Parashat Miketz; Shabbat Rosh Chodesh Hannukha
December 4, 2021, 30 Kislev 5782
Torah: Genesis 41:1-44:17;
Triennial 43:16-44:17, Numbers 7:42-47, 28:9-15
Haftarah: I Kings 3:15-4:1
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In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "Glimmers of an Incandescent Light", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "The Perfect Gift" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes about "Golden Bowls and Grand Concepts" in the Haftarah.
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Glimmers of an Incandescent Light
Ilana Kurshan
In parashat Miketz, Jacob sends ten of his sons to Egypt to procure food, since there is a famine in the land of Canaan. Unbeknownst to the sons, the ruler in charge of dispersing rations is in fact their younger brother, Joseph, whom they have not seen since they raised him from the pit and sold him into slavery over two decades earlier. Our parashah is rich with dramatic irony, for “though Joseph recognized his brothers, they did not recognize him” (Genesis 42:8). According to the simple reading of the text, only Joseph knows about their connection; the brothers have no idea. But the midrashic tradition suggests that the various characters in this drama know more than they think they do, a reminder that what is accessible to us consciously is only a small fraction of what we know on a far deeper level.
The midrash (Genesis Rabbah 91:7) begins with a rather superficial explanation of why Joseph’s brothers are not able to recognize him. When they last saw Joseph, he was only seventeen, and did not yet have facial hair; now that he has sprouted a beard, the brothers cannot identify him. In contrast, Joseph’s older brothers already had beards when he last saw them, and so he has no trouble recognizing them. Perhaps this midrash is suggesting that Joseph has matured more than his brothers. Cast out of his father’s home while still a teenager, he has had life experiences that have unsettled him, challenged him, and forced him to grow up: He was sold to a caravan of Ishmaelites; he was employed in a foreign country by an important dignitary whose wife then tried to seduce him; he was wrongfully imprisoned; and then he was taken to demonstrate his talents before Pharaoh, who appointed him as his second-in-command. The brothers, presumably, have remained at home in Canaan, shepherding their father’s flocks; they are hardly changed from when Joseph last saw them. Thus Joseph recognizes them immediately, whereas he himself is unrecognizable.
But the midrash also suggests that Joseph’s brothers may have known more than they were able to acknowledge to themselves. When Joseph’s brothers first arrive in Egypt and introduce themselves to the grand vizier in charge of disbursing rations, they tell him, “We are all of us sons of the same man” (42:11). The midrash (Genesis Rabbah 91:7) picks up on the seemingly extraneous word “all,” which is understood as referring to Joseph as well. According to the midrash, “the divine spirit glimmered within them,” and the brothers know intuitively, albeit not consciously, that they were “all,” in fact, brothers, including the Egyptian vizier standing before them. Essentially the brothers made a Freudian slip, with their subconscious minds infiltrating and informing their speech.
The Torah explains that when Joseph and his brothers communicate, it is through an interpreter, since Joseph pretends not to speak his brothers’ language. The midrash (Genesis Rabbah 91:8) identifies this interpreter as Menasheh, Joseph’s oldest son. Earlier in the parashah we learned that Joseph gave his son this name from the Hebrew word for “made me forget” (nashani): “Joseph named his firstborn son Menasheh meaning: God has made me forget my hardship and my parental home” (41:51). The use of Menasheh as the interpreter suggests that an act of willful forgetting stands between Joseph and his brothers, as if the brothers are repressing what they have already begun to intuit.
Interestingly, the midrash intimates that one reason the brothers came down to Egypt was to search for their lost brother. When Joseph interrogates them, they explain that they were twelve brothers, but the youngest is with their father back in Canaan “and one is no more” (42:13). In the midrash (Genesis Rabbah 91:7) Joseph presses them further, asking about the whereabouts of the son who is no more. The brothers confess that they sold him, and Joseph asks for how much money. “Five sela coins,” the brothers respond. Joseph asks them, “If someone told you that were you to give me five sela coins, he’d return your brother to you, would you do it?” They say they would. The brothers go on to explain that this is the very reason—to search for their brother—that they have come to Egypt.
It is at this point, according to the midrash, that Joseph accuses his brothers of being spies. Joseph knows that the brothers have come to Egypt not just to procure rations; like spies, they have ulterior motives. They have come to search for what they are lacking, which is not just food, but also the brother whose loss has devastated their father. The midrash (Genesis Rabbah 91:1) notes that the term shever—the rations that Jacob sends the brothers to Egypt to procure—also means “brokenness.” When Jacob told his sons that “there are rations to be had in Egypt” (42:2), he was also telling them that Egypt was where his brokenness was to be found, and where he could be made whole again.
According to this reading, it is not just Joseph’s brothers who intuit more than they know consciously, but also Jacob. The Torah teaches that when the brothers brought Joseph’s blood-soaked ornamented tunic to their father, Jacob refused to be comforted. Rashi explains that “one does not accept comfort for someone who is really alive but believed to be dead, for it is decreed that a dead person should be forgotten from the heart, but not a living person” (Rashi on Genesis 37:35). Comfort remains elusive for Jacob, a sign that on some level he still lacks closure, because he has not fully accepted Joseph’s death as a reality.
