Running With The Weight Of Gold — Letters to a young man
10: Joseph Unbound
BS”D
Jerusalem — 9 December 2018
We are each our own Devil, and we make this world our Hell. — Oscar Wilde
Dear D –
In this week’s Torah portion (Genesis 41:1–44:17) Joseph is released from prison and becomes viceroy of Egypt. Several of the Torah’s main literary themes come together here, each with its freight of difficult truths. Literature betrays its purpose if it is a mere decoration for the mind, relying on cheap emotional tricks and ultimately serving only to make us more comfortable with who we are. Art which fails to challenge our assumptions is self-propaganda, and this is far from benign, because it becomes the tool of those who would convince us to follow them, rather than to think for ourselves.
The Torah is one of humanity’s most fundamentally challenging texts. Like any text, its interpretation and the application of it lessons vary widely, depending on whose hands it is in. Most people being fundamentally lazy and unaware that they have inner resources, it becomes an ongoing ordeal to exhort people to read the text for themselves and find personal lessons in its pages. All the more so, because we are constantly barraged by those telling us “What It Means.” Beware the easy way out, because those who lead us down the path of least resistance do so only to enhance their own power.
There is the legitimate need for just that right degree of ideology required to maintain group identity — which lies perilously close to the brute perversion of dogma in order to gain control over others. The line between sustaining a communal identity and forging an absolutist society is awfully thin; history demonstrates that we must always be on guard against the tendency of ideology to give way to the horrors of authoritarianism. Healthy ideology nourishes the individual within the society, to the benefit of both, yet it is constantly on guard, because unhealthy dogma robs the individual of autonomy, drives out — and ultimately murders — those who insist on thinking for themselves. When ideology slips into dogma it gives rise to dictatorship, a society structured as a pyramid which rests on one idea only. Tribalism subsumes individual identity into a group identity defined by a single superficial shared characteristic — skin color, creed, geographical place of origin, shared language, or any of those most obvious descriptors to which people cling because they are too enraged to think for themselves.
At their finest, the Hassidic masters perfected the balance between maintaining identity with the group, and stoking personal freedom (which is also the goal of psychoanalysis.) It may seem contradictory to describe as “free” people who live in closed communities with enforced codes of sameness. But we all enslave ourselves to something. For most of us, that servitude is unconscious, allowing us to falsely believe ourselves to be liberated. But the freedom of the unaware resides at that superficial level so susceptible to manipulation. In short: if we do not consciously choose the gods we serve, we shall be scooped up by foreign gods and will sacrifice our children before them without thinking twice. Joseph has learned the lesson of setting aside his petty hurts, to embrace his mission for the sake of others. By doing so, he saves the world. No small outcome.
Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of his cellmates is not so much prophetic, as it is clear-eyed. The general amnesty and release from prison in honor of Pharaoh’s birthday was anticipated (see last week’s reading, 40:20.) The royal wine steward and the royal chief baker are not mere servants; they oversee the production of Egypt’s wine and bread. Now it is obvious why no one wants to speak up. Pharaoh recounts his dreams (41:8) to his court. It is not that no one knew how to interpret Pharaoh’s dream; the text says explicitly that no one would interpret Pharaoh’s dreams for him.
In fact the meaning is obvious. Pharaoh dreams (41:1–7) of standing on the banks of the Nile. As pointed out by Nachmanides, Egypt is wholly dependent on the Nile; thus the river is both the giver of life, and the bringer of death. (Incidentally, this is analogous to Nachmanides’ definition of the Tohu-Bohu, the Chaos from which God forms the cosmos. It is the Hebrew term corresponding to the Greek Hyle, meaning “stuff.” It is the stuff from which the world is made. And Chaos is the stuff of creation. When we grapple with the chaos of our lives, we are often able to make from it creations and structures of profound and lasting meaning. If we fail to grapple at all, it remains Chaos and it will overwhelm us.) Everyone knows there will be bad years in which the river will withhold its bounty. Crops will fail, animals and people will starve. And historically, when bread riots break out, the official in charge of the bread production is led out in public and beheaded. It is a fair bet that the first one to step forward and explain the obvious to Pharaoh would find himself designated as the new head of Egypt’s food supply, with a likely death sentence awaiting him. Why does Joseph take the job? Well, it beats a life sentence in the dungeon.
