Parashat Vayeshev - The Blind Prophet

BS”D

The Yosef narrative is one of the richest and most complex in all TaNaCh. These few Parshiyot – from Yaakov’s return to Canaan through to the end of Sefer Bereshit – contain enough depth and complexity to occupy several lifetimes. In this section, the themes of all of Sefer Bereshit come together, forming the nucleus of the cell from which shall emerge the Moshe story, and the future of Klal Israel. As we have seen, the Greatness of Yaakov is, at this stage, inchoate. To bring Yaakov to an awareness of, and thereby to a full exercise of his own greatness requires not merely a catalytic event, but in effect an entire catalytic lifetime. Yosef, no lesser in greatness than his father, requires no less jarring a sequence of life events, spread over a period of decades, to bring his own light burning to the surface. Yosef will bring to the fore his father’s painful struggle with dream and prophecy.

In Yosef, the prophetic power of Dream is fully realized; yet he suffers as does Prometheus, in that he can foretell the future for those around him, but – though he strives unerringly towards his greater Destiny – he is incapable of reading his own fate. There is a dispute between Rashi and the Ramban as to why Yosef proceeds to seek out his brothers at the beginning of the Parsha. Why does Yaakov send Yosef out? Apparently, Yosef is being dispatched on a mission to spy on his own brothers. At 37:12 we are told that Yosef’s brothers went to pasture their father’s flocks at Shechem, a town which was the scene of the bloody massacre inflicted by Shimon and Levi after the incident of Dina and Shechem, the son of Hamor. It is often observed that the residents of the surrounding countryside lived in fear of the brothers of Dina. But Yaakov is also concerned that, in response to the massacre, the other inhabitants of the land will rise up and slaugter him and his household. In light of Yaakov’s concern, it is perhaps more understandable that he sends Yosef to check on his sons and flocks.

Consider: Yaakov’s ten sons, together with the basis of his wealth, are sitting in a barren spot, surrounded by enemies. It is provocative, to say the least, as though to rub in the face of the rest of Canaan the slaughter of the inhabitants of Shechem. Yaakov sends Yosef to “look to the wellbeing of your brothers, and the wellbeing of the flocks” (37:14), a not unreasonable concern.

Yosef arrives at Shechemm to find the place deserted. He is apparently thrown into some confusion, and the text ties him in this moment to the Destiny of Abraham, and of Yaakov. In verse 15 we are told Yosef is to’eh ba-sadeh – erring about in the field. This is the same language used by Abraham, and echoed poetically by Yaakov, to describe wanderings. Specifically, to introduce the concept of being separated from the houses of their fathers – a fate which is about to befall Yosef.

The “man” who finds Yosef is taken to be the Angel Gabriel. Rashi states that Gabriel informs Yosef that his brothers have gone off to take counsel and come up with a legal rationale for putting him to death. The Ramban argues that this can not be the case, for Yosef would not have gone forward if he knew what fate awaited him. But perhaps both are true: Perhaps the Angel Gabriel does tell Yosef that his brothers are seeking legal grounds to kill him. And perhaps Yosef is aware that there is no legal justification for this action, and so he proceeds. And perhaps Yosef, as is true of so many prophets in world literature, is able to see quite clearly what will befall others, but can not perceive that his sentence of death will be commuted to life in the prison of Mizraim.

Mizraim is the highest attainment of human society. What, then, is the punishment in being sent to live there? In material terms, a slave in the house of Pharaoh is far better off than a shepherd in the Judaean desert. And this is, in fact, precisely the dichotomy: the same tension that drove Terach to flee Ur Kasdim; that drove Abram to the desert, leaving Lot to the cities; that will ultimately bring us Torah in the wilderness – this is at work here as well. There is a theme running through Torah of the difficulty of reaching spiritual goals in the city. Settled societies give rise to group values, often based on the gathering and protecting of assets, and not on a spiritual quest. Repeatedly, it is only when one is an outcast – whether in the wilderness, like Moshe and Klal Israel, or on the road, like Yaakov and Yehudah – that one has the possibility of spiritual awakening. Cities have their own gods; indeed, they become their own gods. Pharaoh is both temporal king and cosmic deity of Mizraim. Clearly, Torah can never be given in this setting.

What are the indicia of the greatness of Mizraim? Aside from the great engineering feats that are still known to us today, we have a clear demonstration from the Gemara. I owe this insight to Shmuel Yaakov Zeffren, my Chavrutah and my teacher, from whom I continue to learn so much. We are told that Pharaoh and Yosef were able to converse freely because Pharaoh knew all living languages, with the exception of Hebrew. Yosef’s intellectual greatness is that he speaks the Language of Creation, in addition to the languages of humanity. But Yosef learned the seventy languages while in prison in Mizraim. During his imprisonment, an angel came to him each day and taught him the languages of the world. But Pharaoh had no such angel to teach him. Rather, Pharaoh learned these languages as a result of his own intellectual prowess, and by dint of his own human effort. How much greater is the mind that can grasp things on its own, than the mind that receives its knowledge from an angel!

