D'var Torah

Just before Chanukah, I had an opportunity to see Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s excellent play about a multifaifh (Jewish with some Christian relatives) family navigating life in Vienna from 1899-1955. It is a heartbreaking, thought-provoking play, with many intersecting themes. The themes (or perhaps sub-themes) that are sticking with me most this week, especially in light of our Torah portion, Vayigash, are the themes of luck (or chance), and migration. 

In Leopoldstadt, the Holocaust itself is omitted from the happening world of the play: we see the family just before Kristallnacht, in 1938, and then the play zooms forward in time and we meet the family members who survived the war once again in the mid-1950s. This structure throws into sharp relief something that many of us also know from our own families’ stories: how much luck, or chance, shapes who can escape in a time of crisis and who cannot. Leaving takes tremendous courage, but it can also rely upon factors outside of an individual’s control. Sometimes it’s a matter of happening to move before a quota is enacted or a border is closed, or when visas do or don’t arrive, or falling in love with someone with citizenship somewhere else … all of which are totally out of the control of people hoping to emigrate. Much of 20th and 21st century Jewish life has unfurled from our grappling with these moments of chance in our own lives, or in the lives of our ancestors, friends, or family. Who are we because of where we could, or could not, go? And what are our obligations as a consequence of these experiences and memories?

Luck/chance and migration are also important themes in this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash, although they are often overshadowed by other parts of the story. Vayigash continues the tale of Joseph and his brothers that began a few weeks ago, in Vayeshev, when Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. Now, two Torah portions and many years later, in Vayigash, Joseph and his brothers are in the middle of a complicated interaction: Joseph’s brothers have come south to seek food in Egypt because they are experiencing a famine, and the person they have been sent to, to ask for help, is their brother, Joseph, now second-in-command to Pharoah. They don’t recognize Joseph, but Joseph recognizes them, and he creates a test for them, perhaps to see if they have changed: he gives them food to take home, but he also falsely frames his youngest brother, Benjamin, for theft. He says that the brothers need to leave Benjamin behind to be enslaved, but the rest of them can go home with their food. The brothers rise to the challenge, and when Judah offers to sacrifice himself for Benjamin, Joseph is overcome: he reveals himself to his brothers, and they reunite. Joseph offers that the entire family can move to Egypt, because he knows that there are five years of famine still to come for which Egypt is prepared and his family is not. They take him up on his offer. 

Vayigash means “and he drew near,” and like most Torah portion titles, “vayigash” is both the first important word in the portion — and Judah drew near [to Joseph] (Genesis 44:18) - and one of the portion’s major themes. In Vayigash, people draw nearer and nearer to one another. It is a story of reconciliation, a story of change, a story of growth, and a story of hope. What stood out to me this year, perhaps for the first time, is how much it is also a story of migration, and luck. 

What would have happened to the brothers (and the wives, father, children, and grandchildren they had left at home, dealing with a famine) if they had not passed Joseph’s test, or if when they arrived in Egypt they had simply been sent to a different Egyptian official, and not Joseph himself? Likely, their story would have been very different (and much grimmer). We get some sense of the important role luck (or maybe caprice) play in the lives of this biblical family a few chapters later, near the start of the book of Exodus, when the story of the Israelites’ mass enslavement begins like this: “Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all of that generation … and a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:6-8). All it takes for the Ancient Israelites to move from safety to enslavement is the loss of personal connections.

What are we to make of this story, and what obligations does it place upon us? Just as in the contemporary world, the Jewish community has come up with many, many different responses to our recent history, in the ancient world, too, we might imagine a wide variety of responses to the memory of enslavement in Egypt. Our Torah contains several! But the most consistent of these, a commandment that the ancient rabbis said appeared in Torah 36 times, is the commandment to remember immigrants (sometimes translated as “strangers”) —  to treat people fairly, to not oppress them, to love one another. And the refrain for these commandments is: ki gerim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim. Because you were gerim (strangers, immigrants, sojourners) in the land of Egypt. 

The Torah’s response to memories of caprice, and terrible mistreatment, is to say — let’s never treat anyone else this way. Let’s build a society where something else can happen, where no one needs to depend on luck, or personal connections, whether they are fleeing for their lives or just hoping to live happily where they have always lived. 

Thousands of years later, we are deeply, tragically, not there yet. But we keep trying. And this week, our Torah portion, Vayigash, offers us this message of encouragement: people can change, and we can do things we’ve never done before, and maybe even never seen before. When Joseph and his brothers drew near to each other, reconciled, and built a future together, they were doing something unprecedented, something no one in their family (with so many generations of estranged siblings) had done before. As we enter this Shabbat, and this new secular year, we can follow in their footsteps.