What a terrific opening joke! Subtle but brilliant. It has what the best of jokes possess – the unexpected plus insight.

It has the added value in that it hints that the rabbi’s commentary will not be about Joseph as a philanthropist to the Egyptians and the surrounding peoples under Egypt’s sovereign protection. Further, Rabbi Jacobson seems to agree that the story will be about a common literary trope, recognition and disguises.

I do not know enough about the calculations of years or whether in this case it even matters, But I thought that Joseph was only 30 years old when he became viceroy. If he was thrown in the pit at the age of seventeen and nine years have passed since he became vizier of Egypt, then, in my calculation, and, I believe many others, the time between being thrown in the pit, his period of service as a slave and his years in prison together totalled 4 years whereas the Rabbi says that it was 12 years for the time spent in prison alone.

But the devil is in the details, including the details of interpretation. I noted the following additional, and, for me, more serious differences, even as I very much agree with Rabbi Jacobson that the story is one of the most dramatic in the Torah and, I would add, has the longest monologue, that of Judah:

1.     Rabbi Jacobson states that the revelation came after “decades of bitter separation,” but where is there any suggestion that the separation was bitter for either Joseph or his brothers. Joseph seemed never to have given his brothers (or, perhaps more surprising, his father) a thought during the long years of separation. And the only regret of the brothers seems to have been the guilt – perhaps too strong a word – or concern about their treatment of their brother turned into the bitterness to which they had subjected their father. Thus, if the years of separation were bitter, it does not seem to have been so for either Joseph or his brothers.

2.     Jacobson notes that Joseph was full of emotion when first reunited with his younger full blood brother, Benjamin. He dismissed his Egyptian servants and revealed himself to his brothers after weeping so loudly he could be heard throughout the palace. Thus, is unlikely he dismissed his servants in order not to be emotional in front of them. Therefore, the dismissal needs another explanation.

3.     Further, in the previous week’s portion, when Joseph first met Benjamin and was overcome with emotion, he left the company of his brothers to weep by himself. The question arises – why did he weep by himself the first time that he was overcome with emotion and fled both his courtiers and his brothers, but wept, again without his courtiers present, after Judah’s monologue.

4.     Clearly, Rabbi Jacobson is correct that Joseph’s emotionalism is an essential part of the tale, but this does not mean that it was not a calculated emotion as Jacobson implies..

5.     The rabbi translates “nivaloo” (נִבְהֲל֖וּ) as “horrified.” Now it is true that בָּהַל can mean “terrified,” but in the context, the suggested meaning is disturbed, or, I would translate it in this context as “tongue tied.” They were speechless, and true enough they do not say a thing. They do not respond. “Horrified” is just too strong a translation for the context, for, if anything, the context makes clear that they would no longer have to be afraid that Joseph would enslave their youngest brother, let alone take his life as they originally feared, and that their father would not die as a result of hearing the news. Thus, they would be dumbstruck rather than horrified.

6.     The brothers were incredulous. It was then that Joseph called to them to approach him, to come close to him, as if only in close proximity could he reassert a second time that he was their brother, Joseph, whom they had sold into slavery. Recall, that Judah was the one who maneuvered to save Joseph’s life not to have his blood on their hands and sold him into slavery rather than seeing him killed so Reuben would have been doubly dumbstruck because it would have been the first time he learned that Joseph had not been killed but had been sold as a slave.

7.     It is then that Joseph offers the explanation of God’s providence and interprets it to mean that they can escape responsibility for their actions. For it was all part of God’s plan so that they could be saved from the famine sweeping across the land. That explanation has to be read in the context of Joseph in the previous week’s portion where, before Judah delivered his monologue that opens Vayigash, Joseph told his brothers that he was a practitioner of divination – suggesting to them as a false reason why he knew about the planted goblet and why they could not hold back any secret from him, and hinting again about his larger role in the history of the Hebrews, namely that he could forecast their salvation by the Pharaoh and then their enslavement and finally escape from Egypt. What does the insistence upon being a diviner – a practice repeatedly condemned by our rabbis of old – mean when the other bracket to the scene is that Joseph claims it is all part of God’s plan, a claim he repeats 4 times?

8.     Rabbi Jacobson then inserts his own homily on a radical separation between emotions and the logic of calculation. But the real question is not whether emotions are governed by rules of their own, but whether the emotions have some calculus behind them. How genuine are they or are they part of a performance art, part of Joseph’s remarkable Machiavellian qualities?

