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GENESIS — 45:5 sent

GEN1562 Joseph gives two explanations for the sale in [this] one verse … This shows that the brothers were operating on one level of free choice, but that God, at the same time, operates on a different level, as He planned the arrival of Joseph in Egypt.  Nevertheless, free choice is not compromised at all.   … While we think we are in control, God operates on His level to make events happen.  Yet, free choice is never compromised.  ALEMEI 37

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GENESIS — 45:7 sent

GEN1563 This is the first recorded moment in history in which one human being forgives another.… Forgiveness is conspicuously lacking as an element in the stories of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and Sodom and the Cities of the Plain. When Abraham prayed his audacious prayer for the people of Sodom, he did not ask God to forgive them. His argument was about justice, not forgiveness. Perhaps there were innocent people there, fifty or even ten. It would be unjust for them to die. Their merit should therefore save the others, said Abraham. That is quite different from asking God to forgive. Joseph forgave. That was a first in history. Yet the Torah hints that the brothers did not fully appreciate the significance of his words. After all, he did not explicitly use the word “forgive.” He told them not to be distressed. He said, “It was not you but God.” He told them that their act had resulted in a positive outcome. But all of this was theoretically compatible with holding them guilty and deserving of punishment. That is why the Torah recounts a second event, years later, after Jacob had died. The brothers sought a   meeting with Joseph fearing that he would now take revenge. They concocted a story Genesis 50:16 – 17 What they said was a white lie, but Joseph understood why they said it. The brothers used the word “forgive”--this is the first time it appears explicitly in the Torah-because they were still unsure about what Joseph meant. Does someone truly forgive those who sold him into slavery? Joseph wept that his brothers had not fully understood that he had forgiven them long before. He no longer felt ill will towards them.   He had no anger, no lingering resentment, no desire for revenge. He conquered his emotions and reframed his understanding of events. Forgiveness does not appear in every culture. It is not a human universal, nor is it a biological imperative. We know this from a fascinating study by American classicist David Konstan, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. In it he argues that there was no concept of forgiveness in the literature of the ancient Greeks. There was something else, often mistaken for forgiveness: appeasement of anger.  When someone does harm to someone else, the victim is angry and seeks revenge. This is clearly dangerous for the perpetrator and he or she may try to get the victim to calm down and move on. He or she may make excuses: it wasn’t me, it was someone else; it was me but I couldn’t help it; it was me but it was a small wrong, and I have done you much good in the past, so on balance you should let it pass. Alternatively, or in conjunction with these other strategies, the perpetrator may beg, plead, and perform some ritual of abasement or humiliation. This is a way of saying to the victim, “I am not really a threat.” The Greek word sugnome, sometimes translated as forgiveness, really means, says Konstan, exculpation or absolution.  It is not that I forgive you for what you did--you could not really help it, you were caught up in circumstances beyond your control -- or, alternatively, I do not need to take revenge because you have now shown by your deference to me that you hold me in proper respect. My dignity has been restored.   There is a classic example of appeasement in the Torah: Jacob’s behavior towards Esau when they meet again after a long separation. Jacob had fled home after Rebecca overheard Esau resolving to kill him after Isaac’s death Genesis 27:41. Prior to that meeting Jacob sent him a huge gift of cattle, saying “I will appease him with the present that goes before me, and afterwards I will see his face; perhaps he will accept me.” Genesis 32:21  When the brothers meet, Jacob bows down to Esau seven times, a classic abasement ritual. The brothers meet, kiss, embrace, and go their separate ways--not because Esau has forgiven Jacob but because either he has forgotten or he has been placated. Appeasement as a form of conflict management exists even among non-humans. Frans de Waal, the primatologist, has described peacemaking rituals among chimpanzees, bonobos, and mountain gorillas. Frans de Walle, Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1989). There are contests for dominance among the social animals, but there must also be ways of restoring harmony to the group if it is to survive at all. So there are forms of appeasement and peacemaking that are pre-moral and have existed since the birth of humanity. Forgiveness has not. Konstan argues that its first appearance is in the Hebrew Bible and he cites the case of Joseph. What is not make clear is why Joseph forgives, and why the idea and institution are born specifically within Judaism. The answer is that within Judaism a new form of morality was born. Judaism is (primarily) an ethic of guilt, as opposed to most other systems, which are ethics of shame. One of the fundamental differences between them is that shame attaches to the person, while guilt that attaches to the act. In shame cultures when a person does wrong he or she is, as it were, stained, marked, defiled. In guilt cultures what is wrong is not the doer but the deed, not the sinner but the sin. The person retains his or her fundamental worth (“The soul you gave me is pure,” as we say in our prayers). It is the act that has somehow to be put right. That is why in guilt cultures there are processes of repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. That is the explanation for Joseph’s behavior from the moment the brothers appear before him in Egypt for the first time to the point where, in Parasha Vayigash, he announces his identity and forgives his brothers. It is a textbook case of putting the brothers through a course of atonement, the first in literature. Joseph is thus teaching them, and the Torah is teaching us, what it is to earn forgiveness. Recall what happens: First he accuses the brothers of a crime they have not committed. He says they are spies. He has them imprisoned for three days. Then, holding Simeon as a hostage, he tells them that they must now go back home and bring back their youngest brother Benjamin. In other words, he is forcing them to re-enact that earlier occasion when they came back to their father with one of the brothers, Joseph, missing. Note what happens next: [Genesis 42:21 – 23] This is the first stage of repentance. They admit they have done wrong. Next, after the second meeting, Joseph has his special silver cup planted in Benjamin’s sack. It is found and the brothers are brought back. They are told that Benjamin must stay as a slave. Genesis 44:16 This is the second stage of repentance. They confess. In fact, they do more; they admit collective responsibility. This is important. When the brothers sold Joseph into slavery it was Judah who proposed the crime Genesis 37:26-27 but they were all (accept Reuben) complicit in it. Finally, at the climax of the story Judah himself says, “So now let me remain as your slave in place of the lad. Let the lad go back with his brothers!” Genesis 42:33  Judah, who sold Joseph as a slave, is now willing to become a slave so that his brother Benjamin can go free. This is what the sages and Rambam define as complete repentance, namely when circumstances repeat themselves and you have an opportunity to commit the same crime again, but you refrain from doing so because you have changed. Now Joseph can forgive, because his brothers, led by Judah, have gone through all three stages of repentance (1) admission of guilt, (2) confession, and (3) behavioral change. Forgiveness only exists in a culture in which repentance exists. Repentance presupposes that we are free and morally responsible agents who are capable of change, specifically the change that comes about when we recognize that something we have done is wrong, that we are responsible for it and must never do it again. The possibility of that kind of moral transformation simply did not exist in ancient Greece or any other pagan culture. Greece was a shame-and-honor culture that turned on the twin concepts of character and fate. See Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933). Judaism was a repentance-and-forgiveness culture whose central concepts were will and choice. The idea of forgiveness was then adopted by Christianity, making the Judaeo-Christian ethic the primary vehicle of forgiveness in history. Repentance and forgiveness are not just two ideas among many. They transformed the human situation. For the first time, repentance established the possibility that we are not condemned endlessly to repeat the past. When I repent I show I can change. The future is not predestined. I can make it different from what it might have been. Forgiveness liberates us from the past. Forgiveness breaks the irreversibility of reaction and revenge. It is the undoing of what has been done. (Hannah Arendt makes this point in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 241. Humanity changed the day Joseph forgave his brothers. When we forgive and are worthy of being forgiven, we are no longer prisoners of our past. The moral life is one that makes room for forgiveness. SACKS 66-70

