Reconciliation and Redemption: Vayigash

Reconciliation and Redemption

D’var Torah for Parashat Vayigash

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

The story of Joseph and his brothers reaches its emotional conclusion in this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash (Genesis 44:18—47:27).

Having planted—and (surprise!) discovered—his divination cup in Benjamin’s satchel, Joseph demands that the boy be handed over to him as a slave.  To their horror, the brothers realize that their worst nightmare could not have turned out any worse than this.  All their fears, their father’s fear, the secret they had been harboring for twenty two years, all were about to come out into the light; their shame, their guilt, were about to be exposed to the whole word, with everyone watching, with the great Pharaoh’s own viceroy as their judge and witness.

Yet, with nothing left to lose, one of the brothers finds enough moral courage within him to speak up.  If something—anything—good is to come out of this, it is only by speaking the truth. And so Judah steps up, “Vayigash Yehuda,” and recounts the entire tale to Joseph.  He recalls to Joseph that horrible day when his life was completely changed.  Not that Joseph had forgotten any moment of it, or any detail of the betrayal, or the special tunic his father had sewn for him and that he wore with such pride, seeing it again as it was being torn off him and thrown in the dirt.  How could he forget the feel on his soft flesh of the rough hands that grabbed him and hoisted him as though he were no more than a sack of flour?  The years he worked as a houseboy? The unjust accusations; the dank jail he languished in before Pharaoh’s cupbearer finally remembered him?  With his whole being Joseph felt rising within him intense hatred.  And yet, even then, he wondered and was amazed by how much hatred a person could hold within him and not explode.  With all his might, Joseph held back; he let Judah speak on, letting him choke on his own words as he told Joseph how they first plotted to kill him but finally at his—at Judah’s!—suggestion, they sold Joseph to a caravan of slave traders instead. 

“Guilty,” Joseph’s anguished soul wanted to cry out.  “Guilty! Take them all away!”

But he didn’t, and Judah went on, and Joseph’s curiosity got the better of him.  What happened then? What did you tell your father?  What did you say to one another?  Have you realized yet what a great wrong you had done me? Yourself? Our father?”

And Judah continues, his heart breaking within him, not realizing until that moment how much sorrow a heart could bear before it broke.  Yet he doesn’t speak of himself.  In despair, he sees his father, Jacob; with dread, he imagines the moment when he has to face Jacob with yet another failure, with news of yet another lost son, his youngest, his beloved Benjamin.  “How will I go back to my father without the boy?  Let me not see the unhappiness that will befall my father!” Overcome, Judah cannot continue.

At this moment Joseph’s emotions, too, break over him like a huge wave.  The false front he had been putting up, the struggle to forget the past, to suppress his true identity, crumble like so much dry clay.  The mention of his father brings up painfully sweet memories he had been forcing back, and now they flood him in a river of tears.

“I am Joseph,” he calls out to his brothers. “Is my father yet alive?”

Shaken to his core, Judah is dumbfounded.  But then he begins to understand.  He does not respond.  Bowing his head, he realizes that his whole life had directed him to this moment.  By stepping up, by letting truth into the room, he did what he had to do.  All that was left now was to wait and see what effect this moment would have on history.  But there was nothing more he himself could do at this point.

Joseph invites his brothers to step up, to draw near to him.  Their reconciliation is like a circle closing.  It was a similar drawing-near, many years earlier, that brought Jacob closer to Isaac to receive his father’s blessing.  Once again, the legacy of redemption found its rightful heir.  The blessing of Abraham would continue.

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman