Yosef the Hebrew
Student Summaries of Sichot of the Roshei Yeshiva
Yeshivat
Har Etzion
Parashat
VAYIGASH
GUEST SICHA BY
Yosef the
Hebrew
Summarized by
Translated by
A very strange
aspect of this week's parasha is the extensive coverage that the Torah
gives to the story of Yosef's economic plan for Egypt. Why are we told all of this in such
detail? The matter becomes even more puzzling when we find that the steps that
Yosef institutes are not those that we would expect a servant of God to resort
to. He ends up profiting from the
enslavement of the Egyptians, exploiting them simply because they have no food
to eat!
We may solve
this problem by considering another question. When Yaakov asks Yosef to bury him in
Canaan, Yosef tells him, "I will do as you say" – but Yaakov then immediately
asks again, "Swear to me," and Yosef swears again. Why did Yaakov not suffice with Yosef's
initial agreement? Why did he need him to swear again?
We see that
Yosef finds himself in a very delicate position in Egypt. On the one hand, he is a Hebrew, a
member of a despised race that cannot even eat together with the Egyptians. On the other hand, he is second to the
king; everything that happens in the country is by his word, and it is he who
distributes food to the entire nation.
For this reason, Yosef chooses not to make a public display of his Jewish
identity; he expresses it in the confines of his home, while outwardly he is a
"loyal Egyptian," doing whatever Pharaoh wants.
The one time
that Yosef is forced to remove his "good Egyptian" mask is when Yaakov needs to
be buried. When Yaakov dies, all of
Egypt mourns for him for seventy days, and then the obvious course of events is
for him to be buried in Egypt. But
Yosef is obliged – since he swore – to bury his father in Eretz Yisrael. Here it becomes apparent that no matter
how much he looks or acts like an Egyptian, he remains a despised
Hebrew.
It is for this
reason that Yaakov insists that Yosef swear, because he knows that it will be
his most difficult test, forcing him to remove all his Egyptian trappings. It is for the same reason that the Torah
describes Yosef's attempt, through his economic plan, to be a faithful Egyptian
and to keep his true identity under wraps.
How ironic it is that Yosef, who invents the concept of slavery in Egypt
– solely in order to please Pharaoh and to prove his loyalty – is the one to
initiate the process that ultimately leads to the enslavement of Bnei
Yisrael. Yosef, who introduces mass
slavery into Egypt, ultimately causes his own descendants to become slaves.
From this
perspective, the story of Yosef is paradigmatic. It is the story of the Jew in galut, who
rises to positions of influence within a non-Jewish context. It is the story of decisions he makes,
some questionable from the perspective of Jewish morality, in order to
demonstrate his loyalty to the social or political environment in which he finds
himself. In the end, it makes no
difference what he does in order to look and act like the other nations and to
hide his Jewish identity. At some
stage, he will be identified as a Jew and his loyalty will be called into
question, in a typical anti-Semitic fashion. At that point we will be reminded who we
really are.
(This sicha was
delivered on Shabbat Parashat Vayigash 5762 [2001].)