Standing At the Edge of the Abyss: Mikeitz

Standing At the Edge of the Abyss

D’var Torah for Parashat Mikeitz

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Revenge is bittersweet fruit.

In this week’s Torah portion, Mikeitz (“At the End,” Gen. 44:1—44:17) a rueful Joseph gets to give his brothers a taste of comeuppance, playing with them as a cat with its prey.

With the famine foretold in Pharaoh’s disturbing dreams now spreading to the far reaches the world, Jacob sends ten of his remaining sons (minus Benjamin, whom he doesn’t dare entrust to them) to Egypt to procure food.  He has noticed their reluctance to take the initiative and he wonders about it.  Why are they so passive about this approaching calamity?

The famine might be a dark cloud gathering for everyone else, but for Joseph’s brothers, it’s probably more than that.  For years they had been keeping a secret—the truth of how they sold Joseph to a caravan of slave traders en route to Egypt.   For them, the mere mention of Egypt is cause for deep apprehension.

Egypt may be a huge world center, home to millions and, at the moment, filled with thousands more who have come to purchase food.  But for the brothers, Egypt is also that dark pit to which they sent Joseph.  Realistically, there’s less than a scant chance that they might encounter anyone who might recognize them or uncover what they had done.  And yet, such is the nature of guilt that its bearer lives in constant fear of discovery.

For Joseph’s brothers, going to Egypt means inching dangerously closer to that precipice, risking everything, taking a chance that the whole house of cards they had built over the past two decades might collapse with the slightest breeze.

Joseph, of course, expects them.  He has probably posted guards at the city’s gates with orders to alert him the moment that these men, sons of one father, appear.  He has nothing solid, no facts to count on, only a premonition growing stronger by the day.

When the brothers finally do appear, Joseph recognizes them instantly.  Robed in his royal Egyptian garb (so much grander than the striped tunic they had last seen him in), Joseph isn’t the boy he used to be.  And so, with his true identity undiscovered, Joseph begins his charade.

What is he looking for?  Is he searching for a sign of remorse or guilt on their part?  Or is he perhaps trying to discover the extent and depth of his own hate, gauging his bitterness towards them and weighing it against the splendor of his current condition?

Through the cruel tricks he plays on them, Joseph manages to elicit much information from his brothers.  In fact, they seem more than willing to share with him everything they know.  And for once, Joseph is stymied.  These aren’t the deceitful, violent men he knew them to be.  They seem so small now, so pitiable and powerless before him. 

Power feels good in his hands.  Joseph knows he can now avenge himself for the indignities of his youth, for the years he spent enslaved, for the time he languished in a dungeon, falsely imprisoned for a crime he never committed.  Hardening his heart toward them, Joseph refuses to hear their pleas for mercy, just as they failed to hear his cries when they threw him in the waterless pit so long ago. 

Yet inside, his soul cries as he remembers home, his loving father, his younger brother, those early days of sunny innocence.

Joseph decides to test his brothers, perhaps to see if they really have changed, if their words, betraying guilt and anguish, are honest or merely cunning.  Taking as hostage one of the brothers, Simeon, arguably the most violent and least trustworthy of them all, Joseph allows the others to go back to Canaan but orders them to come back to him with his younger brother, Benjamin.  He then orders their sacks to be filled with food as well as with the money with which they paid for it.

Back in Canaan, the brothers find the money and are filled with dread.  They realize that they can now be accused of yet one more unfounded charge—stealing from Pharaoh. 

Afraid to tell Jacob, they wait until the food is nearly gone.  Once again then, Jacob has to spur them to action.  Finally, they are forced to tell their father that the Egyptian overlord has ordered them to bring Benjamin—the sole surviving son Jacob has from his beloved Rachel—or else risk his vengeance.   All at once, Jacob’s anger and pain spill over, threatening to inundate them, and the brothers realize that the trap they had been dreading all this time has indeed been sprung. 

It is at this point that Judah steps up.  Judah—possibly Joseph’s chief adversary among the brothers, the same Judah who had come up with the idea of selling Joseph to the slave traders, the same Judah who had refused to show any mercy or compassion to his brother—now offers to be Benjamin’s protector.  If he fails to bring the boy back, he swears to his father Jacob, he will remain forever unforgiven, bearing for all eternity the heavy burden of his guilt. 

