. There is no hatred in his heart: this is the implicit message of his
speech, according to Rashi (45:12). His status and wealth are the direct result of their guilty act. This is not merely a fact; it forms the basis of Joseph's most personal life litany....
Joseph succeeds in allaying the anguish of the moment: only then
were his brothers able to talk to him”' (45:15). But the shame and fear
never disappear entirely. At the very end of the narrative, after Jacob's death they surface again, as Joseph's brothers appeal to him for their lives, in such terms as to reduce him, yet again, to tears. A residue of that shame poisons their relationship to the end,

SHMUEL KLITSNER WRESTLING JACOB: DECEPTION, IDENTTTY, AND FREUDIAN SLIPS IN GENESIS
But how are the fragile but heroic biblical characters - with their fractured sense of wholeness - to balance the demands of self-mastery with their awareness of their role in the drama of a transcendent sovereign?
The recognition that divine plan and human moral accountability Proceed along independent routes - that paradoxically merge only when each path maintains its integrity and coherence - comes late in the book of Genesis. In the Joseph stories, that echo the Jacob narratives of jealousy, inability to communicate, and near-fratricide, the brothers act cruelly and deceitfully in trying to frustrate Joseph's dreams. When the brothers finally appear in Joseph's court, the latter, in turn, deals cruelly and deceitfully with them in what would seem to be an attempt to fulfil his dreams (of the brothers bowing down to him). At the initial reconciliation of the brothers, Joseph tries to whitewash the sordid events of the past by attributing everything to divine providence: I am Joseph your brother whom you sold into Egypt. Now do not be grieved, nor angry with yourselves...for God did send me here before you to preserve life.... It was not you who sent me here, but God....(Gen. 45:5-8) Ultimately, the whitewash is proven ineffective and the reconciliation revealed as hollow, as relationships like individual identities, cannot evolve on the basis of evasions, repressions, or revisions of the past. There must be self-recognition and painful encounter with the other and with one's own accountability. Thus, when Jacob dies, the brothers once again fear the powerful Joseph’s retribution (Gen. 50:15). This time Joseph understands that reconciliation requires a more credible recognition of the past. It seems he has also arrived at a more sophisticated teleological conception, in which flawed and misguided human endeavors interact with divine providence but often do not reflect it. In the closing verses of Genesis, Joseph speaks again to his fearful brothers, saying “Fear not, for am I in place of God? But as for
you, you thought evil against me, but God meant it for good... (Gen. 50:19-20). (One cannot but hear in these words an echo of the earlier exclamation of Joseph's father - Jacob (Genesis 30:2). In fact, these are the only two verses in the entire
Hebrew Bible where this phrase appears. Jacob had used nearly identical language to respond to Rachel's demand for children: “Am I in place of God who withheld children from you? Yet, one gets the sense that in Jacob's impulsive response to
Rachel, these words express the shepherd's frustration with his own powerlessness. However, the powerful viceroy Joseph, apparently in control of his own destiny and that of countless others, is now using the same words to express his own mature
humility - a belated but profound recognition regarding the limits of human manipulation in the context of cosmic divine planning.) This mode of rapprochement bears the potential for success; it is enabling......
Both in terms of Joseph's own behavior ('am I in place of God?) and in terms of his brothers' culpability (you thought evil?), Joseph has no longer justified human malevolence or treachery on the basis of its fortuitous coincidence with the divine plan. Yet, at the same time, he understands the human predicament as intimately and mysteriously connected to God’'s providential direction. The two, human history and the divine plan, will meet, but it will not be man's task to determine or anticipate in which way or at what moment. The only path out of the thicket will be blazed by our pursuit of the autonomous realization of the divine image within us. The biblical view has staked much on its belief in human autonomy and on the concept of covenantal destiny. Yet it does not do so from the perspective of an underestimation of the difficult, complex and heroic nature of the duality of the challenge. Because our repressions, resistances, and our carefully constructed false identities are so deeply and inextricably connected to our being who we are, it will require courage and tenacity to listen attentively to our souls, to build a bridge between voice and action - ladder between one's internal heaven and earth.

