Our parasha contains the climax of the psychodrama Yoséf has been conducting for his unwitting brothers. When the brothers had come to procure food in Egypt during the world-wide famine, they had not recognized Yoséf in the high Egyptian official who had asked them sharp questions about their origins, then gave them food with the admonition that they not return without their youngest brother, Binyamin. When, inevitably, they returned a second time, they brought Binyamin. Yoséf “framed” him, having his golden goblet concealed in his saddle bag, then announcing that it was missing. When the search turned it up in Binyamin’s bag, Yoséf told the brothers that Binyamin would remain in servitude for the crime; the others were free to go.
The purpose in Yoséf’s eyes was to gauge the brothers’ reaction on seeing Rahél’s younger son suffer the fate to which they had consigned the elder. When Yëhuda, who had proposed selling Yoséf, stepped up to offer himself in Binyamin’s place, Yoséf saw that his brothers were not the same as they had been.
ויאמר יוסף אל אחיו אני יוסף העוד אבי חי ולא יכלו אחיו לענות אתו כי נבהלו מפניו: (“And Yoséf said to his brothers, I am Yoséf; does my father yet live? And his brothers were unable to answer him for they were panicked before him”; XLV, 3).If we turn to the midrash, we find: אוי לנו מיום הדין אוי לנו מיום התוכחה יוסף קטנן של שבטים הי' "ולא יכלו אחיו לענות אתו כי נבהלו מפניו" לכשיבוא הקב"ה ויוכיח כל אחד לפי מה שהוא כו' על אחת כמה וכמה (“Woe to us from the day of judgment, woe to us from the day of rebuke [tochaha]; Yoséf was the least of the tribes, ‘and his brothers were unable to answer him for they were panicked before him.’ When the Holy One, Blessed is He, comes and rebukes each one according to what he is... how much more so”; בראשית רבה פצ"ג סי' י).
The Béyth ha-Lévi is at a loss to find the rebuke the midrash implies Yoséf administered to his brothers; after all, the simple reading of the verse is that they were shocked by the sudden, wholly unexpected revelation that their brother was not a cowed slave in some pit, but the high Egyptian official enthroned before them. He also struggles to understand what it means that G-d will come and rebuke each one lë-fi ma she-hu’, “according to what he is,” and why Yoséf asks, ‘does my father yet live,’ when, as we read last week, he had already been assured that Ya‘aqov was well (cf. XLIII, 27-28).
He begins his lengthy response by noting that men try to excuse themselves from the obligation of Torah study with the claim that they are not up to it, that they were not given the incisive intelligence and analytical ability to learn and retain the knowledge. However, he says, the effort and abilities which they put forth in earning a living in this world, puts the lie to the claim.
The Béyth ha-Lévi cites the following in support: פעם אחת הייתי מהלך ממקום למקום ומצאני אדם אחד שלא הי' בו לא מקרא ולא משנה והי' מתלוצץ כנגדי ואמרתי לו בני מה אתה משיב לאביך שבשמים ליום הדין אמר לי רבי יש לי דברים שאני משיב בינה ודעת לא נתנו לי מן השמים שאקרא ואשנה אמרתי לו מה מלאכתך וא"ל צייד וכו' אמרתי ומה להביא פשתן ולארוג מצודות ולהשליך לים נתנו לך דעת ולדברי תורה שכתוב "כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאד" לא נתנו לך דעת מיד הי' מרים קולו ובוכה אמרתי לו אל ירע לך שכל באי עולם משיבין תשובה זו על אותו ענין שהם עוסקים בו אבל מעשיהם מוכיחים עליהם וכו ([The prophet Eliyahu who did not die as other men -- cf. II Kings II, 1-12 – said],“One time I was walking from place to place and a certain man found me who was ignorant of Scripture and of Mishna and was joking with me, and I said to him, 'My son, how will you answer your Father Who is in heaven on the day of judgment?' He told me, Rabbi, 'I have words which I answer: "Understanding and intelligence were not granted me by heaven, that I should read and study."' I asked him, 'What is your profession?', and he told me, 'Fisherman.' ... I said, 'So, to bring flax to weave nets and throw them into the sea you were given intelligence, and for words of Torah, [about which] it is written "for the thing is very close to you" [Deuteronomy XXIX, 4] you were not given intelligence?!' Immediately he raised his voice and began crying. I told him, 'Don’t let it be bad for you, for all mortals cite this answer concerning the very interest in which they are occupied, but their own deeds rebuke them....'”; תנא דבי אלי' זוטא פי"ד).
Hence, writes the Béyth ha-Lévi, the implied rebuke lies in Yoséf’s words, “Does my father yet live?” Your acts contradict your words, he told his brothers. You say you are, so terribly concerned about Binyamin and how our father would suffer were he to be lost, and yet you were not concerned about the pain you caused him, since over all this time he knew nothing about me, not even that you had sold me. This is what our midrash means by ‘Woe to us from the day of judgment, woe to us from the day of rebuke,” for the Holy One, Blessed is He will rebuke each of us according to what he is, according to what he spent his time on, if our actions contradict our words.
C.
