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