Vayigash

VAYIGASH

Genesis 44:18 - 47:27

He drew close

* Judah pleads with Joseph to free Benjamin and offers himself as a replacement. (44:18-34)

* Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and forgives them for selling him into slavery. (45:1-15)

* Although the famine still rages, Pharaoh invites Joseph's family to "live off the fat of the land." (45:16-24)

* Jacob learns that Joseph is still alive and, with God's blessing, goes to Egypt. (45:25-46:33)

* Pharaoh permits Joseph's family to settle in Goshen. Pharaoh then meets with Jacob. (47:1-12)

* With the famine increasing, Joseph designs a plan for the Egyptians to trade their livestock and land for food. The Israelites thrive in Egypt. (47:13- 47:27)

“ Dinah is described as bat Yaakov, the daughter of Jacob, when in the initial story about Dinah twelve chapters earlier she is called bat Leah (Gen. 34:10)? Why the discrepancy, if not to alert us to some important insight into our communal history, and by extension, into our own lives?”

“So how does Dinah then become bat Yaakov, the daughter of Jacob? Certainly, mothers and daughters, sometimes close enough to be sisters, can compete for the same man. And when the daughter eventually wins the father’s heart, she risks losing her mother’s love. Jacob, in time father to twelve sons, must have had a special place in his heart for Dinah. He chastises his sons for murdering the town and ruining his reputation, but he never rebukes his little girl. Dinah enters the protective embrace of her father from that moment on. As bat Yaakov, she survives the rape, the killing, and the isolation from her family, because she has one real relationship that had been tested and found true.”

Excerpt From

The Women's Torah Commentary

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

“How does Joseph understand his own behavior? Earlier, in an attempt to alleviate his brothers’ distress, Joseph had told them that “it was to save life (la-mihyah) that God sent me ahead of you” (Gen. 45:5). At minimum his words refer to his now having the power and wealth to feed his own family (45:7,11), but Joseph may well think that his mission is grander and more universal: God sent him to Egypt so that he could save the lives of the Egyptians, too. And indeed, when the Egyptians thank Joseph, they use language strikingly reminiscent of Joseph’s own: “You have saved our lives (hehiyitanu)!”217”

“The ironic turns in the text are intense and powerful and thus require explanation: Brought to Egypt as a slave, Joseph now becomes Egypt’s enslaver. And soon enough, a new Pharaoh rises and “the House of Israel [finds] themselves once again on the wrong end of the enslavement process.”228 Joseph displays remarkable administrative prowess, but he unleashes forces that eventually end up oppressing and degrading his own people. It is hard to imagine that the Torah makes no moral judgment at all on Joseph’s setting this destructive process in motion.”

“I would be inclined to a somewhat more nuanced position: Joseph does save countless lives in a disastrous time and thus brings abundant blessing to the Egyptians. And yet he exacts too high a price from them—everything they have, including their very freedom—and insists on making what should have been at best a temporary arrangement permanent.237 With those decisions he plays with fire, and that fire will eventually wound his own family in unspeakable ways.”

“R. Samuel b. Nahman comments: “Joseph put himself in grave danger, because if his brothers had killed him, no one would have known whom to blame. So why did he say, ‘Have everyone withdraw from me?’ This is what Joseph thought: Better that I be killed than I humiliate my brothers in front of the Egyptians” (Midrash Tanhuma, Va-yiggash 5).”

“tell you that there are three cardinal sins in Judaism, three offenses one should prefer to die than commit: idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder. But according to these scholars, stunningly, humiliation appears to be a fourth.212

Why is Judaism so preoccupied with avoiding humiliation? Rabbeinu Yonah suggests that humiliation has “shades of murder” to it (avak retzihah)”

Excerpt From

The Heart of Torah, Volume 1

Shai Held

Rabbi Tarfon elicits from his students that Judah had merit because of his words and actions. He stopped his brothers from killing Joseph. He volunteered to become Joseph’s slave in Egypt so that Benjamin could be free. In the incident with his daughter-in-law Tamar, he confessed his sin. All of these are praiseworthy actions, but in each instance Tarfon forces the students to see that none was sufficient to earn Judah the great privilege of having the kings of Israel be his descendants. In each case, whatever good he did was sufficient only for balancing out his transgressions and nothing more.

