Don’t Just Stand There--Do Something!
Preventing the
brothers from taking positive action during the famine, fear also paralyzes us,
rendering us incapable of addressing our most pressing spiritual, familial, and
societal problems.
By Rabbi Neal Joseph Loevinger
The following article
is reprinted with permission from Kolel: The
Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning.
Overview
At the end of last week's parsha, Yosef [Joseph] is in prison on false charges,
after resisting the advances of his Egyptian master's wife. This week, there is
a remarkable change in his situation: he is brought out of prison to interpret
Pharaoh's dreams, which warn of famine in the future. When he proposes a kind
of nationalization of the Egyptian economy in order to deal with the upcoming
famine, he is made Egypt's "Prime Minister" in order to implement the
plan.
The famine reaches up in to the land of Israel, so Yaakov
[Jacob] sends his sons down to Egypt to buy food; there they encounter Yosef,
who recognizes them, but they think they are dealing with a high Egyptian
official.
Yosef sets in motion a plot to unite all the brothers in
Egypt--he accuses them of being spies, and demands they bring Binyamin, the
youngest, who had been left with Yaakov. They go back to Israel and get
Binyamin, but Yosef is still plotting a test for them; he plants a cup in
Binyamin's bag, to make it appear he stole it, thus giving him a pretext to
take the youngest brother as a servant.
In Focus
"When Yaakov saw that there were provisions to be had
in Egypt, he said to his sons: 'Why are you looking [like that]? I hear that
there are provisions to be had in Egypt. Go down and provide for us from there,
that we may live and not die.'" (Genesis 42:1-2)
Pshat
The famine that Yosef predicted, based on Pharaoh's dream,
has begun, and reaches all the way up to the land of Israel, where Yaakov and
his family live. He directs the 10 oldest sons to go down to Egypt to buy food,
keeping the youngest, Binyamin, at home.
Drash
Yaakov asks a bizarre question of his sons: "lama titra-u?" which presents a
challenge to properly translate and understand. Hebrew has a form for verbs
which makes them reflexive, which means that the action of the verb happens to
the subject of the verb, and this case, Yaakov's question is framed in the
reflexive form of the verb "to see." Alternatively, sometimes the
reflexive form expresses reciprocal action, two or more people doing the same
thing to each other. So what could lama
titra-u in a time of famine mean?
Rashi [medieval Torah commentator] thinks it means "why do you make
yourselves conspicuous?" or "why do you cause yourself to appear a
certain way?" Rashi thinks Yaakov is warning his sons not to make the
Ishmaelites or the descendants of Esav jealous or resentful, which could happen
if they think that the Israelite clan has lots of food while everybody else
goes hungry.
This is a sound moral teaching: don't be so proud that you
can't admit when you're in trouble, or else you're just going to cause
resentment in those around you. However, I don't think it fits the situation
exactly: I don't see any other textual hint that the problem here is the
perceptions of the other tribes or clans. To me, it seems like Yaakov is
addressing a family problem.
One commentator, Ibn Ezra (12th century Spain), partially agrees
with Rashi's reading, but adds that maybe our key phrase means, "don't
fight with each other." Now I think we're onto something--I might read
this as "don't just stand there and fight each other when there is a
famine, we have to act together if we're going to solve this problem."
This makes sense to me, and would fit with the 10 brother's previously
demonstrated capacity to turn on each other (i.e., the way they did with
Yosef).
Following this theme of Yaakov addressing the dynamics of the brothers themselves,
the commentary I like best comes from the 15th century Italian rabbi Ovadiah
S'forno, popularly known as "the S'forno."
He reads lama titra-u as "why
are you looking at each other?" Sforno is picking up on a basic human
tendency to just ignore or deny problems, hoping that they will go away. He
adds that, "each brother expected his fellow" to go and get the food
they needed.
S'forno's reading of our verse makes the most sense to me because I can imagine
all the emotional dynamics in this situation: there is a famine, which was
probably the kind of disaster which didn't happen suddenly but slowly built up
over time, thus allowing each person to hope that somebody else was going to
take the lead in addressing the problem.
Furthermore, it wasn't the kind of problem--yet--that
demanded immediate action; one could always hope that maybe tomorrow things
will get better, and thus a cycle of denial and procrastination sets in,
sometimes right up until the point when it's too late to take effective action.
We don't have to look farther than any day's headlines to see examples of this
all-too-human tendency: there are pressing environmental problems which we each
hope somebody else will make sacrifices to solve; there are homeless people on
the streets; there are children in poverty; there are political, moral and
social issues which are crying out for attention. It's so easy just to
"look at each other," hoping somebody else will emerge with the
courage and energy to name and address a problem which we know in our hearts is
looming ahead of us.
Yet so often people seem paralyzed, unable or unwilling to take risks for a
better world. In the case of the 10 brothers, I wonder if their collective
unwillingness to go down to Egypt had to do with a dread of what they might
find there.
Going back to chapter 37, we recall that the last the
brothers had seen Yosef, they had sold him to a travelling caravan, on its way
to Egypt (37:25-28). Could it be that their buried guilt and fear of
confronting the past was so great that they didn't want to go to Egypt, even to
buy necessary food, in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the
living fact of their awful secret?
Maybe the real problem here is not merely complacency, or laziness, but fear.
Fear not only of taking responsibility for oneself, but also fear of the truth.
Yet no pressing problem can be solved without dedication to the truth above
all; not our family problems, not our social problems, and not our spiritual
problems.
We can "look at each other" and evade the truth as
long as we like, but eventually reality catches up with us. The other choice is
clear: we can join together to "go down to Egypt and provide for
ourselves"--that is, take the risk of confronting the truth about whatever
problem confronts us, "that we may live."
Rabbi Neal Joseph
Loevinger is currently the rabbi of Temple Israel of Swampscott and Marblehead,
MA. A former student at Kolel, he
served as Kolel’s Director of Outreach from late 1999-2001. He was ordained in the first graduating
class of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the University of Judaism,
and holds a Master’s of Environmental Studies from York University in Toronto.
