Summary: Genesis 44:18−47:27
Our portion this week continues the story of Joseph. We begin as Judah pleads with Joseph to free Benjamin and offers himself as a replacement. At that point Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and forgives them for selling him into slavery. Although the famine still rages, Pharaoh invites Joseph's family to "live off the fat of the land." Jacob learns that Joseph is still alive and, with God's blessing, goes to Egypt. With the famine increasing, Joseph designs a plan for the Egyptians to trade their livestock and land for food. The Israelites thrive in Egypt.
Lesson:
There are many ways to derive lessons from the Torah. According to the rabbis, one of the unique ways to discover a lesson was to find contradictory verses in the same portion. Often there is a lesson to be learned from the contradiction between the two verses.
In our portion we find the very strange verse: “. . .all shepherds are abhorrent to Egyptians” (Genesis 46:34). The rabbis ask why the Torah points out this outwardly irrelevant verse. They provide us with a number of answers.
The great commentator Rashi answers: Because they (sheep) are regarded by them (Egyptians) as deities. Hizkuni, another medieval commentator provides a different reason. They (the Egyptians) feared that their destiny depended on them (the shepherds) and that they were slaves of the flock. A number of traditional and contemporary commentators provide a completely different reason. They suggest that the Egyptians were vegetarians who saw no benefit from keeping sheep. Finally, Rashbam, a great medieval commentator, adds that the Egyptians found the shepherds abominable simply because they hated them.
What all the commentators have in common is understanding the verse as teaching that the Egyptians hated a single class of people - they found all shepherds abhorrent.
The second verse I’d like to explore is also found in our portion this week. “His (Jacob’s) life is bound up with his (Benjamin’s)” (Genesis 44:30).
Radak, a great medieval commentator understood this verse to mean that the soul of the father and the son are deeply bound together. “Because of the great love that Jacob bears for Benjamin, Jacob’s soul will leave him if the brothers return from Egypt without Benjamin.” David Nozik, a Harvard philosopher, introduces another, much more modern, reading of this verse which teaches a more universal lesson. He writes, “Rather than thinking of ourselves as a discrete “I”, we now consider ourselves to be part of a “we”.
A friend and colleague from Los Angeles, Rabbi Brad Artson, suggests that the verse teaches us that “We don’t choose to feel pain when a loved one suffers, but we suffer that pain whether we want to or not…In growing to see ourselves as incomplete without another…we make possible the kind of growth of soul, the integration of another’s nefesh with our own, that is as close as we can come to the glimpsing of the divine.
All these rabbis seem to agree that by binding our souls with others, as Jacob did with Benjamin, we erase the boundaries separating ourselves and have the power to create a deep union between us and others.
In the first verse we explored today, we learn that the Egyptians find all shepherds abhorrent. The Egyptians simply aren’t open to the possibility that a single shepherd could be a good person, that shepherds are also human beings created in God’s image, just like the Egyptians.
In our second verse we learn that Jacobs’s soul was bound up with Benjamin’s, that one human being must overcome his or her ego and be willing to be part of a larger community. Each of our souls can be affected by the soul of another.
Two contradictory verses teach us two completely different lessons. Do we want to be like the Egyptians who hate an entire class of people for no reason? Or can we be more like Jacob and Benjamin and see that our souls are bound up with others around us? When we follow the lesson of Jacob and Benjamin, when we focus on the universal “we” instead of the individual “I”, we act in God’s image. It is precisely by opening ourselves to the other, by creating holy relationships, that we invite God into our lives and into the world.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Donald Goor