Miketz 5774

Miketz 5774

This week’s parasha ends with possibly the greatest cliffhanger in the entire Torah. At the end of Miketz, Joseph orders his silver goblet to be planted in Benjamin's sack. As the brothers leave Egypt, Joseph has them all arrested and returned to his palace. Joseph declares that he will put Benjamin in jail, and the rest of them may go home. And it is at this point that we are left with the ultimate question, the ultimate test:

Will the brothers stick up for Benjamin?
Will they stick their neck out for their youngest brother, their father’s favorite, second only to Joseph?
Or will they leave Benjamin, the new favorite, with a strange man, in Egypt?
The parashah leaves us with the cliffhanger, unsure of what will happen with Joseph and the brothers.

I asked some of our Religious School students this past week about their thoughts. First, they all said that they would try and help out their siblings, despite a possible assumption that they maybe would not care and leave their sibling in Egypt.

So I posed another question that also lay before the biblical brothers: if your sibling were to be wrongfully imprisoned, and you wanted to help, what would you say to defend them, to get them out of trouble?

Their answers included:
There must be evidence that can get them out of trouble.
Everyone makes mistakes, and even if they did it, they should get a second chance.
My sibling must be innocent!
I like my sibling a lot, and I would say that you can take me in my sibling’s stead.

These students articulated exactly how the brothers, and specifically Judah, defends Benjamin. It is only in next week’s parasha (spoiler alert!) that we read the eloquent speech of Judah – one that Dr. Nahum Sarna lauds as “deferential yet dignified, spirited but not provocative, full of pathos and passion, yet restrained and transparently sincere.” It is in this speech that he utters the key phrases, all shared by our religious school students:

1)    He apologizes,
2)    He tells the family’s story,
3)    He describes how this will be damaging to Jacob, their father,
4)    And possibly the most important piece: that he, Judah, will take Binyamin’s place.

As we spend time with our families during this week of Thanksgiving and Chanuka, I hope that we all have time to recognize what a gift the children in our community are – that so many of them identify with this later character trait of Judah, a person who stands up for his brother in need. And I hope that we can learn from them, so that whenever we see our literal or figurative siblings in trouble, that we can stand in the breach to protect them, as Judah did for Benjamin so many years ago.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Russo

Vayeshev 5774

How ironic that after the great journey taken by our patriarch Yaakov, Jacob, he whose name is changed to Israel, that when he at last returns home safe and sound after all these years – he who had sworn to God when he was running away from home that should God protect him and feed him and clothe him that God would in fact be God for him – that there is no mention of God when he returns him.  In the first chapter of Parashat Vayeshev (Bereisheet 37). The Parasha begins:

וַיֵּשֶׁב יַעֲקֹב בְּאֶרֶץ מְגוּרֵי אָבִיו בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנָעַן

Va-yesehev Yaakov b’eretz megurei aviv b’ereetz C’naan

And Jacob dwelt in the land of his father's sojournings, in the land of Canaan.

No mention of God here and there is no mention of God throughout the rest of the chapter either.

However, God does appear several times when we get to Chapter 39 when we are already well into the saga of Yosef (Joseph), Yaakov’s son who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, when we need to be reassured that Yosef is fine and are told that God is not only with Yosef but made Yosef “matzliah” (successful or prosperous) as it says:

וַיְהִי יְהוָה אֶת-יוֹסֵף וַיְהִי אִישׁ מַצְלִיח

Vayehi A-donai et Yosef va-yehi ish matzliah

We are told this both when Yosef arrives at the home of Potiphar and again when Potiphar has him thrown into prison after Yosef is falsely accused of trying to seduce Potiphar’s wife.

Surely this is how Yosef survives prison – God is with him.  It is a message repeated in Natan Sharansky’s autobiography Fear No Evil in which he describes his nine long years in a Soviet prison before his liberation and aliyah to Israel. During that time Sharansky kept his spirits raised by reading from the book of Psalms and clinging to his faith in God. “It was the only Jewish book that I was able to keep throughout the entire period. I often went on hunger strikes for days and weeks at a time to maintain the right to have sefer Tehillim,the book of Psalms with me,” Sharansky has recalled.