Ultimately none of us has control over what we repress and what resurfaces; that which seems lost to us may return unbidden. Menasheh, who is supposed to symbolize Joseph’s willful forgetting, ends up coming between him and his brothers. The brothers, who claim that Joseph is “no more,” also recognize subconsciously that he is one of them. And Jacob cannot accept comfort for the loss of his son, suggesting that he continues to sense his presence. We live in an era devoid of prophecy, but our intuitions are not unlike glimmers of the divine spirit, reminding us that there are chambers in our minds and hearts where a light burns incandescent though the door remains barred.
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The Perfect Gift
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Background: The food the brothers brought home from Egypt is running out, but they were told by the Egyptian lord (Joseph) not to come back without their youngest brother, Benjamin, with whom their father Jacob/Israel refuses to part.
Text: Bereshit 43:11-14
11And Israel their father said to them, “If it must be so, then do this: Take some of the choicest [produce] of the land in your vessels and carry down a present for the man—a little balm and a little honey, spices and gum, laudanum, pistachio nuts and almonds. 12Take double money in your hand and take back in your hand the money that was returned in the mouth of your sacks; perhaps it was an oversight. 13Take your brother also, and arise, go back to the man. 14And may El Shaddai give you mercy before the man, that he may release your other brother and Benjamin. And I - if I am bereaved, I am bereaved!”
· Jacob sends gifts and double the silver for food procurement (including the silver that was returned on their last trip.) What message is he sending through each of these?
· Consider the situation: there is a famine in the land to the point that grain must be brought from Egypt. What do you think that Jacob can send to the wealthy Egyptian lord (Joseph) as a present? Why does he not send gold and silver?
· The book of Bereshit offers us several lessons in gift-giving: Avraham’s servant brings gifts to Rivkah’s family in chapter 24, Jacob sends gifts to Esau in chapter 32, and now this. What is the purpose of each of these gifts? How do the contents differ?
Commentary: Seforno Bereshit 43:11
Take some of the choicest [produce] of the land - The present brought to a person eager for wealth needs to be of great quantity to satisfy the eye of the money-hungry. It was of this sort that was Jacob’s present to Esau. But when a present is being brought to a wealthy, aristocratic person, for whom monetary value is of no significance, it is appropriate that it should be little, but it will be a choice thing which is kept in small quantities and found in royal palaces. And of this sort was this present for Joseph.
· What is the “gift-giving dilemma” that Jacob is facing here? What impression does he want to make on the Egyptian lord? Why?
· What social rule has Seforno formulated based on reading the book of Bereshit? Do such gift giving rules apply today?
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Golden Bowls and Grand Concepts
Bex Stern Rosenblatt
The biggest, grandest concepts in Judaism often are found hidden under pages and pages of details. It is from the reading, the observance, the making sense of these details that we begin to construct the grander concept, that we realize we are in the presence of something bigger.
Nowhere is this truer than in the building of and observance around the Mishkan (Tabernacle) and then the Temple. The instructions for building the Mishkan, repeated twice, are overwhelming. From needing to procure dolphin skins to acacia poles to a precise number of goat-skin cloths, we are taught how to structure our society so that we can produce what is needed to construct and maintain such a site. Moreover, we are constructing such a site and structuring our society in such a way toward a specific purpose, namely so that God can dwell among us.
Our haftarah begins with this idea of dwelling. We read, “Shout out and rejoice, Daughter Zion, for behold I am coming to dwell among you.” The First Temple had been destroyed. We had been to exile and back again. And we are now building the Second Temple. God confirms to us that God will once again return to God’s dwelling place, among us, in the Temple.
However, without much ado we find ourselves buried again in details. Zechariah is presented with a strange vision. If the details around the construction of the Mishkan were obscure, the details Zechariah receives here about a menorah are cryptic. We read, as Robert Alter translates, “a lampstand all of gold and a bowl on its top, and its lamps were on it, seven pipes for the lamps on its top. And there were two olive trees by it, one to the right of the bowl and one to its left.” For the past few millennia, no one has been able to sketch out this image definitively. How the pipes connect to the lamps and how many pieces we’re talking about is incredibly unclear. It seems to be describing the same menorah we are familiar with from the Temple. But even Zechariah does not understand the image. He asks for clarification what the image is and is told by an angel or messenger that the meaning is “not by might and not by power but by my spirit.”
The angel seems to have made several logical leaps to get from golden bowls to God’s spirit. And very often, when we read this haftarah, we read only the angel’s words. We skip to the grander concept, this seeming rejection of might and power, having given up on following the logic that connects the image of the menorah to the bigger concept. And yet, as we read this haftarah on Hanukkah, on the holiday celebrating the rededication of the Temple, we can throw ourselves back into the details. As we each light our hanukkiah this season, take time. Consider the symbolism of the act and the details that went into the construction of the physical object and the ritual. And from that consideration, perhaps we can construct a stronger sense of what the bigger concept is.
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