Rabbi's Derasha

Yosef’s revelation to his brothers is arguably the most dramatic moment in the book of Bereisheet.  We know it was moving for Yosef to re-introduce himself to his family.  We know it was an utter shock for his brothers.  But what does it mean for us?  

There is an approach toward this climactic scene which places it not in the Jewish past but in the future.  When we see Yosef announce “Ani Yosef” (I am Yosef), we should think of a climactic scene in the Jewish future.  The Midrash says about this moment, “Oy lanu m’yom HaDin, Oy lanu m’yom tochacha,” woe to us for the day of judgment, woe to us for the day of rebuke.”  It is not speaking about Yosef’s brothers then but about us now.

What is the rebuke in Yosef’s words?  R’ Yosef Soloveitchik of Brisk, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, focused not on Yosef’s initial words but on his follow-up question: “HaOd Avi Chai” (is my father still alive)?  The answer to this question should be obvious.  He was told at several points in this saga that Yaakov is still alive.  In Yehuda’s long speech just before this, he mentions his (their) father several times.  Of course he’s still alive.  

What Yosef is getting at is something that delivers a stinging rebuke to the brothers.  He is responding to Yehuda’s speech, which claimed over and over again that losing Binyamin would be devastating to his father.  So Yosef says, “I too was special in my father’s eyes, and yet you took me away from him.  Is he still alive -- did he survive from then till now?”  The brothers’ growth from the selling of Yosef until now has been conspicuous.  But Yosef is pointing out that the care in their words today strikes him as hypocritical.  The contradiction, the Midrash is saying, is one that will confront all of us.  How consistent are our words, and how we want to be seen, with what we actually do?  

Many years ago, when I was leaving Israel after I was there for the first time, someone invoked this point.  There were people in Yeshiva who were worried about how I would transition back to life on a college campus.  For students in gap year programs, this should be one of the major focuses of their entire year.  For me, it was going to be the focus of one conversation.  Someone found a recent graduate from my college in another Yeshiva and we met.  He urged me to go to Hillel and to the Kosher Kitchen.  He took these as a given.  But I interrupted him.  “I don’t really hang out with Jews,” I told him.  “I mean, I have some Jewish friends, but that’s not the basis of why we are close.”  This meeting took place in December and it was around this Parasha.  He smiled and said, “You know, the Rabbis say that the end of days will be a moment like when Yosef says, ‘Ani Yosef.’  It will be abrupt.  At that moment, I don’t think you’ll want to be caught saying, ‘I don’t hang out with Jews.’”  This is the moment of rebuke.  

What at least some of the Jewish world is going through right now is not unprecedented in the last 100 years.  In this very assimilated moment of Jewish history, this kind of shock has hit before.  At the founding of the State, and its war; in the run-up to the war in 1967; in the Yom Kippur War.  All of these brought moments of inner panic.  Even during the attack at the Olympics in Munich in 1972.  I’m reading the memoir of a proud Bronx Jew who ended up living among very assimilated, deracinated Jews in Manhattan.  He recalled being summoned in September, 1972, by a very prominent person in Upper East Side circles, a person who many probably didn’t even think was Jewish.  The person was literally trembling.  He had been shaken to his core by the attack in Munich.  That can come from visceral fear, sometimes seeded in our collective trauma.  But it also comes because of the stark and sudden realization, in a flash, that This. Is. Real.  When people are caught not paying enough attention to Jewish life, and then see how central it is, it is unsettling.  

There are many Jews right now trying to figure out the implications of this moment.  Not the October 7th moment but the October 8th moment.  It is an instant of Ani Yosef, and they are afraid of being asked, “is my father still alive?”  We all have to figure out how to take the sting out of that question, how to prepare for it so that it does not call us out as hypocrites.