In the end, Rabbi Tarfon answers that this honor came to the tribe not because of anything Judah did but because of the actions of his descendant Nahshon and the entire tribe of Judah when they plunged into the sea before anyone else, trusting that God would save them and bring Israel through the sea in safety. This act of kiddush ha-Shem—sanctifying God’s name—warranted their becoming the head of all the tribes. Rabbi Tarfon thus teaches his students that sanctifying God’s name is a matter of supreme importance.”

Excerpt From

A Year with the Sages

Reuven Hammer

“Instead of reacting as expected, Joseph acts as if everything—including the brothers’ childhood betrayal—has been part of God’s plan. His behavior toward his siblings exhibits another type of vision: the ability to see a divine purpose in even the worst experiences of life.

D’rash: Kaplan’s Insight

Enable us, God to behold meaning in the chaos of life about us and purpose in the chaos of life within us.

Kaplan’s short prayer reflects his understanding that we are makers of meaning in our lives. Human beings seem to be driven by an innate desire to discover personal purpose and to create meaning in the midst of the turmoil within and around us.

Furthermore, Kaplan recognized the same pattern at work on the cosmic level. An underlying theme throughout the Torah is the making of order out of cosmic chaos”

“The Talmud Berachot 54a teaches, “A person must bless God for the bad just as one must bless God for the good.” Our Sages recognized that, in the present, we humans are not always capable of discerning the true meaning of life events, including which are blessings and which are curses. That is the power of spiritual 20/20 hindsight—looking back upon the past and recognizing blessings we never could have imagined”

Excerpt From

A Year with Mordecai Kaplan

Steven Carr Reuben

“Here, in this very dramatic encounter, we see Judah discovering empathy. He cares now, as he did not before, about the feelings of his father and about how his own actions affect his father. He becomes a mensch. Only after Judah proves that he can grow will Joseph make himself “known to his brothers” (Genesis 45:1). Only after he sees that they have changed and that they care about the father they all share is he prepared to go from being “the man” to being their brother. The whole saga is about the lot of them—our fathers, our brothers—growing, becoming menschen. It is about them breaking out of the conventional male role and learning what women apparently know instinctively. Perhaps we need to hear their story in a way our sisters do not.”

“So we have a powerfully emotional scene. At the very beginning of the dramatic events, the text notes that Joseph has all his retainers leave, “so there was no one else about when Joseph made himself known to his brothers” (Genesis 45:1). Does he want no Egyptians present because of the enormity of the secret he is about to reveal? Or because he does not want his subordinates to see him overcome by the emotions that he knows are about to overwhelm him?

In Joseph, we see a struggle against men’s conventional gender roles. Men are supposed to stay in control and keep their emotions under wraps. “Boys don’t cry”; all the more so, men—especially powerful men. But here, finally, the emotions prevail.”

“But Jacob’s answer is especially poignant. “The years of my sojourn [on earth] are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my fathers during their sojourns” (Genesis 47:9). Is he being obsequious or humble? Or is he being bitter? His life has, in fact, not been easy. It has, indeed, been filled with sorrow. But even in his old age, it is striking to notice that Jacob is still measuring his worth against that of his fathers’, and he finds himself wanting.”

Excerpt From

The Modern Men's Torah Commentary

Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin

“One of the key concepts of Judaism – the theme of its holiest days from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur – is teshuva, a complex concept involving remorse, repentance and return. The abstract noun teshuva is post-biblical, but the idea it embodies is central to the Hebrew Bible. It is what the prophets call on Israel to do. It is what Jonah is sent to Nineveh to achieve. In a related sense it is what certain sacrifices (guilt and sin offerings) are intended to accompany.

