GEN1554 See [[GEN1493]] Genesis 38:26 more SACKS 57-8

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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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GEN1576 See [[GEN1253]] Genesis 27:34 sobbing SACKS 35-7

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GEN1605 [This and next verse] make [] it as plain possible that the story they told Joseph was a lie. If Jacob had really said those words he would have said them to Joseph himself, not to the brothers. The times to have done so was on his deathbed in the previous chapter. The brothers’ tale … was a “white lie.” Its primary aim was not to deceive but to ease a potentially explosive situation.  Perhaps that is why Joseph wept, understanding that his brothers still thought him capable of revenge. The sages derived a principle from this text. Mutar leshanot mipnei hashalom, “It is permitted to tell an untruth (literally, “to change” the facts) for the sake of peace” Yevamot 65b.   A white lie is permitted in Jewish law…. It is clear that the sages needed both [Genesis 18:12 – 13 and this] episodes to establish the principle.  Had we known only about the case of Sarah, we could not infer that we are permitted to tell a white lie. God did not tell a white lie about Sarah. He merely did not tell Abraham the whole truth. Had we only known about the case of Joseph’s brothers, we could not have inferred that what they did was permitted. Perhaps it was forbidden, and that is why Joseph wept. The fact that God Himself had done something similar is what led the sages to say that the brothers were justified. What is at stake here is an important feature of the moral life, despite the fact that we seem to be speaking of no more than social niceties: tact. The late Sir Isaac Berlin pointed out that not all values coexist in any kind of platonic harmony. His favourite example is freedom and equality. You can have a free economy but the result will be inequality. You can have economic equality-communism-but the result will be a loss of freedom. In the world as currently configured, moral conflict is unavoidable. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). This was an important fact, though one about which Judaism seems never to of been in doubt. ...  The existence of conflicting values means that the kind of morality we adopt and society we create depend not only on the values we embrace but also on the way we prioritize them. Prioritizing equality over freedom creates one kind of society-Soviet Communism for example. Prioritizing freedom over equality leads to market economics. People in both societies may value the same things but they rank them differently in the scale of values, and thus prioritize how they choose when the two conflict. This is what is at stake in the stories of Sarah and Joseph’s brothers. Truth and peace are both values, but which do we choose when they conflict? … Given the choice, when it came to interpersonal relations, the sages valued peace over truth, not least because truth can flourish in peace while it is often the first casualty in war. So the brothers were not wrong to tell Joseph a white lie for the sake of peace within the family. It reminded them all of the deeper truth that not only their human father, now dead, but also their heavenly Father, eternally alive, wants the people of the covenant to be at peace. For how can Jews be at peace with the world if they are not at peace with themselves? SACKS 72-76

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EXOD7 We are commanded not to hate Egypt [Deuteronomy 23:8], but never to forget Amalek [Deut. 25:17-19]. Why the difference? The simplest answer is to recall the rabbis' statement in Pirkei Avot: "If love depends on a specific cause, when the cause ends, so does the loves. If love does not depend on a specific cause, then it never ends" (Mishna Avot 5:16). The same applies to hate. When hate depends on a specific cause, it ends once the cause disappears. Causeless, baseless hate lasts forever. The Egyptians oppressed the Israelites because, in Pharaoh's words, "The Israelites are becoming too numerous and strong for us" [this verse]. Their hate, in other words, came from fear. It was not irrational. The Egyptians had been attacked and conquered before by a group known as the Hyksos, and the memory of that period was still a cute and painful. The Amelekites, however, were not being threatened by the Israelites. They attacked a people who was "weary and worn out," specifically those who were "lagging behind." In short: The Egyptians feared the Israelites because they were strong. The Amalekites attack the Israelites because they were weak. In today's terminology, the Egyptians were rational actors; the Amalekites were not. With rational actors there can be negotiated peace. People engaged in conflict and eventually realize that they are not only destroying their enemies, they are destroying themselves. That is what Pharoah's advisers said to him after seven plagues: "Do you not yet realize that Egypt is destroyed?" (Exodus 10:7) There comes a point at which rational actors understand that the pursuit of self-interest has become self-destructive, and they learn to cooperate. It is not so, however, with non-rational actors.