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GENESIS — 45:8 sent

GEN1564 When someone harms you, remember that he is only an agent of the Almighty.   From this verse we see Yosef’s perspective of events and understand how he was able to be so magnanimous toward his brothers.   From the words, “It was not you who sent me here, but God” is manifest the realization that people are God’s agents who carry out His will.  Of course, just as a person has the free will to choose his deeds, so must a person try to protect himself from harm.  But after the deed is done, one must be able to forgive.   Yosef was not merely trying to assuage the remorse of his brothers; he was expressing his true feelings.   Consequently, he forgave them.   Would a person grow angry at a stone that was thrown at him? This is the Torah’s outlook on life, and we must make it ours.   (Rabbi Yeruchom Levovitz in Daas Torah, vol. 1., pp. 257-8).  PLYN 177

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GENESIS — 45:24 quarrelsome

GEN1565 A person should try to do all he can to prevent quarrels between others.   Rashi explains that since his brothers were ashamed, Yosef was worried that they might quarrel on the journey back to Canaan.   One might say to another; ‘You are at fault for selling Yosef; you spoke loshon hora about him and caused us to hate him.”  The verse teaches us another aspect of Yosef’s chesed.   We have seen how he appeased his brothers (see verse 45:5).   Now we see that not only did he do everything he could to prevent his brothers from quarreling in his presence, but he even wanted to prevent their quarreling when they were far away.   The good deeds of the righteous are complete.   (Daas Torah, vol. 1, p 261).   PLYN 122-3