Rabbi Hayyim Shmuelevitz explains the matter slightly differently: It is true, he says, that there is no actual tochaha in Yoséf’s words, but the essence of tochaha is to point out the error of one’s ways, ועומק טעמו של דבר הוא כי הטעות אינו בדעתו ובסברתו של אדם גרידא אלא שעפ"י טעות זו כלכל את מעשיו ימים רבים ובהתגלות הטעות עומדים לנגד עיני האדם כל מעשיו וכל פעולותיו והנה אינם כשורה ואין לך בושה וחרטה גדולה מאלו משום שאדם זה חייו היו חיי טעות (“and the depth of the thing’s meaning is that the error is not actually in the person’s conscious awareness or reasoning, but nonetheless it has shaped and justified his actions for many days, and with the revelation of this error all his deeds and acts stand exposed before the man’s eyes, and they do not line up; and you havre no greater shame or regret than these, for this man’s life, was a life of error”; שיחות מוסר ח"ב פר' ויגש מאמר "אוי לנו מיום התוכחה").
If we follow his logic, we see that Rabbi Shmuelevitz’s implied rebuke lies in the first two words Yoséf utters, Ani Yoséf (“I am Yoséf”). To understand why, let us consider the family history, of which everyone involved was acutely aware.
The “pilot project” which was intended to result in a nation whose members were capable of being the standard-bearers of Torah civilisation in the world, of upholding its strictures, thriving under its discipline, and resisting all the blandishments of this world, required a measure of culling. Avraham had two sons, Yishma‘él and Yitzhaq, and subsequently six more by his second wife, Qëtura. Avraham’s only legitimate heir was Yitzhaq, as the Torah unambiguously informs us (Genesis XXV, 5). Yitzhaq, in turn, had two sons, ‘Esav and Ya‘aqov, and here again, only Ya‘aqov was legitimately his father’s heir. ‘Ésav, like all of his uncles, had been rejected, and like them, had gone on to found other nations, at best indifferent, but often inimical to Israel and its mission in the world.
As we all know, Ya‘aqov’s twelve sons became the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. However, we know this only through the Torah. The brothers could not have known, but only hoped, that the culling was over. It is against this family background that the Yoséf saga is laid.
The story opens by telling us ויבא יוסף את דבתם רעה אל אביהם (“...And Yoséf brought their bad report to their father”; XXXVII, 2). As the Talmud tells us (ירושלמי פאה פ"א ה"א), Yoséf fundamentally misunderstood certain actions which he saw his brothers take; the result was that he engaged in unintentional lëshon ha-ra‘, for which certain aspects of his subsequent treatment were Divinely decreed as an atonement (עיי' ירודלמי שם, ובת"ת על אתר דמשמע מל' הבאה דכתיב בפסוק שיוסף האמין את עדותו שאם היתה עדות שקר הי' כתוב ל' הוצאה).
Now consider that his father “loved Yoséf more than the other brothers,” and when the Torah tells us this, it uses not the name Ya‘aqov, but Yisra’él, the exalted name which would one day be used of the holy ‘am ha-Torah. Rashi explains the rationale behind Yisra’él’s affection: ואונקלוס תרגם [בן זקונים] בר חכים הוא לי' כל מה שלמד משם ועבר מסר לו (“And Onqëlos translated [the phrase ben zëqunim] ‘a wise son to him’: everything [Ya’aqov] had learnt from Shém and ‘Éver he transmitted to him”). Yoséf was the most studious and precocious of the sons.
And then there were Yoséf’s dreams. Already wary because of the above events, the brothers read Yoséf’s dreams in light of the dictum preserved in the Talmud, that אין מראין לאדם אלא מהרהורי לבו (“A person is only shown some of the desires of his heart”; ברכות נ"ה:). They were convinced, in short, that Yoséf’s ambition was to replace and supersede them, as Yishma‘él and ‘Ésav before them had been pushed aside and superseded.
Hence, the brothers sat as a court, and judged Yoséf a rodéf, a “pursuer,” whose aim was, if not to kill them (though, as bënei Noah, some of the crimes of which Yoséf suspected them could incur death), then surely to bring about the much more serious termination of their metaphysical connexions in the next world, as Yishma‘él’s and ‘Ésav’s had been terminated. In the end, he was sold into slavery rather than executed, because the brothers saw the sale as a sort of הצלה ע"י אחד מאבריו, of rescuing the rodéf’s victims, i.e., themselves, by injuring the pursuer rather than killing him, avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, whilst still nullifying his dreams (cf. v. 20).
However, יוסף לא נמכר אלא על ידי חלום ולא מלך אלא על ידי חלום (“Yoséf was sold only because of a dream, and came to rule only because of a dream”; מדרש תנחומא פר' וישב סי' ט). The effect of the sale, as they now saw, had only been to facilitate the dreams’ fulfill-ment. Seeing Yoséf enthroned before them, hearing the regal figure say Ani Yoséf immediately showed them the overarching error which had informed their conduct toward their brother.
According to this reasoning, then, what was the point of Yoséf’s question, “Does my father yet live?”
D.
Let us first ask another question: Why were the brothers’ suspicions not aroused that something was odd in the “Egyptian’s” unusual and persistent interest in the affairs of their family, and particularly of their father, such that this was the subject of every interview they had had with him?
The answer, it seems to me, is that because of the deep-seated error which informed all of their actions, they could not imagine that Yoséf would be found to be anything other than a slave. Their prejudice in the matter completely blinded them to the physical similarity between the mishne la-melech and Yoséf, to the timbre of his voice, and to the insistent, probing questions about Ya‘aqov’s welfare. Yoséf’s question served to drive home the depth of self-delusion and error under which the brothers had been laboring, such that they did not recognize Yoséf’s concern in the mishne la-melech’s questions.
