Vayeishev

Genesis. 37:1 - 40:23

(Jacob) Settled

SUMMARY

* Jacob is shown to favor his son Joseph, whom the other brothers resent. Joseph has dreams of grandeur. (Genesis 37:1-11)

* After Joseph's brothers had gone to tend the flocks in Shechem, Jacob sends Joseph to report on them. The brothers decide against murdering Joseph but instead sell him into slavery. After he is shown Joseph's coat of many colors, which had been dipped in the blood of a kid, Jacob is led to believe that Joseph has been killed by a beast. (Genesis 37:12-35)

* Tamar successively marries two of Judah's sons, each of whom dies. Judah does not permit her levirate marriage to his youngest son. She deceives Judah into impregnating her. (Genesis 38:1-30)

* God is with Joseph in Egypt until the wife of his master, Potiphar, accuses him of rape, whereupon Joseph is imprisoned. (Genesis 39:1-40:23)

“Part of the continuing power of these stories lies in their defiance of narrative convention. You can never predict in advance, the Torah seems to suggest, where virtue is to be found.”

“Reuben, you are my firstborn,

My power and the beginning of my might,

Pre-eminent in bearing

Pre-eminent in strength.

Unstable as water, you will not be pre-eminent. (49:3–4)

His is a story of potential unfulfilled, virtue not quite realized, greatness so close yet unachieved.”

“Torah does something it does nowhere else: It makes a statement that, construed literally, is obviously false – indeed, the text goes on immediately to show that it was not quite so. The verse states: “Reuben heard and saved him [Joseph] from their hands” (37:21). He did not. The discrepancy is so obvious that most translations simply do not render the phrase literally. What Reuben actually did was to attempt to save him. The phrase “Reuben heard and saved him” tells us what might have been, not what actually was.”

“This is a deeply puzzling assertion. Did Reuben really need the endorsement of Heaven to do the right thing? Did he need God’s approval before rescuing his brother? Yet, as we will see, this holds the essential clue about Reuben’s character. It tells us what stands between what might-have-been and what was.

Reuben is the Hamlet of Genesis, whose “native hue of resolution” is “sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought.”

“Jacob is a hero of faith, the man who gave Israel its name, the only patriarch whose children all remained within the covenant. Yet the complexity of Jacob’s character is light years away from the idealised heroes of other religious traditions. In Jacob we discover that the life of faith is not simple. Not by accident does his name Israel mean “the one who wrestled with God and with men and prevailed.” We discover something else as well. Every virtue carries with it a corresponding danger. The person who is over-generous may condemn his own family to poverty. The individual who, like Aaron, chooses peace at any price, can sometimes allow and abet those around him to make a golden calf. There is no single authoritative role model in Judaism. Instead there are many: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Moses, Aaron and Miriam; kings, prophets and priests; masters of halakha and aggada; sages and saints, poets and philosophers. The reason is that no one can embody all the virtues all the time. A strength here is a weakness there.”

“It is impossible not to recognise in Reuben a person of the highest ethical sensibilities. But though he had conscience, he lacked courage. He knew what was right, but lacked the resolve to do it boldly and decisively. In that hesitation, more was lost than Joseph. Lost also was Reuben’s chance to become the hero he might and should have been.”

“The issue at stake is the extent of responsibility borne by a guardian (shomer)”

“Their request to Jacob, haker na, must be construed as a legal request, meaning, “Examine the evidence.” Jacob has no alternative but to do so, and by virtue of what he has seen, to acquit them. A judge, however, may be forced to acquit someone accused of a crime because the evidence is insufficient to justify a conviction, while still retaining lingering private doubts”

“So Jacob was forced to find his sons innocent, without necessarily trusting what they said. In fact Jacob did not believe it, and his refusal to be comforted shows that he was unconvinced. He continued to hope that Joseph was still alive. That hope was eventually justified: Joseph was still alive, and father and son were ultimately reunited.

The refusal to be comforted sounded more than once in Jewish history. The prophet Jeremiah heard it in a later age:”

“Why was Jeremiah sure that Jews would return? Because they refused to be comforted – meaning, they refused to give up hope.

So it was during the Babylonian exile, as articulated in one of the most paradigmatic expressions of the refusal to be comforted:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept,

As we remembered Zion…”

“Jews are the people who refused to be comforted because they never gave up hope. Jacob did eventually see Joseph again. Rachel’s children did return to the land. Jerusalem is once again the Jewish home. All the evidence may suggest otherwise: it may seem to signify irretrievable loss, a decree of history that cannot be overturned, a fate that must be accepted. Jews never believed the evidence because they had something else to set against it – a faith, a trust, an unbreakable hope that proved stronger than historical inevitability. It is not too much to say that Jewish survival was sustained in that hope. And that hope came from a simple – or perhaps not so simple – phrase in the life of Jacob. He refused to be comforted. And so – while we live in a world still scarred by violence, poverty and injustice – must we.”