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GENESIS — 45:26 believe

GEN1568 When Jacob was told by his sons that Joseph was still alive, he at first had some misgivings as to whether it was the same Joseph he knew and remembered who was still alive. Jacob realized that Joseph had all the psychological reasons for bitterness, resentment and revolt against his father’s home, and that, psychologically speaking, it would have been most natural for Joseph to have forsaken all the spiritual and moral values in his father’s heritage and to have adopted the then-new morality, immorality and amorality of a pagan Egypt which had recognized and elevated him while his own brothers had betrayed him.   Nevertheless, Jacob did not doubt the veracity and truthfulness of his son’s statement. When he beheld all the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him and his family to Egypt in love and in respect, when he saw that Joseph still adhered to the concepts of chessed, hat he had imparted to him while he was till sitting at his feet, then Jacob became convinced that it was the same Joseph who was still alive, that Joseph had been able to maintain his spiritual and moral identity, that Joseph had not deviated even one iota from the moral values in his father’s tradition, and that Joseph throughout the years of exile, bondage and excruciating anguish had not born any bitterness, resentment or hostility to his brothers and to his father’s home. How did such maintenance of spiritual and moral identity in the face of so many adverse psychological factors and contrary to all laws of psychology come about? The answer is that Jacob was able to maintain the loyalty of Joseph through the father image that he, Jacob, had furnished and implanted into the mind and heart of Joseph. Jacob had been able to implant this father image into the mind and heart of Joseph by impressing upon the heart and mind of Joseph the ethical message and concept inherent in the law of egloh arufoh. The law of egloh arufoh is based upon the concepts that man, as a being created in the image of God, is to be treated with respect and consideration regardless of his station in life and his moral caliber, even if he appears to be a vagabond and a criminal.   BUILD 26

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GENESIS — 45:26 believe

GEN1567 R. Shimon said: “Such is the punishment of the liar: even when he tells the truth, he is not believed.   For so we find with respect to Jacob’s sons. It is written Genesis 37:33: ‘And he recognized it and said: “it is the coat of my son.’” Therefore, in the end, even though they spoke the truth, he did not believe them, as it is written: ‘And his heart fainted, for he did not believe them’” Avoth d’R. Nathan TEMIMAH-GEN 178

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GENESIS — 45:26 believe

GEN1566 [Talmud tractate] Derech Eretz advises: “Love [the word] ‘perhaps’ and hate [the phrase] ‘why not’? [implying throwing caution to the wind].” That is, avoid speaking with certitude unless you are absolutely positive that your statement is accurate.  The Sages say, “The punishment of a liar is that no one believes him even when he speaks the truth” Sanhedrin 99b, Avos deRabbi Natan 34.   The Talmud brings a proof for this statement from the sons of Yaakov – because they did not speak the truth to him about Yosef’s supposed death, Yaakov refused to believe their claim that Yosef was alive.   WAGS 199

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GENESIS — 46:1 father

GEN1570 [Why not of his grandfather, Abraham?]   Regarding the question of who is covered by the commandment to honor parents, there may be some surprises.   In-laws are covered … Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael, “Yitro”, ch. 1, p. 190; Yalkut Shimoni, “1 Samuel,” no. 133; Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah, 240:24.   In the case of a divorce, a step-parent is covered, as long as honoring the step-parent does not detract from honoring the natural parent. Because the main activity of Jewish parenting is pedagogic, the obligation to honor parents is extended to teachers.   According to the Talmud Ketubot 103a, older siblings are covered as well. Surprisingly, on the question of whether grandparents are covered, there is a difference of opinion.   Despite the Talmudic saying that “one’s grandchildren are like one’s children,” Yevamot 62b; Kiddushin 4a, this view was not universally held. E.g., Sotah 49a  The reason is psychologically interesting. The major work of the Jewish mystics, the Zohar 2:233a , states, “a man loves his grandchildren more than his children.” In other words, because grandparents tend to dote on their grandchildren more than on their own children, there was an apprehension that the bond between grandparents and grandchildren might threaten the relationship between children and their parents Genesis Rabbah 94:5; Rashi and Nachmanides’ commentaries this verse. Hence, the grandparent-grandchild relationship was deflated by some of the sources in order to try to defuse this possibility.  HTBAJ 166

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GENESIS — 46:1 father

GEN1571 It is not written: “to the God of his father, Abraham.” R. Yochanan said: “This teaches us that one must give more honor to his father than to his father’s father.” [Midrash Rabbah]. We may derive from this that one is, indeed, duty-bound to honor his father’s father, but that his father’s honor takes precedence.  Rama to Yoreh Deah 240:24  TEMIMAH-GEN 178

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