Dvar Torah on Parshat Vayechi

We are now at the end - the end of the Book of Genesis, the end of the story of Yosef and his brothers, the end of Yaakov's life - and Yosef's - the end of the period of the patriarchs, and the end of Jewish life in the land of Israel - for the time being.

Yaakov has died, and been buried in Cannan. His children have all come back to Egypt. The brothers' fear that, with Yaakov gone, Yosef will now take his revenge for what they did to him years earlier is proven to be unfounded. Yosef reassures his brothers,  takes care of them, and they all seem to live happily ever after in the Land of Goshen. Yosef lives to see his great grandchildren, and the feeling we get, as he and his brothers approach the end of their lives, is one of peace and tranquility; the brothers have been reconciled and have found a home in Egypt.

At this stage, I think the reader would be well within his or her rights to point out that the Jewish story has taken a wrong turn. Years have passed, the famine is over, surely, if Yosef and his brothers wanted to return to the land of Canaan, which was promised to their fathers, they could have done so.  It would seem that they have simply forgotten all about their covenant with God, and His promise concerning the holy land, and are - understandably, given Yosef's position - ready to simply move on and make their lives, and their futures, in Egypt. 

And then, at the very end of the parsha, Yosef reminds them: "And Yosef said to his brothers 'I am dying, and God will surely remember you, and bring you up from this land to the land which He swore to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov'. And Yosef had the children of Israel swear saying 'God will surely remember you and you will [then] bring my bones up from here'. And Yosef died at the age of 110, and he was enbalmed and placed in a casket in Egypt."

It would seem that Yosef knows that the past has, indeed, been forgotten, and that the Jewish people will not, of their own volition, remember the covenant with God and return to Israel. He therefore tells them that the ball is in God's court: If you won't remember, and act, He will, and He will ultimately bring the people of Israel back to their land. In the meanwhile, the people of Israel will be passive, awaiting the time when God will remember them, the covenent, and the promised land.

How could this happen? How could Yosef and his brothers so quickly forget and abandon their destinies, their identities, their recent past and the promise God made to their fathers about their future? Have they really completely lost contact with the legacy of their fathers, Avraham, Yitzcvhak, and Yaakov? Have they really forgotten who they are? And if so, how did that happen?

I would like to take us back to an earlier part of the story. Yosef has successfully interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh, and has been made viceroy. He is given a wife, Osnat, with whom he has children. He calls the first-born Menashe, saying "for the Lord has caused me to forget all my struggles and all that happened in my father's house". Apparently, Yosef's success in Egypt has done to him what success is meant to do - it has helped him forget all the terrible difficulties which preceeded his success - especially what happened "in my father's house" - the way his brothers treated him.  Already at this stage of the story, making it in Egypt enables Yosef to forget the trauma of his awful interactions with his brothers in his father's house, and all that that led to.

Perhaps this same dynamic is what explains the behavior of Yosef's brothers as well. Their life in Canaan ended very badly indeed. The sale of Yosef as a slave to Egypt, Yaakov's ongoing, never-ending mourning for the loss of his beloved son, and the guilt they obviously felt (all through their interaction with Yosef, the brothers mention Yosef's disappearance, and the fact that their father's heart was broken by it) all add up to extremely negative  memories of life with their father in Canaan. A new life, in Egypt, will give them a chance to put these bad memories behind them, and start anew. This is what Egypt meant to Yosef, which is why he named is son Menashe, in recognition of forgetting his difficult past, and this is what Egypt was for his brothers.

It would seem that even a commitment as strong as the patriarchal covenant with God, and His promise of the land of Canaan, can be undermined by what actually happens in the land of Canaan. The actual lived experience there - the sale of Yosef, Yaakov's depression, would seem to trump the theoretical attachment to the land, and the covenant. Put plainly: what happened back home made the Israelites never want to go home again, no matter what they are meant to believe about their connection to that home.  They will have to wait for at a time when Egypt will no longer be a haven from trauma, but, rather, a place of even greater trauma, for God to remember them, and remind them, where  their home, and their destiny, really is.

Our relationship to the land of Israel, and to God's promise of that land, would seem to depend more on our ability to be better brothers than Yosef's were, and build healthy, happy lives there, than on any theoretical connection to it. Our commitment to Israel is strongest when we avoid doing what the brothers did to Yosef and Yaakov, when we manage to create a family/society without the jealousy, selfishness, and falsehood that typified the interactions between Yosef and his brothers. That Israel was one which Yosef and his brothers preferred to forget, and not return to, until, in extremis, God called on them to do so, and leave the slavery of Egypt behind.  That kind of Israel, today, would, God forbid, stimulate a similar rejection in our hearts and minds, and lead us to forget the covenant, forget the land, so that we can forget the trauma of what happened there. 

On Friday we will be remembering the destruction of the first Temple with the fast of the tenth day of Tevet. Our failure back then, some 2500 years ago, to create a healthy society is what is traditionally understood to have led to the destruction. A similar  thing is understood to have happened at the destruction of the second Temple - the rot in Jewish society is seen as its ultimate cause. It may well be that this failure to create a just and healthy society has even further-reaching effects than "just" the Temple's destruction: it is easy - healthy, even -  to forget about, and abandon, a disfunctional society. This may explain why, though we do remember the Temple and its destruction, it took us a very long time - almost two thousand years - to "remember" to leave the Diaspora and return to the land - the scene of the crime. Now that we have gotten over it, and are back here in Israel,  giving it another shot, we dare not make the same mistake again. 

Shabbat Shalom, and have an easy fast,

Rabbi Shimon Felix