Ze'ev Maghen: John Lennon and the Jews: A Philosophical Rampage p 289 293
Unlike Truths, which are designed to remain fundamentally static - and have often managed to do just that over history, functioning as so many eternally immovable rocks upon which endless churches have been built - unlike such immutable ideologies and crystallized doctrines, a people is by nature a dynamic phenomenon, a living organism that constantly grows and evolves. A living nation - just like a living person - is an ongoing “work in progress, is an entity expanded and deepened by the endless accrual of its collective experiences, is a bringing to bear on a fleeting present of an ever-lengthening and increasingly multifaceted past. A people is unavoidably and quintessentially the cumulative product of everything it has ever been through.
And we Jews, dear reader - do you know what we have been through? Do you know where we have been, what we have seen, how we have dreamed, and felt, and built? The things we've known and loves we've lost and hopes we've carried in our breasts? How we have tried, and died, and striven, how we have fallen and arisen, how much we felt and fought and wrestled, how much we suffered - and created? Do you know all this? Not just in your head, as history - that's easy! - but in your heart? Does your heart remember and comprehend these things? Does it feel them? Does it internalize, identify, react, ignite...explode?
The poignancy and power of all that we have been through - as a nation unique among the nations of the world, as a people whose temporal reach is almost as long as history itself - means that we cannot but burn brightly and fiercely. It means that we are a passionate people. It means that our motivations, when they are genuinely Jewish, emanate far more from our warm and throbbing hearts than from our cold and calculating cerebrums. Sure, Jews may be smart - but they simply must be irrational Aware of it or not, committed members of our tribe live lives animated first and foremost...by romance. But being Jewish not only entails being irrational - it is also specifically and designedly about being irrational, or better yet: it is about designating the
rational as draft-horse, and the irrational as droshky driver, the rational as vizier, the irrational as Sultan. You may remember that way back at the beginning we attempted to demonstrate that the rabbis of the Talmud used rationality merely as a tool through which to achieve objectives that were - in the majority of cases-- highly irrational. We made much fun of the rabbis on that score, yes we did, and meanwhile all the time it was they who had the ratio right, they who were tuned in and turned on to what makes all of us truly human: rationality in the service of irrationality. Rabbinic methodology, in the end, is none other than the very methodology of life itself.
(And this, by the way, reminds us of the single greatest offense committed by scholastic apologia, the one we let slide back in our polemical tirade of chapter three. We Jews, you see, were once-upon-a-time plugged in and logged on to The Power - not exclusively, mind you, but we certainly had some major band-width - we were hooked up to the juice that makes everything go, we were nourished by the very gravity that counteracts inertia, that reanimates dead logic and makes life wonderful and miraculous: the propelling force of the immeasurable, the unpredictable, the nonsensical and the romantic, the proper proportion and hierarchy between intellect and emotion. We possessed that priceless treasure, oh yes we did, and praise the Lord still possess it, but no thanks to the purportedly pious apologists, who strove and still strive so relentlessly to take it from us, by cutting our cords to the irrational. The beating Jewish heart will always vanquish them....
The schoolmen taught: Strive to be perfect, as the Lord your God is perfect. Before classical rationalism showed up and corrupted it, however, the Jewish outlook could be read as essentially the opposite of this: strive to be imperfect, as the Lord your God is imperfect.

A.J. Heschel: Between God and Man p158
But how do we know what the right deeds are? Is the knowledge of right and wrong derived from reason and conscience alone? There are those who are ready to discard the Divine commands and call upon us to rely on our conscience…those who call upon us to rely on our inner voice fail to realise that there is more than one voice within us, that the power of selfishness may easily subdue the pangs of conscience….the conscience is not a legislative power, capable of teaching us what we ought to do but rather a preventative agency; a brake, not a guide; a fence not a way. It raises its voice after a wrong deed has been committed, but often fails to give us direction in advance of our actions. Judaism calls upon us to listen not only to the voice of the conscience but also to the norms of a heteronomous law…..There is a sure way of missing the meaning of the law by either atomization or generalization, by seeing the parts without the whole or by seeing the whole without the parts. It is impossible to understand the significance of single acts, detached from the total character of the life in which they are set…some people are so occupied collecting shreds and patches of the law, that they hardly think of weaving the pattern of the whole; others are so enchanted by the glamor of generalities, by the image of ideas, right while their eyes flare up, their actions remain below. What we must try to avoid is not only the failure to observe a single mitzvah, buy the loss of the whole….the order of Jewish living is meant to be, not a set of rituals but an order of all man’s existence, shaping all his traits, interests and dispositions.

Rav Shmishon Raphael Hirsch: Bereshit 49 1-2
האספו and הקבצו have by no means the same meaning. This is evident already from the fact that now can be said even of a single, individual, e.g. עד האסף מרים (Numb. XII.15). אסף means, to bring someאhing from the place or sphere where it does not really belong, to where it does belong There is always some idea of its relationship to aעזב , a breaking away from everything else that is improper. Hence here האספו, break away from everything to which you really do not belong, and find
yourselves all united in the one common purpose. Be all taken up with that which is common to you all! Place yourselves all on one common footing! So that האספו demands the spiritual gathering together on the single point, for one single purpose...
קבץ on the other hand...always refers to the external gathering together of people, not uniting in mind but in space.
So we have here two pronouncements: All of you together give yourselves up to your one purpose in life for I would picture to you what will happen to you at the end of time....
We know from what follows that Jacob was not having in mind the uniformity of his sons, but was thinking of them in their characteristic diversity. Hence: "'different though you all are, if you will all give yourselves up entirely to the one spirit, I will reveal to you what the end of time will be for you'. First one spirit must pervade all the sons of the
Family of Jacob before the אחרית הימים will come. It will not come before the האספו has become a reality Yea - perhaps - it will not even be conceived, understood, until then, and that is why only just short hinting references to the אחרית הימים follow.