Jacob resigns himself to the inevitable, and once again the brothers make their way to Egypt, their hearts heavy with foreboding.

What they dread indeed transpires.  Though inwardly overcome by emotion at seeing his brother Benjamin, Joseph hardens himself to his brothers.  Planting his royal chalice in Benjamin’s bags, he orders the boy arrested and handed over to him as a slave.  Horrified, Judah offers himself instead, but Joseph refuses the trade, insisting that only the guilty one must remain in Egypt as his slave. 

There are no moves left in this game.  Joseph has played his hand masterfully.  At this point, his brothers understand they have reached the end of their run.  They thought they had left their crime far behind, but as always must happen, they realize instead that they have come full round to face it again.  They recognize their guilt and see everything that has happened to them as divine retribution.

It’s a powerful lesson.  Some call it karma.  I prefer to call it consequences.  Our past, for better or for worse, must always accompany us.  The good deeds bring in their wake goodness, kindness and compassion in equal measure to that which we have brought about.  Similarly, however, our misdeeds never disappear either.  At the end of the road we are destined to meet them again.  It’s the way things work in this world, a law of morality as constant as any in physics or math. 

It’s the law of due consequences, inescapable, unavoidable, clear and always just. 

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman

Finding Comfort On Our Way: Va-Yeishev

Finding Comfort On Our Journey

D’var Torah for Parashat Va-yeishev

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

I found myself mourning today.  Fifty years later, with all the changes the world has seen and gone through, with all the changes that I have gone through, one fact alone remains unchanged:  Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

I was fourteen, barely two years in America.  At school, after the announcement of President Kennedy’s death was made on the P.A., after a moment of stunned silence, one of my classmates turned to me and said, “You don’t even care. You aren’t even American.”

I was thinking of that remark earlier today, a grey and wet day.  Traffic wasn’t moving, and the drops that fell on the windshield and windows of my car simply slid down the smooth surface, leaving trails behind them.  Even fifty years later I found myself caring deeply.  I felt strangely moved.  When I examined my feelings, I realized I was grieving for more than a dead President.  After all, it was so long ago; and I didn’t even know President Kennedy. 

I did see him once, though.  A few months earlier, on a fine Shabbat morning, I was walking with my family to synagogue for the bar mitzvah of a family friend.  The many motorcycles that suddenly appeared alerted us to stop and look.  And there it was, the motorcade and the President’s limo.  We saw him quite distinctly.  I remember waving, and I remember seeing him wave back.  There was no one else near us at that moment.  It was definitely us he was waving to.

It was a good period in our life.  We had settled in, had friends, school; my father had a good job; there was much to look forward to.  America, too, was doing well then (or so it seemed to our innocent eyes).  The Peace Corps had begun doing its good work around the globe, spreading President Kennedy’s theme of “Camelot,” a vision of a world of hope, a world where all the nations were seated at a round table, round as the earth itself was, with no walls or boundaries between them.  It was a vision inspired by the Lerner and Lowe musical Camelot, which in turn was inspired by my favorite book of the time, T. H. White’s marvelous retelling of the Arthurian legends, The Once and Future King.

Of course, the real world wasn’t anything like that.  The Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer to a nuclear Armageddon than ever before.  America’s military involvement in Vietnam had already begun.  Racial unrest was about to turn violent on the streets of our cities.

One could easily ask how it was possible for the President to hold on to a vision that seemed to be slipping farther and farther away.  Certainly he could see that the dream, if not already dead, was surely disappearing in the smog of reality.

In a similar way, in reading this week’s Torah portion, Va-yeishev (Genesis 37:1—40:23), one could ask why Jacob refused to be comforted after he learns of Joseph’s supposed death. 

Judaism teaches us not to remain lifelong mourners for anyone or anything.  The Jewish three-step mourning process—a week, a month, a year—is designed to help the bereaved move onward, back to a productive life.  Yes, annual visits to the gravesite are made; we continue carrying our sadness with us, and our memories remain with us to our very last breath.  However, the demands of reality and life insist on our full attention, calling on us to focus on the present rather than the past.

So why does Jacob refuse to be comforted?  Why does he continue mourning?

And why, fifty years later, do we go on weeping for a President felled by a madman’s bullet?

