Joseph’s brothers had gone down to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph recognizes them. They do not recognize him. Joseph accuses the brothers of being spies, holds brother Simon as hostage, and sends them back to father Jacob - replacing the money they had paid for the food back in the brothers’ respective sacks. When provisions in Canaan again run low, father Jacob sends the brothers back to Egypt, this time with brother Benjamin in tow, along with gifts for Joseph, further advising the brothers to return the money they had discovered in their grain sacks saying, “Perhaps it was a mistake.” Arriving back in Egypt, the brothers were brought to Joseph’s home by an eish, a man. Greatly afraid, the brothers feared they would be accused of robbery for the money discovered in their sacks. They attempt to explain to the man what had transpired and return the found money to him, but the man responds, “Your God and the God of your father must have put treasure in your bags for you.” To digress. A man goes into the bank to cash a check. The teller asks the man to endorse the back of the check but he refuses. “I will not and you can’t make me.” The assistant manager comes over and explains that if the man would just sign the back of the check they will cash it. Again the man refuses. The manger comes over to help, then the assistant Vice President of the bank, and then the Vice President until finally the man with the check and all the staff people who had tried to help arrive in the office of the CEO. The CEO asks everyone else to leave, invites the man to have a seat, looks him straight in the eye and says, “Sign the check or I’m going to punch you in the face.” The man signs the check. Back at the first window, the original teller asks, “What happened in the CEO’s office. We all asked you to sign the check and you refused.” “Oh,” said the man, “He explained it to me.” Jacob: Perhaps it was a mistake? The eish: No. Somehow, some way God was at work in all of this. So what seems at first a diversion, a minor element in the story line turns out to be the Torah’s subtle way of “explaining it” – a realization Joseph comes to and expresses more fully in this week’s parashah when he says to his brothers “So you see it was not you who sent me here but it was God, and it was to save life.” Notice though that in the first instance the “explanation” is given by an eish, a man, an anonymous, seemingly non-essential character in the narrative, just as Jacob wrestled with an eish in an earlier parashah and Joseph – when he cannot locate his brothers – is given directions to find them by an eish. Sometimes, the most unexpected characters take on a major instructional role in our lives as they ‘explain it’ to us, when they provide us with an abiding insight or an alternative way of looking at something. Such ‘explanations’ - like the metaphoric punch in the face – can sometimes come as a shock but they can also shape or re-shape our being in a powerful way; and when they do so they usually send us off with a better, more effective or more profound way of thinking and doing. Back in Milan, our Italian friend Cinzia would begin her texts to David with the salutation Tesoro. The word means ‘treasure’ indicating perhaps the very valued place his friendship had for her. Insight and explanation are also things to be valued as treasures – however and from whomever they come to us. And who is to say that the people who provide them, those who play the roll of eish for us, are not angels sent from on high to help us to make better sense of the living of our days? Shabbat Shalom Rabbi Whiman