“And Yehudah/Judah approached him/Yosef/Joseph”
Judah! The brother who helped to save Joseph’s life when he suggested to the rest of the brothers that they sell Joseph to the Ishmaelite merchants rather than kill him.
Judah! The brother who convinced the aged Jacob to allow Benjamin to join the rest of the brothers on their trek back to Egypt where the Egyptian viceroy (the disguised brother Joseph) had expressed an interest in meeting the youngest brother.
Judah! Who like his father Jacob and brother Joseph had been involved in matters of deception in his family – only he had deceived and then was deceived by his daughter in law Tamar whose come uppance he accepted as justified. Having neglected to pair off his widowed daughter in law with his surviving son, Shelah, when he discovers that she has tricked him into sleeping with her he admits: “She is more in the right than I, inasmuch as I did not give her to my son Shelah.” [Genesis 38:26]
Professor Nahum Sarna in Understanding Genesis points out the parallels between these stories of deception. And we note how appropriate it is that it is Judah’s entreaty to Joseph that leads to Joseph revealing his true identity at last. After the goblet is found in Benjamin’s sack – the goblet which Joseph arranged to have placed there in the first place – Judah asks the viceroy to be merciful for this is the youngest of their father’s children and because his older brother was already dead the death of this brother would be too much for their father to bear.
Ironically, Judah offers himself as a slave in place of Benjamin to the very man whose enslavement he himself had once brought about. His words lead to the brothers’ reconciliation and the family’s reunification.
Why does Judah, of all the brothers, play this all important role in the story of Joseph and his brothers? First of all Judah and Joseph are the ancestors of the two kingdoms of later history: Judah was the southern kingdom and Joseph’s son Ephraim fathers the northern kingdom.
But more important, Judah emerges as something of a hero in a manner consistent with other lessons in the book of Bereisheet. As Rabbi Neil Gillman, professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary wrote: “Judah is the fourth oldest of the brothers. That he emerges as the hero of the story is in part one more example of the Torah’s characteristic tendency to ignore the natural order of birth in tracing the line of covenantal history by passing over the first-born son. Just as Isaac displaces Ishmael, and Jacob displaces Esau, so now Judah displaces Reuben, Simeon and Levi, and so eventually will Ephraim displace Menasha…….But the real message is that it is God who shapes the course of history, not nature.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Matt Futterman
Senior Educator