(Pharaoh’s dreams also invoke Cain and Abel; the first dream features cows, the second crops. Each dream starts out hopeful and ends in devastation as the promise of plenty is devoured by its twin. The second parallel is the seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine, foreshadowed in the Jacob story. Jacob gladly works for seven years in anticipation of marrying his beloved Rachel [29:20: “So Jacob worked seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him as but a few days because of his loving her.”], only to be duped into marrying her sister Leah — after which he despairingly agrees to a further seven years of servitude in order to marry Rachel as well. Seven fat years followed by seven lean years. Our hopes, our dreams for a bright and easy future. Our confrontation with reality — perhaps we failed because we forgot to check all the boxes, but maybe there wasn’t anything we could have done after all. And so we live, building our future on the ruins of our past. It’s all there in black and white. The story of our lives over and over and over again…Will we be ruled by it, ruined by it? Or will we take charge?)
Joseph’s life is a sequence of events for which the readiest response should be anger. Anger at his brothers who tossed him down the pit. Anger at being sold into slavery. Anger at Potiphar’s wife who framed him, at the Royal Wine Steward who forgot him (Though he is also the one who ultimately saves Joseph. It took an extra two years — sometimes we just need to wait for the timing to be right.) And certainly anger at his dysfunctional father Jacob who created this mess.
If ever a man had cause for anger and resentment, it is Joseph. And, if ever a man achieved greatness unaided, it is Joseph. God speaks to Abraham and Isaac, and ultimately even to Jacob. God will speak face-to-face with Moses. But God says not a word to Joseph, leaving Joseph to work things out for himself. From a purely human perspective, Joseph is perhaps the greatest Biblical figure, achieving greatness on his own, with nothing but his vile existence and his slowly dawning insight to guide him.
The Talmud says that giving in to anger is a form of idol worship. Anger is the reaction when our version of reality turns out to be mistaken. When the world refuses to cooperate with our plans, we become enraged. We reject reality. We scream at God, “How dare you upset my fantasy?!”
On the linguistic level, the Hebrew word for anger literally means “nose.” Think of a snorting bull preparing to charge, or of a fire-breathing dragon shooting flames of ire and wrath. And it is through the nose that we receive life. God fashions the first human from dust from the ground, (Gen. 2:7) “And God blew into his nostrils the breath of life…” For the Kabbalists this is not metaphor: God imparts some actual part of God’s own self into us, the Divine Spark which imbues us with life. When we give into our own anger, we are blowing God out, spewing God out upon the world. There is no power greater than the power of God, and no force more destructive than the power of God unleashed with wanton rage. No power more destructive to those around us, nor any act more self-destructive.
Joseph has learned that, regardless of our inner turmoil, we must control our behavior. That our every action has an effect — and a consequence. We must act, not in mere reaction to flashes of rage. Not to satisfy our appetites. But each of us lives in service of something far greater than ourselves. If we live, as we said above, as unwitting slaves to someone else’s will, then our actions will be desultory at best, genocidally destructive at worst. It is only when we envision, and plan, and craft, and even schedule our own personal destiny that our actions will be fully informed by our learning and knowledge — that our knowledge can transform into wisdom. Joseph has learned that there is, in fact, no such thing as “justifiable” anger, for anger is a purely destructive force. It is the assertion that “I” am more important than anything else. Joseph recognizes that to save himself, and to achieve the transformation the world so sorely needs, we must remove that “I” — that irascible, that self-justifying, that angry and wounded Self — from the equation.
This new wisdom enables Joseph to succeed where others have failed. It is a commonplace that those in high government positions — by no means exclusively in the Middle East! — abuse their position for personal gain. We have noted elsewhere Nobel Prize-winning economist Amaryta Sen, who writes that throughout human history, famine is a political phenomenon. There is always food. But those in power use food as a weapon to punish the minorities they hate, as a favor to bribe those whose backing they crave, and to enrich themselves beyond measure. At times when grain prices shoot sky-high, expect the Chief of the Royal Granaries to be driving a Lamborghini. The Torah’s detailed description of Joseph’s diligent husbanding of Egypt’s resources shows that he has seen through the base human craving for immediate gain — seen it as a losing game, and seen that if he truly masters the situation, he will gain unprecedented power. Actual power, not based on the momentary granting of favors, but on his control of his environment — and on his own effectiveness, in the face of the incompetence of those around him. Joseph has learned to embrace the task for which God sent him into the world.
Joseph has been given ample time and solitude, and he has put it to good use. Not all of us have the misfortune to be thrown into a dungeon. Yet we are all in some fashion imprisoned. Imprisoned by our past especially: by the hurts done us by our parents, by dreams shattered, or by mere random bad luck. The manifold unfairnesses of life. How many of us are angry at the poor outcomes when our own decisions did not work out, still carrying rage at those who could have helped us and did not?
Joseph’s prison was one of damp stone, of cold and dark places crawling with scorpions and snakes, yet he emerged wiser for the time spent underground. Will we be so lucky to emerge from our personal dungeons of the heart? There is no end of work to do. May God strengthen your hands.
Yours for a better world –
Moshe