Jacob had returned to his homeland not much earlier.  En route, he had lost his beloved wife Rachel, but he went on.  Jacob knew he had promises to keep—to God, to his father and mother, to his wives, to his children.  He knew he had to raise his family.  He had already chosen a successor on whom he would bestow the blessing of God.  The blessing, first given to Abraham and then to Isaac, would continue with Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph.  Joseph was, like his father, a dreamer.  He had visions of power, grandeur, even of a role in the world’s redemption.  To Jacob, Joseph represented hope and eternity.  The striped coat of many colors that Jacob gave him was like the rainbow that God had given humanity; it was a symbol of peace, of harmony, of balance restored.

Despite all his losses, Jacob continued believing in this dream.  Long ago he had learned of the imperfections of the world.  He knew about loneliness and loss, and he sensed the cold, murderous hatred that brothers could hold for one another.   He knew that in order to get ahead in this world, you sometimes have to barter and trade, sometimes beg, and yet at other times take by force.

But Joseph represented hope.  For Jacob, Joseph was a dream, a vision of a better world, a future in which stability was restored and peace between brothers was possible.  The torn and bloodied cloth he now held in his hands, which once had been Joseph’s splendid rainbow-colored tunic, represented to Jacob the irretrievable collapse of all his dreams.

Jacob mourned not only the loss of his beloved son.  He grieved for the loss of innocence, for what he saw as God’s betrayal of a promise made long ago.  He mourned defeat, the utter breakdown of hope and faith.

Of course, we, the readers of the Torah, know the ending of this story.  We know that Jacob will be reunited with his beloved Joseph.  We know that Jacob will laugh again, bounce his grandchildren on his knees.  And we know that Joseph will yet play the role he was destined for, as the redeemer of his family and people. 

In the same way, fifty years after the assassination of President Kennedy, we can find hope in the fact that his dreams are not yet gone; that the Peace Corps survives, that nations do sit at a round table to discuss cooperation and peace—dreams as distant and fragile today as they were in the days of King Arthur and his famous knights.

And despite our losses, like Jacob, like President Kennedy, we too can take comfort.  We can rediscover hope as we continue working towards our ancient ideals, as we pick up each broken piece and connect it with its mate, as we go on building bridges between a past that had once existed and a future that has yet to be created.  

We may not mourn forever.  It is forbidden.  Rather, we must rise and carry on our sacred task, creating structures and edifices to house the values we believe in—the blessings of peace, of harmony and of a world with its balance once more restored.

It is so that we honor the past in the best way we can.

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman

The Victory At The End of the Road: Vayishlach

The Victory At The End of the Road

D’var Torah for Parashat Vayishlach

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Parashat Vayishlach (Genesis 32:4—36:43) comes on fast and furious.  Few other portions in the Torah contain as much bloodshed and violence as this one.  If not for its many important lessons, it might as well be rated “R” and turned into pulp fiction.

The portion begins as Jacob is coming home after his long stay (close to 21 years) in Haran.  At Laban’s house he has become a wealthy man, a family man.  He now has two wives (plus their two handmaidens), 12 children and many flocks and herds of various livestock.  Jacob receives word that Esau, his twin brother who has sworn to kill him, is coming at him with a full contingent of armed men.

Fearful of losing everything, Jacob is forced to divide up his camp, placing some in front, closer to the line of danger, so that even if harm comes to them, he might still have the second half as a remnant.  He also sends Esau presents, flock after flock of animals from his herd.

After helping his family cross the river into the Promised Land, Jacob returns to the lookout post in the highlands overlooking the valley below.  There, in the dark of night, he wrestles with a mysterious being—perhaps a demon, perhaps an angel, perhaps his own alter ego.  As the struggle persists, neither gives in; at one point the “angel” wrenches Jacob’s hip joint.  Then, as the light of dawn begins to breaks, the “angel” begs to be released and agrees to bless Jacob in return.

Jacob is now free to face his brother, probably with greater trepidation in his heart than actual hope.

But once again, Jacob’s ruse works.  Esau’s anger is assuaged by all the gifts he has received, and he agrees to let Jacob and his tribe continue on their path unmolested.

Some time later (Rashi, the great medieval commentator, says it was eighteen months:  summer, winter and summer again), Jacob encamps by the city of Shechem.  One day, his daughter, Dina, is raped by the prince of the city.  Ten of Jacob’s sons, led by Simeon and Levi, ravage the city and, in violent and bloody retribution, murder all its men and boys, taking the women and possessions as loot.  They earn Jacob’s anger and scorn, but the tribe will now wander throughout the land unmolested, as other people learn of the swift and total response that any attack upon them might engender.