9.     Jacobson raises 4 questions

a)     Why does Joseph when he now is in a context of privacy from Egyptian ears ask his brothers to come closer?

b)     Why does Joseph repeat to them that he is their brother?

c)     Why in the second time does he refer to the fact that he was the same brother whom they had sold into Egypt?

d)     Why does he even define himself as their brother the second time, but not the first?

10.  Before answering these questions, Jacobson makes a side remark that in this longest narrative in the whole of Genesis, a) that it is unbroken, and b) ‘there can be no doubt that its hero is Joseph.” But neither, I would contend, is correct and, at the very least, not self-evident.

a)     First, between chapters 37 to 44 covering the Joseph narrative, it is interrupted by chapter 38, the story of Tamar and how and why she tricked her father-in-law into sleeping with her and getting her pregnant. Such an important interposition in the story should and cannot be overlooked so, at the very least, its placement raises many questions.

b)     There is certainly no doubt that Joseph is the main protagonist in the story. But the hero?

c)     I now must introduce an aside. It is important to distinguish between the major protagonist and a hero, for in Shakespearian tragedy or in Attic tragedy, leading figure may be far from heroic. And when he is, say in Othello, his heroic qualities may just be a foil for the jealousy, for the naiveté that get him into trouble. Hamlet is no hero. Oedipus is no hero. Let us assume for the moment that Jacobson means “main protagonist” when he writes “hero”.

d)     Jacobson’s distinction between emotion and calculation may be similar to Aristotle’s differentiation between the two in insisting that tragedy is about the passions, and about compassion, and in the dialectic of the two, the audience is subjected to a catharsis, releasing fears and thereby cleaning the spectator of deformed emotions. Or, far less likely given the influence of Aristotle via Maimonides to Jewish commentary, he could have been referring to Nietzsche’s theory that tragedy is a dialectic, not between passion and compassion as two sides of emotion, but between emotion and what is referred to as calculation by Jacobson. I was not able to discern Jacobson’s position because his statements lacked precision.

11.   Rabbi Jacobson then asks a central question: will the real Joseph please stand up? He immediately states his main thesis: “Joseph’s life embodies the entire drama and paradox of human existence. Joseph on the outside was not the Joseph on the inside; his outer behavior never did justice to his authentic inner grace.” The rabbi then introduces another radical separation, not only passion offsetting calculation, but the outer life in contrast to the inner. Further, the rabbi insists that Joseph’s outer behaviour “never did justice to his authentic inner grace.” We now know for sure that when Jacobson wrote “hero” and not main protagonist, he meant hero, he meant in the sense of Attic tragedy that heroism was in the end a matter of great inner virtue. And here I thought that Covenantal ethics stands in stark contrast to the virtue ethics of the Greeks! And to top it off, Jacobson uses such a Christian virtue as “grace” to apply to Joseph.

12.  Simone Weil, an illustrious apostate Jew, in her opening lines in her volume, Gravity and Grace, defined grace as the only virtue set outside the laws of nature. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” Grace is light. Grace is about supernatural intervention. Lear, on the other hand, is a tragedy of gravity – when we need others most, others withdraw rather than come close. This is Weil’s sense of gravity.

13.  Grace, on the other hand, is about depth of character and it is impossible in Weil’s eyes for an emotion to be deep but base. The same action is easier if the motive is base. What usually explains a character’s actions – gravity, the natural laws of emotions, or grace, the rarer and only non-natural explanation for action. Grace is a matter of self-surrender not self-aggrandizement, of surrendering oneself to the will of God, or, in Christian terms, to Christ. Deliverance belongs to God not to man. Grace feeds on light not on gravity. For Weil, there is only one fault, the inability to feed on light, closing oneself off from divine revelation, from the imitation of Jesus “to do the will of Him who sent me.” Gravity makes things come down. Grace allows them to rise on the wings of the angels. But to be open to grace is to be open to the light of the divine that comes from above, then the narrative cannot be about a man’s capacity from divination, for seeing into the future through interpreting the hiss of snakes or the reading of Tarot cards.