Teshuva, as analysed by the sages and later by Maimonides, has certain key elements. The first is confession and acknowledgement of wrongdoing:

How does one confess? The penitent says, “I beseech You, O Lord, I have sinned, I have acted perversely, I have transgressed before You, and have done such and such, and I repent and am ashamed of my deeds.”1

The second is to commit oneself not to repeat the offence:

What is this teshuva? It is that the sinner abandons his sin, removes it from his thoughts, and resolves in his heart never to repeat it, as it is said, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the man of iniquity his thoughts[…]”

“As soon as we understand these three points, the logic of Joseph’s course of action becomes clear. The drama to which he subjects his brothers has nothing to do with the dreams, or with revenge. To the contrary, Joseph is not acting for himself but for the sake of his brothers. He is leading them – for the first time in recorded history – through the three stages of teshuva.”

“When he sits the brothers down for a meal he arranges that they be seated in order of age, highlighting the fact that Benjamin is the youngest, and then ensures that “Benjamin’s portion was five times as much as anyone else’s” (43:34). There is only one explanation for this strange detail. Joseph is trying to make his brothers jealous of their youngest sibling.”

“This is a highly significant moment in the history of the human spirit. Judah is the first penitent – the first ba’al teshuva – in the Torah.”

“This did not happen in a sudden change of character. It was set in motion by another event that happened between these two meetings, namely the story of Tamar. ”

“Tamar is the heroine of the story, but it has one significant consequence: Judah admits he was wrong. “She was more righteous than I,” he says.

This is the first time in the Torah someone acknowledges their own guilt. It was also the turning point in Judah’s life. Here was born the ability to recognise one’s own wrongdoing, to feel remorse, and to change – the complex phenomenon known as teshuva.”

“Joseph did not communicate with his father because he believed his father no longer wanted to see him or hear from him. His father had terminated the relationship. That was a reasonable inference from the facts as Joseph knew them. He could not have known that Jacob still loved him, that his brothers had deceived their father by showing him Joseph’s bloodstained cloak, and that his father mourned for him, “refusing to be comforted.” We know these facts because the Torah tells us. But Joseph, far away, in another land, serving as a slave, could not have known. This places the story in a completely new and tragic light.”

“When Joseph was appointed second-in-command in Egypt, given the name Tzafenat Pa’neah, and had married an Egyptian wife, Asenat, he had his first child. We then read:

Joseph named his firstborn Menasheh, saying, “It is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s house.” (41:51)

Uppermost in Joseph’s mind was the desire to forget the past, not just his brothers’ conduct towards him but “all my father’s house.” Why so, if not that he associated “all my trouble” not just with his siblings but also with his father Jacob? Joseph believed that his father had deliberately put him at his brothers’ mercy because, angered by the second dream, he no longer wanted contact with the son he had once loved. That is why he never sent a message to Jacob that he was still alive.”

“At that moment Joseph realized that his fear that his father had rejected him was unwarranted. On the contrary, he had been bereft when Joseph did not return. He believed that he had been “torn to pieces,” killed by a wild animal. His father still loved him, still grieved for him. Against this background we can better understand Joseph’s reaction to this disclosure:

Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants, and he cried out, “Have everyone leave my presence!” So there was no one with Joseph when he made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him, and Pharaoh’s household heard about it. Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph! Is my father still alive?” (45:1–3)”

“In both cases, misunderstanding flowed from a failure of communication. Had Rebecca told Isaac about the oracle, and had Rachel told Jacob about the terafim, tragedy might have been averted. Judaism is a religion of holy words, and one of the themes of Genesis as a whole is the power of speech to create, mislead, harm or heal. From Cain and Abel to Joseph and his brothers (“They hated him and could not speak peaceably to him”), we are shown how, when words fail, violence begins.”

“So it is not that God forgives, while human beings do not. On the contrary, we believe that just as only God can forgive sins against God, so only human beings can forgive sins against human beings. That is why Yom Kippur atones for our sins against God, but not for our sins against other human beings.3”

Excerpt From

Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

Jonathan Sacks