But Rabbi Bardley Shavit Artson of the American Jewish University, who will be spending the Shabbat of December 13-14 with us at Anshe Emet has noted that the sages of Rabbinic tradition taught in Midrash Beresheet Rabbah, in the name of Rabbi Huna that since God must have been with Yosef as God is with all of us, the phrase must have meant that, "Yosef whispered God's name whenever he came in and whenever he went out." In other words it is not that Yosef received the special attention of God, but that he, like Scharansky, cultivated his own consciousness of God's presence. By continually repeating God's name to himself, by regularly invoking God's love and involvement, Joseph trained himself to perceive the miraculous in the ordinary, to experience wonder in the mundane.

Rabbi Artson also notes that according to Rabbi Huna, Yosef whispered God's name. “He kept quiet about his own religiosity. Not one to preach incessantly to others, Joseph taught the love and power of God not through words but through deeds. By performing 'mitzvot' and acts of love, Joseph testified to God's love with his own example.”

May talk about God, but education is most effective when we can point to role models who walk the talk rather than preach and teach words that ring hollow.  Perhaps if the text had stated that God was still with Yaakov when he returned home and then Yaakov would have done right by God and declared that after all this years God was unconditionally his God.  If only he had walked his talk just a bit better he might have been a bit more “matzliah”.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Matt Futterman

Senior Educator

Vayetzei 5774

Stones and Strife

In this week’s parashah, Vayetzei, Jacob travels from the Land of Israel to his mother’s hometown in search of a wife and a safe distance from his angry brother. Along the way, he stops for the night and the Torah tells us וַיִּקַּח מֵֽאַבְנֵי הַמָּקוֹם וַיָּשֶׂם מְרַֽאֲשֹׁתָיו, he took from among the stones of the place and placed beneath his head (Gen. 28:11). From the way this verse is written, it is hard to know how many of the stones Jacob took. Some commentators look to verse 18, in which Jacob awakens and removes the stone from beneath his head, and conclude that Jacob took only a single stone from among the stones of the place. Others give greater weight to the verse here, suggesting that he gathered multiple stones and arranged them into a kind of shelter; the later verse, they argue, is to be understood as a generalization.

But there is a third approach, found in a midrash (Hullin 91b): according to this midrash, Jacob gathered twelves stones — representing the twelve tribes that would issue from his descendants —  to make his resting place for the night. Immediately, each stone began vying with one another for the privilege of being the stone upon which Jacob would rest his head; a miracle occurred, and the twelve stones fused into a single stone, ending the conflict between the tribes.

And yet, throughout the story of our people, the tribes continue to jockey with one another, using their unique skills and abilities to set themselves apart from their fellow tribes! So what is this midrash trying to teach us?

No matter where we turn — whether family, workplace, Jewish community, or American society — we encounter diverse perspectives, conflicting interests, and competition for the “best” place within the group. We lament this difficult state of affairs, longing for a situation in which conflict would disappear and harmony would reign.

But the Torah does not actually advocate a complete elimination of conflict; instead, our tradition asks us to work through — not avoid — our disagreements. As Roger Fisher and Scott Brown of the Harvard Negotiation Project write, “It would be a mistake to define a good relationship as one in which we agree easily... the working relationship... is one that produces a solution that satisfies the competing interests as well as possible... in a way that appears legitimate in the eyes of each of the parties” (Getting Together, 5, 8-9). In other words, we must become like the stones, like the tribes: uniting as one, while still retaining our individual perspectives. Fisher and Brown challenge us to stop seeing people with different perspectives as adversaries to be conquered, and instead to see ourselves as “two partners facing the future, side by side” (6). Theirs is an approach that the Torah would heartily endorse, a vision our ancestral tribes attempted to live by, and the challenge parashat Vayetzei sets before us.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Abe Friedman