14.  Joseph’s lifelong claim to having the arts of a diviner suggest at the very least that he was not open to grace, that his divining skills were but attributes of the divine planted in him so that he could foresee the future. One suspects that Joseph is the same arrogant kid he was at seventeen, was the same kid who spread malicious gossip about his brothers to his father, and was the same kid who would grow up to be the Pharaoh’s viceroy and use the occasion of the famine and the ability to distribute food from the Pharaoh’s coffers to deprive the Egyptians of their land and turn them into serfs. How does such an action demonstrate “a soul on fire with moral passion”? Hero! Are you kidding? Possessing the virtue of Grace! Joseph with all his natural brilliance, with all his phenomenal administrative skills, with all his cleverness in manipulating others, is hardly a person exemplifying grace.

15.  “Joseph’s singular condition – embodying the paradox of the human condition -- is poignantly expressed in one biblical verse: ‘Joseph recognized his brothers but they did not recognize him.’ Joseph easily identified the holiness within his brothers. After all, they lived most of their lives isolated as spiritual shepherds involved in prayer, meditation and study. Yet these very brothers lacked the ability to discern the moral richness etched in the depth of Joseph's heart. Even when Joseph was living with them in Israel, they saw him as an outsider, as a danger to the integrity of the family of Israel. Certainly, when they encountered him in the form of an Egyptian leader, they failed to observe beyond the mask of a savvy politician the heart of a Tzaddik, the soul of a Rebbe.” If Joseph is an exemplar of the soul of a Rebbe, then no one should desire to be a Rebbe.

16.  To read the pshat that Joseph recognized his brothers but they did not recognize him as having a deeper meaning that the brothers could not see into the soul of Joseph is beyond credibility. When the brothers lived with Joseph in Israel, Rabbi Jacobson is correct – they saw Joseph as endangering them and the integrity of the family. Surely they were correct, not in their action but in their implied thoughts. Joseph used the fact that he was handsome, used the fact that he was an aesthete, and parlayed in malicious gossip. Everything he did was to set father against son and brother against brother. He was a danger to the integrity of the family. And, in the end, because of his economic foresight and his administrative skills, and with some luck thrown in, he reached an unexpected prominence, but instead of using it to reinforce his family in Israel, he drew them all out to the land of Goshen, thereby eventually subjecting the Hebrews to the wrath of the Egyptians fed up with a Hebrew interloper who had reduced them to serfs. Because of Joseph, some years of great heights, but many more bitter years of slavery and alienation from the promised land. A hero with a soul of grace!!! Come on.

17.  Rabbi Jacobson offers as an illustration Joseph’s actions in rejecting the advances of Potiphar’s wife. But look at Joseph’s explanation for his rejection. It would not be in my self-interest for the foundation of my position is trust. If he slept with Potiphar’s wife, he would betray that trust and put everything at risk. The decision is a matter of consequential calculation, not moral conviction. It is one thing to read into the text. It is another to read into the text and ignore what is said before one’s eyes.

18.  If the Kaballah sees Joseph as the exemplar of the blaze hidden within the dark hole, then it is a neo-Platonist tract written by those who seek the perfect hidden form within and in spite of the detritus of daily life, when, in grace, the light is visited upon one and is not a given in one’s DNA. That is, if you believe in grace.

19.  I am afraid that Rabbi Jacobson neither understands Joseph nor comprehends what grace is.

20.  Finally, I confess that I have as hard a time with heroic misty-eyed biblical interpretation as I do with heroic history. Both are assaults on intelligence that constructs an ideal edifice built on sand and ignoring evidence before one’s very eyes. As just another example from the few cited above, Rabbi Jacobson makes a repeated point that Joseph asked his brothers to approach him, But the parshat begins with Judah approaching Joseph without any urging from the latter. That raises the possibility that even in Rabbi Jacobson’s interpretation, and perhaps more so, Judah is approaching the other rather than ordering the others to approach him, and this is a far greater exemplar of grace and insight than Joseph’s behaviour. Further, he might already have suspected that the vizier was Joseph.

Ignoring the citations which remind me of the praises Eastern European scholars gave to Marx when their governments were under the thumb of Russia within the USSR but papers that had little or no connection with Marxist theory, what is one to make of the concluding sentence: “The eternal lesson of Joseph is that the individual journey of your life, in all of its ups and downs, is what will ultimately allow you to discover your unique place in this world as a servant of G-d.”?

Howard