Denis. S. Shulman: The Genius of Genesis p150, 157
Sigmund Freud, who understood insight as the goal of psychoanalysis, also, like Genesis, argued that an individual's capacity to change is a function of his or her self-awareness. For Freud and the contemporary psychoanalyst, therefore, the major technique that helps the patient increase insight, and thereby change, is the interpretation. For Freud and his students, the interpretation alters the balance of the psychic forces of the patient, releasing the patient from ties to instinctual fixations and undoing repression....However, as we have seen from the description of the various transformational narratives in Genesis, additional specified factors, crucial for change, are recognized by the biblical..... Joseph, in pit and dungeon, not only scrutinizes his own narcissism and family history of
sibling envy and retaliation, but also, when enticed to exact revenge on those brothers who had wronged him, transcends the impulse and the past. Joseph forgives his brothers and promises to protect their families. Judah, not only discerns with horror what he did to his brother Joseph, but also takes whatever steps are necessary so that the scenario is not repeated with Benjamin. By doing so, Judah makes a symbolic restitution to his father, so grievously wounded and betrayed by Judah and the brothers.
As we have seen, the Genesis “theory of personality change” always involves steps in addition to insight. Within this perspective, for change to occur, self-awareness is necessary, but not sufficient. Whereas Freud and his students generally understood insight as an end in itself, the Genesis “psychologist, in his characterization of the principle transformational heroes of his text, recognized insight as the essential condition so that right action cam be taken. For the biblical, it is both self awareness plus action that makes for lasting psycho-spiritual change.....
The individual in the biblical text is critically important, but he or she is not the goal of
the text. In Genesis and the other books of the Bible, the individual always reposes within the intricately-woven nest of community, family heritage and the Divine. In the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and Koran, each individual is an instrument of God's plan or purpose, or an obstacle to it.... In Genesis, each character's life has purpose because it is lived out within a sweeping multigenerational Landscape involving heaven and earth.....
In the Genesis account of Joseph's life, soul and psyche, we discover a second
answer to the biblical understanding of human purpose. As we saw in Chapter Five, Jacob, Joseph's father, is a hero who, from his birth and for forty years afterwards, is ruled by his impulse to triumph over his brother. The text depicts Jacob as ruthless in his drive to gain the birthright and blessing that belong to Esau. Others' vulnerabilities, his brother's impulsivity, his father Isaac's blindness, are merely Jacob's props in his morally reprehensible schemes. As Jacob flees his brother's homicidal rage and the parents that were incapable of controlling him at his worst, Jacob is a hero who requires a radical character “make-over." Jacob has this psycho-spiritual transformation over the next two decades. It culminates with the wrestling match which results in Jacob's name change to
Israel. However, as we saw in some detail in the previous chapter, Jacob's transformation is neither complete nor consistent....
For the Genesis “author", just as there is no individual who is alone, there is no individual who can ignore his responsibility to the community and future. Jacob's obligation was to struggle with himself so that he could, at least partially, achieve Israel; so that Joseph could save his brothers. Joseph needed to find his way to humility and forgiveness in pit and dungeon; so that the descendents of these people of Genesis could ultimately find their way to Sinai and the Promised Land.

Unlike the psychoanalytic perspective, the biblical asserts that each of us has a meaningful role to play in he present and the future. According to Genesis, the survival and integrity of his world depend on each of us and how we act. The genius of Genesis is its depiction through multi-layered narratives of a clarion of philosophy of human purpose. Most simply put: Genesis teaches us that each of our lives, in this brief time we have, should demonstrate gratitude toward all things present, and responsibility toward all things future...
From this survey of the psychological genius of the Book of Genesis, we have
discovered that each of us is the first man and woman, dazzling and resplendent, formed in our God's image; and each of us is Adam and Eve, fragile, frightened and forever barred from the Garden. Each of us is Abraham, all too ready to sacrifice our ethical principles and life purpose; and each of us is Abraham, needing to invent monotheism time and again and, in the process, elevating human life to the sacred. Each of us is Jacob, eagerly deceiving others and ourselves; and each of us is Jacob, when forced to confront ourselves, who struggles with angels and demons, and sometimes emerges transformed, but limping. It is this voice of Genesis, still miraculously audible over the chasm of the forty centuries, that speaks to each one of us today through the narrative contours of our lives.