“Operating throughout the story is a form of the law that later would became part of Judaism: yibbum, levirate marriage, the rule that a member of the dead husband’s family should marry his childless widow “to perpetuate the dead brother’s name so that it may not be blotted out from Israel” (Deuteronomy 25:6)”

“Indeed, verse 8 explicitly uses the verb y-b-m. However, as Nahmanides points out – and this is crucial to the story – the pre-Mosaic law differed from its Mosaic successor. The law in Deuteronomy restricts the obligation to brothers of the dead husband. The earlier law included other members of the family as well.3”

“With great ingenuity and boldness, Tamar has broken through the bind in which Judah had placed her. She has fulfilled her duty to the dead. But no less significantly, she has spared Judah shame. By sending him a coded message – the pledge – she has ensured that he will know that he himself is the father of the child, but that no one else will. To do this, she took the enormous risk of being put to death for adultery.

Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: “It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public.”4 This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:”

A Tale of Two Women

“I find it exceptionally moving that the Bible should cast in these heroic roles two figures at the extreme margins of Israelite society: women, childless widows, outsiders. Tamar and Ruth, powerless except for their moral courage, wrote their names into Jewish history as role models who gave birth to royalty – to remind us, in case we ever forget, that true royalty lies in love and faithfulness, and that greatness often exists where we expect it least.”

Excerpt From

Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

Jonathan Sacks

The writer exploits the flexibility of the Hebrew toledot, a term that can equally refer to genealogical list and to story, in order to line up the beginning of the Joseph story with the toledot passage that immediately precedes it.

And Israel loved Joseph . . . for he was the child of his old age. The explanation is a little odd, both because the fact that Joseph is the son of the beloved Rachel is unmentioned and because it is the last-born Benjamin who is the real child of Jacob’s old age. It is noteworthy that Jacob’s favoritism toward Joseph is mentioned immediately after the report of questionable behavior on Joseph’s part. One recalls that Jacob was the object of his mother’s unexplained favoritism.

Of the fifty chapters that compose the Book of Genesis, exactly half—twenty-five—are about Jacob and his family. Of those twenty-five, thirteen are devoted to Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son. Genesis devotes more space to Joseph’s story than anyone else’s, and at the heart of this narrative is Joseph’s relationship with his father.

Of the fifty chapters that compose the Book of Genesis, exactly half—twenty-five—are about Jacob and his family. Of those twenty-five, thirteen are devoted to Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son. Genesis devotes more space to Joseph’s story than anyone else’s, and at the heart of this narrative is Joseph’s relationship with his father.

R. Chaim Zaitchik (1905–89), in contrast, reminds us that at the deepest levels, we constantly sell ourselves short, doubting that we have the power to act forcefully and definitively. We become discouraged and demoralized far too quickly, he tells us, and we thus succumb to exhaustion and lethargy. Our problem, in other words, is that we “lack faith in, and lack consciousness of, the full range of [our] currently latent, hidden capacities.” Like Reuben before us, he insists, we are all obligated to assess our abilities expansively and generously.166 Self-doubt, in other words, is self-fulfilling. If we do not believe in our abilities, we will in fact fail.

According to R. Yeruham Levovitz (1873–1936), our problem is that we don’t believe that every single action we take really matters. We forget—or fail to internalize in the first place—that there is, in his words, “eternity in every action, however seemingly minor.” This, he argues, is the source of our deepest spiritual and interpersonal failings: “The whole of Torah testifies to and teaches this foundation—the enormous significance of even one action; and if we do not live with this awareness, that any one of our actions can reach all the way to heaven, what hope do we have—because this is the very essence!

Joseph is not just Jacob’s favorite; he is also God’s, “as demonstrated by his beauty, his clear leadership qualities, his ability to have prophetic dreams, as well as his wisdom to interpret other people’s dreams and to dispense good advice.”173 But at first he uses his gifts only for his own glory. A midrash wonders why, after the Torah has already told us that Joseph was seventeen years old, it adds the seemingly superfluous observation that he was a lad (Gen. 37:2), and answers that “he behaved like a boy, penciling his eyes, curling his hair, and lifting his heel” (Genesis Rabbah 84:7). The teenaged Joseph is spoiled and self-enamored.

How did Joseph lose his way? The verses describing Joseph’s relationship with Potiphar emphasize repeatedly that Joseph’s extraordinary success is made possible only by God’s blessing. So blessed is Joseph that even an Egyptian courtier can see that God is with him (Gen. 39:2,3,5). Yet it is the narrator and the courtier who invoke God and sense what really underlies Joseph’s success; Joseph, tellingly, makes no mention of God at all. The reader is thus left to wonder whether Joseph “assume[s that] he attained this position on his own and that his charisma was for no greater purpose than to live a comfortable life.