No audio this week (service canceled)
This weeks portion called va-yee-gash (translated “And He Come Near”) is from Genesis 44:18 – 47:27.
In this week’s Torah treading, Vayigash, Judah responds to Joseph’s demand that Benjamin remain enslaved in Egypt, pleading to be taken as a substitute. Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers. At Joseph’s request, Jacob and his family come down to Egypt.
Please stand while I read from the parsha:
Gen 44:27 Then your servant my father said to us, ‘You know that my wife bore me two sons.
Gen 44:28 One left me, and I said, Surely he has been torn to pieces, and I have never seen him since.
Gen 44:29 If you take this one also from me, and harm happens to him, you will bring down my gray hairs in evil to Sheol.’
Gen 44:30 “Now therefore, as soon as I come to your servant my father, and the boy is not with us, then, as his life is bound up in the boy’s life,
Gen 44:31 as soon as he sees that the boy is not with us, he will die, and your servants will bring down the gray hairs of your servant our father with sorrow to Sheol.
Gen 44:32 For your servant became a pledge of safety for the boy to my father, saying, ‘If I do not bring him back to you, then I shall bear the blame before my father all my life.’
Gen 44:33 Now therefore, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my lord, and let the boy go back with his brothers.
Gen 44:34 For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the evil that would find my father.”
Based on an article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
The sequence from Bereishit 37–50 is the longest unbroken narrative in the Torah, and there can be no doubt who its hero is: Joseph. The story begins and ends with him. We see him as a child, beloved—even spoiled—by his father; as an adolescent dreamer, resented by his brothers; as a slave, then a prisoner, in Egypt; then as the second most powerful figure in the greatest empire of the ancient world. At every stage, the story revolves around him and his impact on others. He dominates the last third of Bereishit, casting his shadow on everything else. From almost the beginning, he seems destined for greatness.
Yet history did not turn out that way. To the contrary, it is another brother who in the fullness of time leaves his mark on the Jewish people and on us. The Jews bear his name. After the division of the kingdom and the conquest of the north by the Assyrians, they became known as Yehudim or Jews, for it was the tribe of Judah who dominated the kingdom of the south, and they who survived the Babylonian exile. So it was not Joseph but Judah who conferred his identity on the people; Judah who became the ancestor of Israel’s greatest king, David; Judah to who the Messiah Yeshua was born.
Why Judah, not Joseph?
The answer lies in the beginning of Vayigash, as the two brothers confront one another, and Judah pleads for Benjamin’s release.
At the beginning of the Joseph story we find that it was Judah who proposed selling Joseph into slavery: Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover his blood? Let’s sell him to the Arabs and not harm him with our own hands. After all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed.
This is a speech of terrible callousness. There is no word about the evil of murder, merely calculation (“what will we gain”). At the very moment he calls Joseph “our own flesh and blood,” he is proposing selling him as a slave. At this point, Judah is the last person from whom we expect great things.
However, Judah—more than anyone else in the Torah—changes. The man we see all these years later it not what he was then. Then, he was prepared to see his brother sold into slavery. Now, he is prepared to suffer that fate himself rather than see Benjamin held as a slave.
It is a precise reversal of character. Callousness has been replaced with concern. Indifference to his brother’s fate has been transformed into courage on his behalf. He is willing to suffer what he once inflicted on Joseph, so that the same fate should not befall Benjamin. At this point, Joseph reveals his identity. We know why. Judah has passed the test that Joseph has carefully constructed for him. Joseph wants to know if Judah has changed. He has.
This is a highly significant moment in the history of the human spirit. Judah is the first penitent—the first baal teshuvah—in the Torah. Where did it come from, this change in his character? For that, we have to backtrack to chapter 38, the story of Tamar.
Tamar, we recall, had married Judah’s two elder sons, both of whom had died, leaving her a childless widow. Judah, fearing that his third son would share their fate, withheld him from her—thus leaving her unable to remarry and have children. Once she understands her situation, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute. Judah sleeps with her. She becomes pregnant. Judah, unaware of the disguise, concludes that she must have had a forbidden relationship, and orders her to be put to death. At this point, Tamar—who, while disguised, had taken Judah’s seal, cord and staff as a pledge—sends them to Judah with a message: “The father of my child is the man to whom these belong.” Judah now understands the whole story. Not only has he placed Tamar in an impossible situation of living widowhood, and not only is he the father of her child, but he also realizes that she has behaved with extraordinary discretion in revealing the truth without shaming him. (It is from this act of Tamar’s that we derive the rule that “one should rather throw oneself into a fiery furnace than shame someone else in public.”) Tamar is the heroine of the story, but it has one significant consequence. Judah admits he was wrong. “She was more righteous than I,” he says. This is the first time in the Torah that someone acknowledges their own guilt. It is also the turning point in Judah’s life. Here is born that ability to recognize one’s own wrongdoing, to feel remorse, and to change—the complex phenomenon known as teshuvah—that later leads to the great scene in Vayigash, where Judah is capable of turning his earlier behavior on its head and doing the opposite of what he had once done before. Judah is a penitential man.
One of the fundamental axioms of teshuvah was taught by Rabbi Abbahu. He said: In the place where penitents stand, even the perfectly righteous cannot stand. His proof text is the verse from Isaiah, “Peace, peace to him that was far and to him that is near. The verse puts one who “was far” ahead of one who “is near.” Judah is a penitent, the first in the Torah. Joseph is consistently known to tradition as ha-tzaddik, “the righteous.” Joseph became second to the king in Egypt. Judah, however, became the father of Israel’s kings and the father of Israel’s Messiah. Where the penitent Judah stands, even the perfectly righteous Joseph cannot stand. However great an individual may be in virtue of his natural character, greater still is one who is capable of growth and change. That is the power of teshuvah (penitence), and it began with Judah.