Rabbi Reuben's Weekly Torah Commentary

Vayashev
(Genesis 37:1-40:23)

This week in the Torah, we begin the remarkable Joseph story.  It's a long, winding tale of sibling rivalry and intrigue, slavery and redemption, temptation and unjust retribution.  We learn that the consequences of arrogance can be tragic and devastating and that life can be filled with its own plot twists and turns that are often beyond our own ability to comprehend or understand at the time they are unfolding.

The Joseph story is, in essence, a novella all its own.  It provides the link between the last of our patriarchs, Jacob and the evolution of Am Yisrael, the Jewish people who ultimately emerge out of the descendents of his twelve sons.

Sometimes it seems as if the famous French expression, "the more things change the more they stay the same," was written to reflect our Biblical ancestor's apparent inability to learn from the tragic mistakes of their own parents.   From Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, the parental sin of playing favorites between one's children seemed to have been passed down from generation to generation like an unconscious parent virus.

 Perhaps that's why we are reminded in the Torah that the sins of the parents are visited upon their children even to the fourth generation.  We humans just seem to be very, very slow learners.  After all, how could Isaac not have learned the lesson of the price of parental favoritism, as he watched his brother Ishmael cast out into the wilderness by his own father?  And yet he favored Esau over Jacob, which contributed to setting up the conditions under which Jacob had to flee for his life and go into voluntary exile from his father's home for twenty years.

How could Jacob not have learned the same lesson of how destructive parental favoritism is to family harmony from the traumatic experiences of his youth?  And yet we read in this very Torah portion, "Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children...and he made him a coat of many colors.  And when his brothers saw that he loved him more than all of them they hated him and they could not speak peaceably to him." (Gen. 37:3-4).

Sadly, over three thousand years later, I still see the same thing in my rabbinic life nearly every day.  In spite of thousands of years of evidence and the personal experiences of us all, parents continue to demonstrate preferences for one child over another.  I will never forget sitting with Didi in a restaurant with a mutual friend, as she pointed to her two young children sitting next to us in the booth and without even a second thought asked us, "So tell me, which of my kids do you think is better looking?" as her children gazed innocently up at us.  

The more things change, the more they stay the same, indeed.  On of the hardest things in life for us to master, is the ability to be open to learning important life lessons second hand, without having to go through the original experience ourselves.   Human beings seem to resist learning any way but the hard way - by first hand, head on, direct experiences that are ours alone.

And yet perhaps that is the entire point of studying Torah itself and assuredly why we keep studying the Torah year in and year out, reading the same portions over again and again.  It is so that every week we will have another opportunity to use the lives of our own ancestors as role models both of what to do and what not to do.  Jewish tradition believes that we are not condemned to repeat every mistake that others have made.  In fact, we are not condemned even to repeat our own mistakes. And that is why we study Torah each week, and that is why the Talmud tells us to "turn it, turn it for everything is in it."  The rabbis claim that this challenge refers not only to the Torah text itself, but to the story of our own lives as well.  For as we examine our own stories, delve into our own behaviors of the past, we can discover that the past is simply descriptive and not prescriptive of future behavior.

After all, the Joseph story is ultimately the story of personal redemption, family redemption and faith.  For in the end when Joseph has risen to the greatest power in the land of Egypt next to Pharaoh and is reconciled with his brothers and father once again, he believes that his life is proof of the Yiddish expression, "Human beings plan and God laughs." We just never know how things are going to turn out.  Perhaps we can end by using the story of Joseph as a beautiful example of the redeeming power of faith.  Faith that the meaning of our lives will ultimately become clear, and faith that by believing in ourselves we will be able to share our own dreams with others.