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EXOD12 The opening chapters of Exodus plunge us into the midst of epic events. Almost at a stroke the Israelites are transformed from protected minority to slaves. Moses passes from Prince of Egypt to Midianite shepherd to leader of the Israelites through a history-changing encounter at the burning bush. Yet it is one small episode that deserves to be seen as a turning point in the history of humanity. Its heroines are two remarkable women, Shifra and Puah. We do not know who they were. The Torah gives us no further information about them than that they were midwives, instructed by Pharaoh: "When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is if it isa girl, let her live" [this verse]. A Hebrew description of the two women as hameyaldot haIvriyot it could mean" the Hebrew midwives"; so most translations and commentaries read it. But it could equally mean, "the midwives to the Hebrews," in which case they may have been Egyptian. That is how Josephus [Antiquities of the Jews, 2.9.2], Abarbanel, and Samuel David Luzzatto understand it, arguing that it is simply implausible to suppose that Hebrew women would have been party to an act of genocide against their own people. What we do know, however, is that they refused to carry out the order: "The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told him to do; they let the boys live" (Exodus 1:17). This is the first recorded instance in history of civil disobedience: refusing to obey an order, given by the most powerful man in the most powerful empire of the ancient world, simply because it was immoral, unethical, inhuman. The Torah suggests that they did so without fuss or drama. Summoned by Pharaoh to explain their behavior, they simply replied: "Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive" (Exodus 1:19). To this, Pharaoh had no reply. The matter-of-factness of the entire incident reminds us of one of the most salient findings about the courage of those who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. They had little in common except for the fact that they saw nothing remarkable in what they did. [See James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), 35-39, and the literature cited there]. Often the mark of real moral heroes is that they do not see themselves as moral heroes. They do what they do because that is what a human being is supposed to do. That is probably the meaning of the statement that they "feared God." It is the Torah's generic description of those who have a moral sense (See, for example, Gen. 20:11).

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EXOD16 See [[EXOD12]] Exodus 1:16 kill SACKS 79-80

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EXOD23 See [[EXOD12]] Exodus 1:16 kill SACKS 79-80

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EXOD24 The story of the midwives that belongs to a larger vision implicit throughout the Torah and Tanakh as a whole: that right is sovereign over might, and that even God Himself can be called to account in the name of justice, as He expressly mandates Abraham to do. Sovereignty ultimately belongs to God, so any human act or order the transgresses the will of God is by that fact alone ultra vires. These revolutionary ideas are intrinsic to the biblical vision of politics and the use of power. In the end, though, it was the courage of two remarkable women that created the precedent later taken up by the American writer Thoreau in his classic essay Civil Disobedience (1849) that in turn inspired to Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the 20th Century. Their story also ends with a lovely touch. The text says: "So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, He gave them houses [this and following verse]." Luzzato interprets this last phrase to mean that He gave them families of their own. Often, he writes, midwives are women who are unable to have children. In this case, God blessed Shifra and Puah by giving them children, as He had done for Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel. This too is a not unimportant point. The closest Greek literature comes to the idea of civil disobedience is the story of Antigone who insisted on giving her brother Polynices a burial despite the fact that King Creon had refused to permit it, regarding him as a traitor to Thebes. Sophocles' Antigone is a tragedy: the heroine must die because of her loyalty to her brother and disobedience to the king. The Hebrew Bible, however, it is not a tragedy. In fact, biblical Hebrew has no word meaning "tragedy" in the Greek sense. Good is rewarded, not punished, because the universe, God's work of art, is a world in which moral behavior is blessed and evil, briefly in the ascendant, is ultimately defeated. Shifra and Puah are two of the great heroines of world literature, the first to teach humanity the moral limits of power.

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EXOD69 The idea that a leader's highest virtue is humility must have seemed absurd, almost self-contradictory, in the ancient world. Leaders were proud, magnificent, distinguished by their dress, appearance, and regal manner. They built temples in their own honor. They had triumphant inscriptions engraved for posterity. Their role was not to serve but to be served. Everyone else was expected to be humble, not they. Humility and majesty could not coexist. In Judaism, this entire configuration was overturned. Leaders were to serve, not to be served. Moses' highest accolade was to be called eved Hashem, God's servant. Only one other person, Joshua, his successor, earns this title in Tanakh. The architectural symbolism of the two great empires of the ancient world, the Mesopotamian ziggurat (Tower of Babel) and the pyramids of Egypt, visually represented a hierarchical society, broad at the base, narrow at the top. The Jewish symbol, the menora, was the opposite, broad at the top, narrow at the base, as if to say that in Judaism the leader serves the people, not vice versa. Moses' first response to God's call at the burning bush was one of humility: "Who am I to lead?" [this verse]. It was precisely this humility that qualified him to lead.

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