To what, then, does this advanced civilization aspire? Alas, it appears that intellectual sophistication, coupled with extraordinary achievements in science and engineering and social structure – all of these ultimately are placed at the service of nothing more exalted than human appetites. Like Shakespeare’s Venice, Mizraim is a society created for its own furtherance. It seeks achievement and attains achievement – in science and in commerce, in government, in city planning and in social programs. But ultimately, the presence of even a single outsider – be it Othello the Moslem, be it Shylock the Jew – brings the moral bankruptcy of the system rushing to the surface like an erupting geyser. For, in Egypt, all that people want – all that the power and powerfulness of this society is brought to bear upon – is the fulfillment of their appetites.

While the concept of Original Sin is foreign to us, we nonetheless acknowledge that there was an original sin: a point at which sin originates in the human narrative. This point was when Chava ate the fruit. We have observed elsewhere that G-d commanded only Adam not to eat the fruit; that when the serpent enters into dialogue with Chava, he is asking her a trick question: G-d only commanded Adam because at the time there was no one else. Chava, a distinct being, is perhaps not subject to the ban on eating from the Tree, or at any rate perhaps may believe the argument. Her sin consists in two actions (Bereshit 3:6): she sees the fruit, and she takes the fruit. The unmitigated, the unconsidered, the uncontemplated and un-moraled-out direct passage from desire to fulfillment is precisely the Matter that Torah comes to address. If humans act purely on appetite, purely on desire, then there is no hope for building a just and lasting society, no hope of bringing G-d into the world. No hope, ultimately, of attaining even our own truest and more meaningful desires for emotional and intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. The postponing of fulfillment is not only for those who wish to live a spiritually exalted life. It is the basic component of growing up.

The sin of Shechem is that he sees Dinah, and he takes her. Yehuda sees Tamar, and he approaches her. Yehuda is redeemed when he recognizes and acknowledges his own actions, and thus the redemption of the family of Yaakov begins. But, for the rest of the world, the morality of “If it feels good, do it,” continues to reign. The morality of Mizraim.

We have seen the origins of prayer in the story of Abraham’s servant, how he asks G-d for a speedy and successful journey. Perhaps he is merely lazy, for no sooner does he arrive in Haran than he asks that his trip be crowned with success. He does not even want to unpack the camels. And, indeed, the fulfillment of his prayer arrives even as the words are still in his mouth. But it is not the Servant’s request that constitutes prayer. Rather, as we have seen, it is the triple telling of the sequence of events: he asked G-d for help, he experienced the fulfillment of that request, and he tells over the experience of having G-d grant his wish. This is the basic structure of Jewish prayer: we do not ask for miracles; rather, we acknowlege that there have been miracles. That, as the Ramban points out forcefully, we live constantly surrounded by miracles, even if they are not visible to us as such. Our praise of G-d is not so much asking for new miracles as it is acknowledging, retelling and praising G-d for past and present miracles.

This week’s Parasha introduces us to the prayer of Mizraim. The prayer of Zuleika, the wife of Potiphar.

Rashi gives us a fascinating insight into the workings of Egyptian society when, in next week’s Parasha (41:42-45) Pharaoh gives Yosef a ring, then places “the” golden collar around his neck, then marries him to Osnat, daughter of Potiphar. The sexual imagery of the Yosef narrative is extremely frank. The collar which Pharaoh places on Yosef’s neck is clearly a specific and significant one; the ring and the collar are outward signs of two things: that Yosef bears Pharaoh’s authority, but also that Yosef is Pharaoh’s property. When Pharaoh marries Yosef to Osnat, Rashi tells us that Potiphar falls into despair and emasculates himself because he so passionately desired Yosef for himself as a sexual partner. In fact, the life of a slave in the ancient world included satisfying the master’s whims, which could also be sexual in nature. The story of Yosef and Mrs. Potiphar reveals her own deep despair. Potiphar is out of the house all day, every day. When she finds herself alone with Yosef, she – perhaps presumptuously – takes upon herself the rights of Owner and commands the household slave to lie with her, presumably as he is forced to lie with the master of the household. When the story reaches its high point, and Yosef flees the house, leaving his garment in her hands, she goes through the same three-stage formula we saw in the story of the Servant and Rivkah.

