December 2007

Who doesn’t love a good story?!

One of the greatest stories in our tradition is that of Joseph and his brothers. How fortunate for us that through the serendipity of the Jewish calendar, every year during the season of Chanukah we receive this story as a special gift. We begin it from the Torah this year on Saturday, December 1, and continue through the following three weeks.

Even if the story is familiar, how could we ever tire of a family saga that has all the elements of an old-time melodrama: jealously! suspense! a handsome hero! a woman spurned! hidden identity! the invisible hand of God!

We are first introduced to Joseph when he is seventeen. He is a tattle-tale: “and Joseph brought bad reports [of his brothers] to his father.” He is so self-absorbed that he doesn’t realize that his brothers hate him. When he tells them of a dream, “they hated him even more.” That doesn’t stop Joseph from telling them yet another dream in which the sun, moon and stars bow down to him. It’s clear to his family that they are the sun, moon and stars, and that Joseph sees himself as the center of the universe.

The story unfolds from there: the brothers sell Joseph into slavery, Joseph rises then falls (into prison) then rises again, to become the most powerful person in Egypt except for Pharaoh. Twenty-two years after selling Joseph into slavery, during a famine in Canaan, his brothers come to Egypt seeking food. They do not recognize the man to whom they must appeal as the long-lost, presumed-dead Joseph. After many twists and turns of the plot, Joseph reveals his true identity to them and is soon after reunited with his father Jacob.

This summary does not begin to do justice to the artfulness of the plot or the human drama. I urge everyone to read the story in all its fullness. However my interest at this moment is with the conclusion of the family’s drama and the arch of Joseph’s life. His father and brothers do, indeed, all these years later bow down to him, as his dream had foretold. But he is no longer a self-absorbed adolescent; he has come to see the events of his life as fitting into a picture much larger than himself. He recognizes—as I believe we all must—that he is merely a vessel through which God flows.

The beauty of Joseph is that, in the end, he does not take personally either the harm done to him by his brothers or his later success and fame in Egypt. Of course these events were personal in that they happened to him. But he could see the larger view, the hidden pattern in the fabric. He says to his brothers, “Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me here; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.”

Joseph’s story is a lesson for us all. We begin life as a baby; all our experiences revolve around us. We can’t help but feel we are the center of the universe. The true goal of a purposeful life is to grow from that self-centered beginning: to gain knowledge, understanding and wisdom--not for their own sake, but in order to improve the world around us.

Like Joseph, may we come to see the events of our lives as part of a larger story in which we, too, are a vessel through which God flows.
L’Shalom,
Rabbi Helen