Then Rebecca’s nurse, Deborah, dies.  How she came into the story is unclear, but it foreshadows yet another, even greater sorrow that is about to take place.  Rachel, Jacob’s beloved wife, dies, leaving the world of the living at the same time as she delivers Benjamin, Jacob’s twelfth and last son, into it.

And yet one more event, as though all that wasn’t enough for the “R” rating:  Reuben, Jacob’s first born, sleeps with his father’s concubine Bilhah—Rachel’s handmaiden, mother to two of Jacob’s sons.  This wasn’t just lust, however.  In taking Bilhah, Reuben is actually guilty of rebelling against his father, a moral sin for which he will be punished by being passed over for the position of leadership after Jacob’s death.

Why do all these terrible things happen?

Some rabbis explain that this is Jacob’s punishment for his eager participation in Rebecca’s plot to make sure Jacob receives Isaac’s blessing.   Yet was this one youthful failing sufficient cause for so much pain, tragedy and violence?

The Torah goes out of its way to relate details from Jacob’s life.  We know precious little about Abraham, and even less of Isaac.  Yet we’re told so much of what befalls Jacob, from yet before his birth and all the way to his death and burial.  Can all the bad things be simply payback?  Divine punishment for what, after all, simply had to happen?  For realistically speaking—and Jacob as well as his father and mother knew this fact—Esau was incapable of maintaining the responsibility inherent in the birthright, the responsibility of taking care of the rest of the family.  Esau rarely saw beyond the next meal, beyond his own instant gratification—surely he wasn’t qualified to be the bearer of God’s and Isaac’s blessing!  No, all that happens in this portion (and even later) cannot be Jacob’s just rewards.

A clue to the presence of so much violence and bloodshed can be found in the blessing Jacob receives from the “angel,” a blessing reiterated by God later on:  Jacob’s name is changed to Yisrael, meaning “one who wrestles with God and with people—yet overcomes.”

It’s a figurative as well as literal struggle that the Torah refers to.  Jacob does not really strive with God—God is of course far too powerful.  Rather, Jacob struggles with his internal image of God.  Jacob lacks the all-out faith of his grandfather Abraham and the blind submission of his father, Isaac.  Jacob is filled with doubt.  He knows intrinsically that promises are only that—promises.  Blessings are only as truthful as their reality factor; half the time they are no more than wishful thinking.

The truth is, we can relate more to Jacob, the realist, the doubter, the skeptic. There is more of him in us than there is of his father and grandfather.  His life is much more like ours—maybe not in detail, but certainly in the larger picture. 

We all live a drama that could easily be turned into pulp fiction:  The family entanglements and jealousies, the loves and losses, the winning and losing.  We all make our way through foreign terrains, through peace and wars, through calm and agitation.  Like Jacob, we all struggle not only with other human beings, but also with the higher values and almost-impossible demands of our God and tradition.  Like Jacob, we find ourselves at times filled with faith and awe, yet at other times overcome with doubt and questioning.

It’s human nature.

Yet the blessing that Jacob receives from the angel, and then again from God, is not only that we struggle through life.  That, I’m afraid, is a given.  Rather, it’s in the implication that at the end of the road, we find that we do overcome.

Jacob may not see the rewards that will be his any time soon, but his people, Israel, will.  They will, after all, outlast all their oppressors.  They will survive through all their striving and struggling with themselves, with God, with all the evil in the world.

The struggle itself will make us stronger.  That is why we are called Israel.  At the end of all this struggling, with God’s help, we win.

It’s with this certain knowledge in his heart, mind and soul that Jacob can now face the rest of his journey, the rest of his life, difficult as that might be.

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman

Guests In The House of God: Vayeitzei

Guests In The House of God

D’var Torah for Parashat Vayeitzei (Genesis 28:10—32:3)

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely Adonai is in this place and I did not know it.”  He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:16-17)

Why do we pray?

The question has struck me many times as I’ve looked at a congregation assembled before me on a holiday or Shabbat eve.  The prayerbook assures us that we all have different reasons for coming here.  Some are in need, in pain, or in distress.  Others come to be part of a community, or to share a simcha—a joy—in their lives.  Some come for the music, which elevates them, moves them, helps them calm down at the end of a hectic work week.  Still others may come for the sermon, to hear what might be going on in the rabbi’s world, his or her thoughts on a particular verse from the Torah, or to learn a lesson put forth by our Wise Sages.

