Timeless Torah

It’s Biblical drama at its best: A missing magical goblet, its surprise discovery in Benjamin’s sack, Judah’s passionate plea, and finally the revelation of, “I am Joseph!” But Joseph has yet another surprise. Instead of blaming his siblings, he comforts them, and with majestic graciousness says, “It was not you who sent me here, but G-d.”

   With this, the serpentine tale of Joseph comes to its denouement.  Joseph, who dominates the last third of Genesis, casts his shadow on everyone else. But a question remains. What propels his story? What forces drive Joseph in his successive encounters with his brothers?

Let us recall the sequence of events. The first time the brothers came before Joseph, he accuses them of being spies and puts them in prison. Eventually with only Shimon as a hostage, he adjures them to bring Benjamin to verify their story. When supplies run out, Judah persuades Jacob to let Benjamin come. Now Joseph greets them with warmth, inviting them to dine. And yet, when he sends them on their way, he slips his ‘divination’ cup into Benjamin’s sack.
The second excursion to Egypt, at first painless soon becomes their worst nightmare. Having once come home without Joseph, they are about to lose Benjamin also. And so the brothers retrace their steps, and the drama moves toward its climax. What is the logic of this sequence of events? One possibility is simply revenge. Joseph is making his brothers suffer as they once made him suffer. But this is untenable. At every significant stage, Joseph turns aside to weep. People engaged in revenge do not weep. Those who repay evil with evil take satisfaction in so doing. Joseph however is clearly acting against his inclination and that causes him pain.
Another explanation suggested by the Torah itself is that Joseph is manipulating his family to accept his authority so as to fulfill his dreams, in which they bow to him. But if that were the whole story, Joseph would have devised a strategy that would bring the whole family to Egypt and then revealed his identity and power over their lives in this time of famine. This does not happen. Indeed, Joseph’s actions do not advance, but actually delay, this outcome.

One of the key concepts of Judaism is teshuvah, a complex term involving three basic elements. The first is confession and acknowledgement of wrongdoing as the penitent says, “L-rd, I have sinned…I have transgressed…and have done such and such. I repent and am ashamed of my deeds.” The second is to commit oneself not to repeat the offence, “To abandon his sin, remove it from his thoughts, and resolve in his heart never to repeat it.” Perfect, or complete, repentance however only occurs, “When an opportunity presents itself for repeating the offence, and the offender refrains from doing so.”

The logic of Joseph’s course of action is now obvious. The drama to which he subjects his brothers has nothing to do with revenge or dreams. To the contrary, Joseph is not acting for himself but for his brothers. He is taking them (for the first time in recorded history) through the three stages of teshuvah.

His initial move accusing them of a crime they have not committed (of being spies) is to see whether this would remind them of a crime they did commit (selling their brother into slavery). The effect is immediate and they said to one another, “Surely we are being punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen.” The brothers have confessed and expressed remorse for what they did. The first stage of teshuvah has been accomplished.

The second takes place far away, but Joseph has so arranged matters that he will know regardless. With Shimon as hostage, Benjamin’s presence in Egypt is vital. Knowing his father as he does, Joseph has calculated, rightly, that Jacob will only let Benjamin go if his sons have convinced him that they will not let happen to him what they let happen to Joseph, as Judah says, “I myself will guarantee Benjamin’s safety…If I do not bring him back to you…I will bear the blame before you all my life.” The second condition of repentance has been achieved: a commitment not to repeat the offence, namely that they return without their youngest sibling unlike the previous time by Joseph.

The third act is a master-stroke. Joseph constructs a scene, one could almost call it a controlled experiment, 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, while 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. The brothers’ resentment of Joseph was heightened by the jealousy they felt at the sight of the many-colored robe Jacob had given him. How can he put them into a similar situation now? How can he provoke their envy against Benjamin? By arranging a meal where, “Benjamin’s portion was five times as much as anyone else’s.” This unexpected twist only makes sense if Joseph is emphatically trying to make them jealous of their youngest brother. Finally, as far as possible, the circumstances of their original crime have been replicated. A child of Rachel is about to be taken as a slave. They have reason to be jealous of him as they were of Joseph. But unlike before they now rise to the challenge.

The moment of truth has arrived. Joseph has offered the brothers a simple escape route. All they have to do is walk away. It is here that the story reaches its climax. Judah, the very brother responsible for selling Joseph, now offers to sacrifice his own freedom in behalf of Benjamin.

Since the circumstances are similar to what they were years earlier, Judah fulfills the conditions for complete repentance. Not dreams, not revenge, but teshuvah is what has driven Joseph all along. Joseph has more than survived; he has prospered, grown, and changed. But his concern is for his brothers. Have they changed? The entire sequence of events between the brothers’ first arrival in Egypt and the moment Joseph reveals himself is an extended essay in teshuvah, a precise rehearsal of what will later become normative Jewish law.

Why now? Because the family of Abraham is about to undergo exile. This must occur before they can become a nation. However, the trials and tribulations of exile will place more demands on Israel than on any other people in history. G-d knows that they will often fail. They will sin, complain, worship idols, and break His laws. That He accepts, though at times it gives Him great grief. While G-d does not demand perfection, He does ask that we acknowledge our mistakes and commit ourselves not to make them again…in a word, teshuvah. The brothers’ example paved the way, and so Jewish history could now begin.