A dentist, after completing work on a patient, came to him begging.
Dentist: Could you help me? Could you give out a few of your loudest, most painful screams? Patient: Why? Doctor, it wasn't all that bad this time.
Dentist: There are so many people in the waiting room right now, and I don't want to miss the four o'clock ball game.
In this week's Torah portion, Vayigash Judah has made a passionate plea for Benjamin’s release. Yes, the missing silver cup has been found in his possession. Judah does not challenge the facts. Instead, he throws himself on the mercy of the Egyptian ruler, of whose identity he is still unaware. He asks him to think of the impact Benjamin’s imprisonment will have on his father. He has already lost one beloved son. The shock of losing another will kill him.
“Now then, please let your servant remain here as my lord's slave in place of the boy, and let the boy return with his brothers. How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come upon my father.”
These are the words that finally break Joseph’s heart. He is overcome with emotion. He turns to his brothers, and reveals his identity:
Then Joseph could no longer control himself, 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 Joseph said to his brothers, "I am Joseph! Is my father still living?" But his brothers were not able to answer him, because they were terrified at his presence.
The question raised, what was Joseph trying to achieve in all of his encounters in Egypt with his brothers?
Let us recall the sequence of events. Sometime earlier, as famine struck the entire region, the brothers had come before Joseph for the first time, in order to obtain food from the Egyptian Prime Minister for themselves and their families. He recognizes them. They do not recognize him. He “speaks harshly” to them, accusing them of being spies. He puts them in prison for three days.
He then releases them, holding Shimon as a hostage, telling them that they must bring Benjamin with them next time, to verify their story. Unbeknown to them, he has the money they had paid for the grain put back into their sacks. When they discover this, they are unnerved again. Something is happening to them, but they do not know what.
eventually, the food runs out and they have to return. It takes much persuasion on the part of Judah to convince Jacob to let Benjamin come with. This time, Joseph greets them with warmth, inviting them to eat with him. Eventually, having provided them with fresh supplies of grain, he sends them on their way. Now, however, he does more than place money in their sacks. He has his favorite divination cup placed in Benjamin’s grain.
The brothers have left the city, relieved that the visit has been unexpectedly painless. No sooner have they gone than they are overtaken by Joseph’s steward. Someone has stolen his master’s silver cup. The brothers protest their innocence. The steward searches their bags, starting with the eldest. Finally, they reach Benjamin, and there, in his sack, is the cup. It is their worst nightmare coming true. They knew that having once come home without Joseph, they could not lose Benjamin also. Judah had staked his honor on it. So the brothers appear before Joseph once more, and the drama moves toward its climax.
What is the logic of this sequence of events? What was Joseph trying to do? Why did he not share with them right away who he is?
Some like to say it was a tale of revenge. He is making his brothers suffer as they once made him suffer. This too is untenable. At every significant stage, Joseph turns aside to weep, careful not to let the brothers see him in this state. People engaged in revenge do not weep. They smile. Those who repay evil with evil take satisfaction in so doing. Joseph takes no satisfaction at all. What then is the logic of Joseph’s carefully constructed plot?
The most eloquent answer is that Joseph wanted to see if the family was ready to heal if his brothers have come around. Have they repented for what they have done to their own brother?
“What is perfect repentance? It occurs when an opportunity presents itself for repeating the offense once committed, and the offender, while able to commit the offense, nevertheless refrains from doing so because he is penitent, and not out of fear or failure of vigor.”
Joseph constructs a scene to see if his brothers have indeed changed. They had once sold him into slavery. He now puts them in a situation in which they will have overwhelming temptation to repeat the crime by abandoning Benjamin to slavery. That is why he plants the cup in Benjamin’s sack, arranges for him to be accused of theft, rules that his punishment will be to remain in Egypt as a slave, and tells the other brothers that they are free to leave.
Why Benjamin? Because he, like Joseph, is a son of Rachel – and therefore envied and despised by the other brothers. There is, of course, one difference. As far as possible, the circumstances of their original crime have now been replicated. Their youngest brother, a child of Rachel, is about to be taken as a slave in Egypt. They have reason to be jealous of him as they were of Joseph. They rise to the challenge. As Benjamin is about to be taken into custody, they offer to join him in prison. Joseph declines: “Far be it from me to do such a thing! Only the man who was found to have the cup will become my slave. The rest of you go back to your father in peace.”
The moment of the trial has now begun. Joseph has offered the brothers a simple escape route. All they have to do is walk away. It is then, when “Judah went up to him and said . . .” that the story reaches its climax. Judah, the very brother who was responsible for selling Joseph into slavery, now offers to sacrifice his own freedom rather than let Benjamin be held as a slave.
The circumstances are similar to what they were years earlier, but Judah’s behavior is now diametrically opposite to what it was then. He has the opportunity and ability to repeat the offense, but he does not do so. Judah has fulfilled the conditions set out by the sages and Maimonides for “complete repentance.” As soon as he does so, Joseph reveals his identity and the drama is at an end.
Not dreams, not revenge, but teshuvah is what has driven Joseph all along. His brothers once sold him as a slave. He survived – more than survived, he has prospered. He knows that everything that has happened to him is somehow part of G-d’s plan. His concern is not for himself but for his brothers. Have they survived? Do they realize the depth of the crime they committed? Are they capable of remorse? Can they change? When they did, reconciliation happened.
As Jews were about to enter the next phase of history, to become a people in Egypt, this was vital. It was important for them to learn how brothers have to be there for each other, even if they disagree. They had to learn that we are family, and a family must support each other, love each other, and be there for one another. Whenever, in our history, Jews split into fractions it was a harbinger of disaster.
Mendel Beilis was born into an observant Chassidic Jewish family though he was not religious himself. On March 12, 1911, a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy Andrei disappeared on his way to school. Eight days later his body was discovered in a cave near a local brick factory. Mendel Beilis, a father of five children, employed as a superintendent at the brick factory in Kiyev, close to the cave, was arrested on July 21, 1911. Beilis spent more than two years in prison awaiting trial. Meanwhile, a vicious Anti-Semitic campaign was launched in the Russian press against the Jewish community in Russia, with accusations that the boy was murdered in order to use his blood for matzah.
On October 8, 1913, right after Yom Kippur, the trial opened. The crucial question was posed by the prosecutor. The Talmud makes the following declaration (Yevamot 61a):
“You [the Jewish people] are called, Adam, human, while the nations of the world are not called human, Adam.”
This supposedly demonstrated clearly that Judaism considered gentiles sub-human. Hence to kill a non-Jewish child would be totally acceptable from the Jewish perspective.
Rabbi Jacob Mazeh, the Rabbi of Moscow, answered the question brilliantly.
“You, the Jewish people are called Adam,” does not mean to say that non-Jews are G-d forbid less than human; after all, it was the Torah which claimed first that every single human being was created in the image of G-d. Rather, the Talmud meant to say that there was something about the title Adam which applied only to the Jewish people, and not to the non-Jewish world.
The title Adam is never found in the plural, only in the singular. All other Hebrew words can be found in both. Thus, Adam can never refer to many humans, only to a single human. This, says the Talmud, is the unique condition of the Jewish nation: there may be millions of Jews around the world, but they are called Adam, they are considered a single human being.
This trial demonstrates the point. One Jew, Mendel Bailis, is accused of killing a child, but who is on trial? The entire Jewish world! Together with all of the Jewish texts from the beginning of time!
Imagine if a Russian gentile was accused of the murder. Would anyone entertain the idea of putting the entire Russian people and all of Russian literature on trial?! Because you are a single Adam. You may be 14 million bodies, but you are one soul. You are like one person, one organism. The Nations may very well be considered Anashim, the plural form of the word man, but they cannot be considered Adam, a nation that stands together as a single man.
This explanation left a deep impact on the court. After a long trial, the court threw out the charges, which were clearly fabricated. Mendel Beilis was set free.
It all began at that moment in Vayigash when Judah and Joseph discovered together that we are one. Each and every Jew is interconnected and part of this great puzzle, this great Mosaic called "Am Yisrael," the nation of Israel.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...