Some pray for relatively silly things.  I bet as many prayers were said as bets were placed for this team or the other to win the World Series.

Clearly God is a Red Sox fan…

And yet some others come to complain to God, to question God’s fairness when bad things happen, when illness strikes good people, when anyone seems to bear an unusually heavy burden of sorrows or suffering.  They may be saying the same words as everyone else, intoning the same song or prayer as the cantor and congregation, yet their hearts aren’t here.  Their soul’s focus is aimed higher, to the Seat of all justice, mercy and power.  These people don’t come to find a peaceful setting for their soul; they come to pick a fight with God.  Their prayer isn’t sweet—it’s bitter, like Hannah’s when she prayed for a child; or mournful, as when David prayed for the life of the son Bathsheba had just given birth to.

Some pray for material things that they think might make their lives easier or better.  Others ask for strength so that they might just go on doing what they are, for as long as they can.

Through all these, however, there is a common denominator.  What we pray for varies from person to person.  Whom we pray to changes from religion to religion, and sometimes within ourselves.  But what is common to all is that we pray.  That with words or thoughts, silent, spoken or sung, whether they be directed inwards or upward, we pray. 

Why DO we pray?

Perhaps because we can.  Because we realize—or choose to imagine—that we are not alone in the universe; that there may be a force much larger than us, a collective power of which we are but a part; and that by somehow connecting to that larger entity, we cease to be alone.  Perhaps we pray because we believe that when we become connected to some ongoing source of strength, we, in return, are strengthened.

We pray to be better.  We pray to rise again after falling, and falling, and falling.

We pray because we believe that as we pray, so we are answered.  Like some cosmic karma, when we open a channel of communication with that greater whole, we initiate a give-and-take, an ebb-and-flow of ideas, thoughts and inspiration—a stream of energy that we call “holy.”  Prayer makes some of us sense holiness.

Some of the prayers we say are personal; they relate to our own individual lives.  Others, communal prayers such as Aleinu, the Kaddish or the T’fillah, connect us with one another, with our fellow congregants, with the community of friends and family around us.  These prayers, however, can do more than merely strengthen the bonds between us, sitting here together at this moment; they can also transport us to the past—the distant past of ancestors long forgotten; or to the more recent past, to connect with people we once knew but who are no longer with us, and thus kindle within us the reassuring memory of their love and faith and trust.

Prayer doesn’t have to be addressed to anyone in particular.  It can just express the thoughts, feelings or emotions that are otherwise contained within our hearts.  Just releasing them out to the open can make us feel better.

We pray despite our doubts, because hope and faith are built into our hearts and DNA.

And sometimes there’s just a little bit of wishful thinking.  Like the Sounds and Images from Earth that NASA put on a golden record and installed aboard Voyager I in 1977, so we too send out images, sounds, pictures, thoughts, music and words into the space around us, not knowing how far they will go but still hoping that at some point they will be picked up, examined, and perhaps sent back to us with some response. 

We pray because we are human—alone, yet also part of something greater; because we feel—and want to share what we feel; because we sense a need to say thank you, or I’m sorry, or please—to anyone and no one in particular.  We pray because prayer can shed light on the path we are traveling on, and because prayer gives our wanderings and meanderings both purpose and a goal.

I wonder what our Father Jacob prayed for on the first night he was away from his parents’ home, having just started the journey of his lifetime.  Yet the Torah doesn’t reveal to us what he said or thought, only that, with his head resting on a rock, Jacob had a vision of a ladder with its top in the heavens, with angels climbing up and down, and God standing beside him—speaking to him, blessing him, promising him safe journey and return.

Perhaps we pray because we hope to be like Jacob, to find that wherever we are, there holiness can be found; hoping to find reassurance when we are fearful, encouragement when we are anxious. 

We pray because we hope to open our eyes after the night’s restless slumber and realize that God has been walking along with us all this time, only we did not know it.

May our prayers tonight and always fill us with a sense of awe and holiness, as they did for our ancestor Jacob so long ago, so that wherever we are, we, like Jacob, will always find ourselves welcome guests in the House of God.

Kein y’hi ratzon—may this be God’s will.

© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman