Translation by Yaakov Tzemach
Yosef (Joseph) was thrown in a pit, sold into slavery and, when finally seemed to recover, lost everything as he was thrown in jail on an a false accusation of adultery. In Parshat Miketz, Yosef’s life takes on a new direction. He rises to greatness and becomes second in power to Pharaoh in the Land of Egypt. He marries a woman of high social stature and is blessed with two children.
The names he gives his children provide insight into how he relates to his previous life. He names his firstborn son “‘Menashe’ - ki neshni Elokim, for God as let me forget my toil and my entire father’s house” (Bereishit - 41:51). The word “Neshani” means forgetting. Yosef thanks God for helping him forget “his toil,” meaning the hardships he experienced and also to forget his “entire father’s house.” Yosef forgets everything - both the bad and the good. Repressing the past in its entirety enables one who has undergone a traumatic experience to start life over. A similar mechanism was utilized by many holocaust survivors who chose not to tell their children anything about the lives they had in Europe – neither about the camps, nor about their parents and siblings because any remembrance of the past can reopen old wounds.
With the birth of his second son, Yosef changes his relationship to his past: “And name of the second [son] he called ‘Efraim - ki hifrani Elokim -because God has made me fruitful in the land of my sorrows.’” (Bereishit 41:52). Yosef chose to commemorate the suffering he had experienced, and even to see the good that emerged from “the land of [his] sorrows.” Thus, Yosef is like his father, Yaakov (Jacob), who sought out the blessing embedded in the pain from his fight with the angel. In light of this we can give a symbolic interpretation of Yaakov's preference to Efraim over Menashe when blessing them at the end of his life.
The Midrash (Tanchuma Vayechi 17) brings a story that highlights Yosef’s transformation. The Midrash tells of Yaakov’s funeral procession, which on its way back to Mitztrayim (Egypt) passed by the pit into which Yosef was thrown by his brothers years earlier. When Yosef’s brothers saw that they were approaching the pit, they feared that revisiting the crime scene would push Yosef to take revenge. However, contrary to their expectations, Yosef stood in front of the pit and made a blessing: “Blessed is God (HaMakom) that made for me a miracle in this place (Bamakom hazeh)”.
This story, which closes the Midrash Tanchuma on Sefer Bereishit, describes the emotional and spiritual heights that Yosef attained. Yosef is able to contemplate the pain and see it as a source of blessing. Like many midrashim, this story is rooted in ideas explicitly written in the verses, psukim. The Torah describes the brothers’ concern that Yosef take revenge upon Yaakov’s death (Bereishit 50:15) and Yosef’s calming response, as he explains that everything is part of a divine plan: “And you thought to do to me evil. God thought it for good in order to make as today, to support a great nation” (Bereishit 50:20).
Cold and lonely up high
It would be overly simplistic to say that the story of Yosef and his brothers has a happy ending. The irony is that just as Yosef learned that what seems bad at first can turn out to be good, likewise he learned that what seems good at first can also turn out to be not so good. When he was young, Yosef dreamt of power. He excitedly told his family of his dreams in which they all prostrate to him. When the dreams are actualized and he rises to power, Yosef learns that it can be cold and lonely at the top. After their father dies, the brothers fall on their faces and offer themselves as slaves, pleading with Yosef to forgive them.
When this happens -- and this the actualization of his dreams -- Yosef, instead of feeling validation, breaks and cries (Bereishit 50:17). When Yosef achieves his childhood dream, he wants nothing more than to break the distance and estrangement that had developed between himself and his brothers. He wants to simply be one of them.
It is told about HaRav Kook that, when his mother died, he cried very bitterly and was completely inconsolable. When someone tried to comfort him by saying that this is the way of the world, he responded as follows: “You don’t understand. Until now there was one person in the world that called me ‘Avreim’le’ and now there is nobody.”
We need leaders who understand what Yosef ultimately understood, that leadership is a responsibility and not a privilege. We need leaders that choose the position of authority not because they are motivated by their egos, but because they feel a sense of mission, of being part of us.