SERMON - VAYIGASH       December 22, 2023       10 Tevet 5784   Rabbi David Edleson 

I grew up in a very complex family dynamic. As a Jewish family in the deep deep South during desegregation, in fact usually the only Jewish family in our small town, we got axes through our door and a cross on our lawn; we got bomb threats when my sister was named valedictorian and sucker punches regularly in the school hallways; we had more than a few friends’ parents that wouldn’t allow us into their home or come to their parties, so we had to depend on one another. We felt like we were all in on a secret that everyone else had totally wrong, but that wasn’t cool because it resulted in such sporadic hostility.  Mostly I remember it being confusing. It also seemed to confuse my parents, which increasingly makes no sense to me as I age. 

But while we had a very strong sense of family, it was also a deeply dysfunctional family. Like a Southern Philip Roth novel that never got written, my mother was overbearing and charismatic but also disturbed, jealous, volatile and triangulating. My father was passive. My sister wanted to be popular instead of smart. My brother wanted to be a country-club Protestant instead of a dark-complected Jew, and I was obnoxious, funny but in a very mean way, and as the baby, I felt I was in charge of everyone. As we each graduated from high school, we left the family circle and spread out about as far from one another as we could.  We loved each other, but at a healthy distance. 

I was thinking about my family as I was studying this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash, in which Joseph, now vizier of all Egypt, reveals himself to his brothers, and they sob and weep on one another’s necks, and their lives turn into an ancient prequel to the Brady Bunch where they all live together in the Land o’ Goshen with maids and more food that you could ever eat.         

But that is not really what is going on in that story.  Joseph, the baby, had always had an outsized ego and felt the world should bow down to him. He was a holy terror and his siblings decided they had had enough and threw him in a pit, sold him off into slavery, and then lied about it to their father for decades.  Joseph had been sexually assaulted, thrown in jail and generally had a bummer of a life because of those brothers, until he unexpectedly became king of the world.  

In this week’s portion, they finally are back together, and Joseph starts the reunion by playing a series of very brutal tricks on his brothers that give them a taste of what they did to him.  When his brother Judah that had sold him as a slave finally steps forward to save Joseph’s new little brother Benjamin,  Joseph is flooded with all the emotions of family and loss and the Torah tells us: 

Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants, and he cried out, “Have everyone withdraw from me!” So there was no one else about when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. His sobs were so loud that the Egyptians could hear, and so the news reached Pharaoh’s palace. 

Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still well?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dumbfounded were they on account of him. Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come forward to me.” 

And when they came forward, he said, “I am your brother Joseph, he whom you sold into Egypt. Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you. ..

You will dwell in the region of Goshen, where you will be near me—you and your children and your grandchildren, your flocks and herds, and all that is yours. ..

With that he embraced his brother Benjamin around the neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. 

He kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; only then were his brothers able to talk to him.

It is a beautiful moment in the story of our ancient family.  I have always been very moved by Joseph after all he’s been through suddenly being wracked with sobs and pent up emotions.  

When my mother died, and my brother and sister and I all started to realize that what we had been told about each other by our mother was not anything like the truth, we had a moment like this.  In the funeral home, as people were about to come in, we broke down and sobbed and held one another.   After that, we made an effort to spend a few weekends together and then we went back to our usual ways of being.  We talk.  I’m very close with my sister, but we are deeply different people with very different experiences and ways of seeing the world, and so we do our best but there are still resentments and histories that weave themselves into the fabric of our relationships. 

I often wonder:  Are we reconciled enough?  Should I do more or is this the right relationship for us?  

In our Torah portion, , there is a hint of something like “reconciled enough” .  Joseph is still Joseph; he can’t but help brag about his power and status even as he is weeping and reconciling. Also notice that Joseph tells them they will live in the land of Goshen, near Joseph.  Joseph runs all of Egypt.  He has a palace, but he doesn’t invite them to live with him, or next to him, but half-way across Egypt -   close enough.  

Joseph continues to have his own life, his own powerful circle of connections, and while he might visit his family, I suspect that their differing lives and the history of hurt and distrust are still at play.  

Close enough. 

This might seem sad, but I also see it as complex, as all relationships are, and hopeful in its own way.  It’s not the Hallmark Holiday movie version of life, but it is respectful, mutually affirming, and peaceful. There is room to make progress . 

Indeed, that is my hope for Israel and Palestine. That both sides somehow are able to face the wrong done to the other, the cycle of attack and retaliation, the trickery, and shifts in power, so that we can live side by side there, with respect, mutually affirming and peaceful.  Both sides will have to give up things that are dear to them and central to their identity.  That is hard work and requires a spirituality that does not pull us toward purity;  a spirituality that understands the value of “Close Enough.”  

The utopian ideal of reconciliation is almost never real because as human beings we are creations of our experiences and the stories we tell about them.  But there are in the Torah a few examples of “close enough,” with Cain and Abel as the mirror against which we try and do better. 

After the near sacrifice, Abraham and Isaac are never quite the same. They live near each other, and Isaac is dutiful to his father, but they are never close in the way they were before the Akedah. 

Esau opts not to kill Jacob, and though they hug and weep,  Jacob, now Israel immediately turns and goes to a different part of the country. 

And now with Joseph and his family  

Later in the Bible our family forgets how to be close enough, and instead fight civil war after civil war, with betrayal after betrayal. We learn again that the failure to reconcile, to compromise will result in war after war after war, and ultimately the destruction of the kingdom and of sovereignty.  

It is a wise and sobering book, this Bible we’ve inherited.  

We long for a perfect reconciliation, a perfect healing where we are brought back into unity with one another and with God,  but that sort of unity is the domain of the divine:  God is One; people not so much.  

Prayer is a time for imagining and tasting the Oneness of the divine, experiencing moments of wholeness, but our daily lives are not that-  can’t be that.  Instead, we must learn to long for Oneness while working on compromises, dealing with imperfect relationships,  balancing competing goods and competing evils.  The Jewish spiritual path is one on which we learn to hold complexities and find balance among them.   

It is not always as satisfying as moral certainty, as feeling passionately just. It’s just not as sexy and satisfying as a clear right and wrong, but it is, I think, more honest about what is possible and what is best at making a civil society possible.  

The Talmud teaches:  No Flour, No Torah.  A good life, an exemplary life includes compromise and getting dirty and sometimes accepting what is possible even when it is not what we want.  Indeed, the utopian longing for perfect solutions is, I think, getting in the way of making some terrible situations much better. It is a spiritual necessity to learn how to hold complexity, hurt and distrust while working together on common goals like living in a society - or a family -that does not destroy us and over time, makes us better.     

Shabbat Shalom