Parashat Vayigash is the Torah portion in which the story of Joseph reaches its climax. Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers and discloses that he is the one they sold into slavery. But with the happy ending of this family story, another story begins, one that will accompany us until the middle of the Book of Exodus: The story of the Israelites’ exile in Egypt.
Already in the covenant that God made with Abraham — the brit bein ha’betarim, or the Covenant Between the Parts — we learned that Abraham’s descendants would be exiled to the land of Egypt for many long years of bondage and slavery. So this chapter of the story is foreknown, not an accidental mishap. But that still begs the question: Why was Abraham’s family decreed to go into exile in Egypt for such a long period?
The Zohar views the descent to Egypt as a formative event in Jewish history and a vital milestone in the Jewish people’s path to being chosen by God. The key to understanding why actually comes earlier in Genesis, in another descent to Egypt. As will be recalled, Abraham was told by God to leave the place of his birth and go to a land that God would show him. In Abraham’s journey to the land of Canaan, the Zohar also sees another more significant journey — the quest for the hidden God. And indeed, Abraham finds God in Canaan, the land where the God of Israel dwells.
The Zohar describes Abraham’s journey in the land of Israel as one of ascent from level to level, or in the kabbalistic context from sefirah to sefirah, on his way to acquiring the sefirah of Hesed (Kindness), with which Abraham is identified. However, this story of ascent is interrupted in the biblical narrative by a descent: “And there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land of Canaan.” (Genesis 12:10). After tribulations in Egypt, Abraham and Sarah return to the land and continue their journey, both physical and spiritual. But the question remains: What is the significance of this descent to Egypt?
In answering this question, the Zohar’s formulates a principle that would later be embraced and revised by generations of kabbalists: Descent for the sake of ascent.
Come and see the mystery of the matter: Had Abram not gone down to Egypt and not been refined there at the outset, he would not have become a complete portion and inheritance of the Holy One, blessed be He.
So too with his children: When the Holy One, blessed be He, wished to make them one people, a whole people, and to draw them near to Him, had they not first gone down to Egypt and been refined there, they would not have been His singular people.
Similarly, had the Holy Land not been given first to Canaan, and had he not ruled over it, it would not have become the portion and inheritance of the Holy One, blessed be He. All of this is one mystery.
According to this passage, as part of his journey to the highest spiritual levels, Abraham had to first descend to the land of Egypt, which represents the realms of impurity, the Sitra Achra (literally “the other side”), a term the Zohar uses to refer to Satan and the realm of evil. To acquire holiness and cleave to God, Abraham had to first visit less sympathetic spiritual realms — evil in both its metaphysical roots and its manifestations on earth. The Zohar’s word for refinement, tzeruf, which also means purification or cleansing, sharpens the idea: In order to ascend to the heights of the metaphysical world, one must be cleansed through an encounter with evil.
We can find several versions of this idea in the Zohar – a moderate version and a more radical one. According to the milder version, the necessity of contact with evil is for the purpose of becoming familiar with it and learning how to deal with it — in effect, to know your enemy. In the more radical version, one needs not only familiarity with evil, but to experience it and to extricate oneself from it as a kind of forging or stage of initiation. The Zohar is careful not to propose this as operational guidance or recommendation. The principle is brought here only as explanation and justification for a story that already belongs to history – Abraham’s descent to Egypt.
And yet, in applying descent for the sake of ascent not only to Abraham but to his descendants, the Zohar elevates it into a mystical principle. Just as Abraham was forced to descend to Egypt in order to complete his spiritual ascent, so too his children were decreed to come into contact with the source of impurity as a condition for achieving the exalted status of God’s chosen ones. And not only that: Just like the Abraham and the children of Israel had to experience impurity, so did the land of Israel, which had to pass through the hands of the Canaanites (who represent in the Zohar one of the centers of impurity) before it could be sanctified and given to the children of Israel. The passage through the crucible of the Sitra Achra is a necessary stage on the path of purification. As the 16th-century Zohar commentator Rabbi Abraham Galante explained: “It is impossible to be perfected in perfection and to rise in one’s level, each person according to his deeds, except after descending to the external forces (hitzonim) and being extricated from them…”
This idea would go on to enjoy a long and complex history. In the 16th century, the disciples of Rabbi Isaac Luria emphasized the need to descend into the depths of evil in order to redeem the sparks of divine holiness from within the shells (klipot) of impurity. In the 17th century, the followers of Shabbetai Zevi used it to explain the apostasy of their messiah and his acceptance of Islam. Beginning in the 18th century, Hasidism suggested that their tzaddik, in his unique way of serving God, must visit defiled social and spiritual realms.
The practical implications of this idea are not at all simple, but the underlying idea is clear: There is no way to achieve ascent and sanctification in a sterile way — only through recognizing the evil in God’s world and being in close acquaintance with it.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