Prayer, in TaNaCh, comes primarily from women. And it has principally to do with bringing children into the world. The individuals who recognize G-d unbidden, who address G-d directly, are women. Chava is the first person (Bereshit 4:1) to utter the name of G-d. Hagar (Bereshit 16:13) addresses G-d by name, saying, “I recognize you. You’re the one who keeps coming around Abraham’s tent.” While we accept that Hannah is the originator of prayer as we know it, it has its deep origins in the tales of marriage and childbearing throughout Sefer Bereshit. When, at 25:22, Rivkah is experiencing a difficult pregnancy, she picks herself up and goes to speak with G-d, as one would visit the family doctor. When, at 29:32, Leah is the first to give birth, she echoes Chava and invokes the name of G-d in naming her firstborn son. The story of the Servant, which gives to prayer its original form, is the story of a man sent to find a wife for another man. Rachel asks her husband to pray that she, too, might have children, and Yaakov, at the end of his life, breaks down and admits to Yosef that he, Yaakov, was afraid to pray, and thus the birth of Yosef is all the more miraculous.

Rashi links Potiphar’s wife to this lineage, giving her the status of a Righteous Woman. He tells us that she foresaw that Yosef was destined to have children from her, and so she attempted to make it happen, not realizing that the prophecy applied not to herself, but to her daughter Osnat. If the Midrash is the inner psyche of Torah, this reading of the episode of Yosef and Potiphar's wife reveals a conflict that itself is worth a year on the analyst’s couch.

The Yosef narrative, as told in the Kor’an, is rich in sensual imagery. The Kor’an is much more frank about the power of Yosef’s physical beauty. Poriphar’s wife is given a name – Zuleika – and a personality to match. When she accuses Yosef of trying to rape her, her husband drags her out in public and calls her a liar. When the women of the town mock her for her infatuation with the Hebrew boy, she invites them to her house for a snack. She serves fresh oranges, handing them around with small sharp knives for the women to slice the fruits. Then, without warning, she draws aside a curtain and Yosef enters the room. The women are so struck by the power of his immense beauty that they lose themselves, and long moments pass before they realize that, in their sensual reverie under the sway of his potent beauty, they have each sliced through the fruits and right into their own palms, the blood flowing and dripping down their elbows, mingled with the juice of the oranges…

For what does a Mizri pray? Starting at 39:12, the triple narrative structure of prayer begins. Freely translating: 12: And she grabbed him by his garment saying, “Lie with me!” And he abandoned his garment in her hand and fled outside. 13: Then, as she saw that he had abandoned his garment in her hand and had fled outside, 14: then she called to the people of her household and spoke to them and said “Look! He has brought us this Hebrew man to Tsaheq us. He came to me to have sex with me, and I called out in a great voice, 15: and when he heard that I lifted up my voice and called out, he abandoned his garment with me and fled and went outside. She then retells the sequence of events once more when her husband returns home. The use of the word Tsaheq in verse 14 is, of course, evocative of the Yitzhak story. It appears in the interaction between Ishmael and his baby brother, and again in the interaction between Yitzhak and Rivkah, and clearly bears some incidental implication of an intimate relationship, if not an explicit connotation. Generally translated here as “to mock”, it certainly recalls to mind the sexual playfulness that led Avimelech immediately to recognize that Yitzhak and Rivkah were husband and wife. Zuleika’s prayer is the prayer of a woman who is bitterly disappointed.

We Jews are also familiar with this kind of prayer. We pray, on Tisha Be’Av, as we recall the devastation of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, the slaughter and miserable deaths by starvation of millions of our ancestors. In the Ashkenazic Yom Kippur ritual, we recite the tragic slaughter of the holy martyrs. We beg G-d three times each day to return us to a world of righteous judgement, to accept our own personal Teshuva, to rebuild Jerusalem, to return us from exile and bring the ultimate redemption. All of these are things that have not happened. That, in a rational and atheistic view of the world, have no reason to happen. But we pray because, in our history, we know they have happened. Because our tradition teaches us that they will happen again. And, most powerfully, because, invisible and insensible though the process may be to our own perception, they are occurring right now. Constantly. Eternally.

Zuleika’s prayer is the bitter prayer of disappointment. And, by the way, here is another of the dysfunctional marriages the Torah is so chock-full of. Her husband is never around. When he is, he is too fixated on Yosef to pay any attention to his own wife. “The slave of my household?!” the Kor’an has him thundering at her in righteous wrath. And can’t you just hear her shouting back at him – “Potti! I have needs!” She desired Yosef. She was thwarted in her desire, and her mounting passion turned to bitterness and rage. Her prayer is the bitterness of impotent desire.

We may also not attain our wishes, our appetites may go unmet, our desires unfulfilled. We have suffered great calamity and tragedy in the past. G-d forbid, we may well suffer it again. Our lot is perhaps no better than that of any other group of people. Yet, we persist throughout human history, and the greatness that was Egypt now dwells in the museums of the West, in children’s picture books, and in expensive film productions. Torah is the lense through which we examine our lives. The interpreter that stands between us and the world. If all that Halachah accomplishes is to slow us down and make us ponder a moment before we act, it has attained its goal of transforming human existence.

Yours for a better world.