• This Week's Torah Portion

Parashat Vayigash begins with Judah approaching the Egyptian viceroy, a man he does not know is actually his brother Joseph, in sheer terror. The brothers have brought Benjamin down with them to Egypt to get more food from Egypt’s storehouses, and Judah, the very same brother who contrived to sell Benjamin’s older brother Joseph into slavery (Genesis 37:26-27), has assured their father Jacob that he will take personal responsibility to ensure that Benjamin returns home safely; if not, he will “stand guilty” before his father “forever” (Genesis 43:9). Joseph, however, has just tricked the brothers by slipping his silver goblet into Benjamin’s sack, and it looks like Benjamin will be taken into lifelong slavery, if not worse. Into this breach, at the end of Parashat Mikeitz steps Judah, who declares the words that have since been incorporated into the traditional Selicḥot service, “Mah nedabber umah nitztadak?” – “What can we say to my lord? How can we plead, how can we prove our innocence?” (Genesis 44:16). At the beginning of this week’s parashah, he goes further, relating the stakes for his father, should the beloved Benjamin not come home: “When he [Jacob] sees that the boy is not with us, he will die, and your servants [Judah and the brothers] will send the white head of your servant, our father, down to Sheol [the realm of the dead] in grief” (Genesis 44:30-31). Judah goes on to explain that he has personally promised to protect the boy, whereupon he pleads that he be taken into slavery in Benjamin’s stead, demonstrating a selflessness and humility that we have not seen before from him or any of the other brothers. It doesn’t matter that this viceroy has previously unjustly accused Judah and his brothers of being spies (Genesis 42:14); Judah likely knows that neither Benjamin nor any of the other brothers would dare to steal the goblet; they are somehow being framed for this crime, yet he does not try to fight the charge. The 11^th-century midrash, Bereshit Rabbati, interprets Judah’s admission of his previous sin against Joseph as a confession of guilt, and assumption of responsibility as the reason the Davidic dynasty and future Messiah will be from Judah’s family: I must be a slave as I sold Joseph, my brother. It is just that I should be a slave for him. This is indicated by the phrase ‘Now therefore, please let your servant remain.’ God said to him, ‘Judah, you have offered yourself as collateral for Benjamin; therefore, the Redeemer who will arise from you over Israel will be named after you.’ The scenario dramatized in Parashat Vayigash has high stakes and is rife with deceptions: in the background is the brothers’ prior violent betrayal of Joseph and their deceptive presentation of Joseph’s bloodied coat to their father, implying that a wild animal had devoured Joseph (Genesis 37:31-33). The aggrieved Joseph’s cruel manipulation of the hungry brothers who have now thrown themselves at his mercy also figures prominently. The power dynamic is as uneven now as it was when the brothers threw Joseph in the pit. Everyone has suffered greatly. Judah seems to intuit, though, that the only way forward will be for someone to alter the dynamic by acting altruistically instead of out of brute self-interest. And he is proven right. After Judah takes responsibility, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and a reconciliation takes shape. Given Judah’s heroic posture in this story, that that the Davidic dynasty stems from his line, and that in being Yehudim, Jews are all named for Judah, I was surprised to find that modern Hebrew poetry, the corpus from which I have been mining material for this Torah commentary, includes virtually no poetic depictions of him. The following 1958 poem by one of Judah’s namesakes, however, the great modern Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai (1923-2000), comes very close to portraying the humility and lack of self-justification Judah models in this biblical episode:

The Place Where We Are Right From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the springtime. The place where we are right is trampled and hard like a yard. But doubts and loves make the world loamy like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the house was which was ruined.

הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ אָנוּ צוֹדְקִים מִן הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ אָנוּ צוֹדְקִים לֹא יִצְמְחוּ לְעוֹלָם פְּרָחִים בָּאָבִיב הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ אָנוּ צוֹדְקִים הוּא רָמוּס וְקָשֶׁה כְּמוֹ חָצֵר אֲבָל סְפֵקוֹת וְאַהֲבוֹת עוֹשִׂים אֶת הָעוֹלָם לְתָחוּחַ כְּמוֹ חֲפַרְפֶּרֶת, כְּמוֹ חָרִישׁ וּלְחִישָׁה תִּשָּׁמַע בַּמָּקוֹם שֶׁבּוֹ הָיָה הַבַּיִת אֲשֶׁר נֶחְרַב.

How does one rebuild a ruined house, or worse, a ruined family? How does one facilitate an approach that brings together antagonists with genuine grievances against each other and enables a new beginning? Not by hunkering down, says Amichai, which will only harden the ground upon which everyone stands. Not by tallying up wrongs and rights. In Parsahat Vayigash, Judah does everything he can to protect his father and, by extension, the rest of his family from descending into Sheol – that dark, hard place of stasis and death. The poem’s title and first line refer to “Hamakom shebo anu tzodkim,” that place where we insist that we are right, where nothing good can grow. The one time in the Joseph saga where the word “makom” (place) occurs is where Joseph is thrown into jail, described as “mekom asher asirei hamelekh asurim” (that dark place where the king’s prisoners are imprisoned) where Joseph suffers great injustice but where, against all odds, he finds a way back to the light (Genesis 39:20). Loamy fertility, the very opposite of the famine that the family is currently battling in Canaan, can come, Amichai’s poem suggests, not from hardening positions and rehashing of past grievances, but by fostering an atmosphere of doubt about one’s own constant rightness. Read along with this poem, the story of the brothers’ descent to fertile Egypt is as much a story of hungry people seeking food as it is about a family previously driven by hate finding a “gishah” (approach, from the same root as Vayigash) to something ever closer to love.