Rebbetzin Tziporah – Vayeishev

UNITED UNIQUE

Dear Friends,

Would you be the type to throw Yosef into the pit?

Before you give the right answer, ask yourself if you have ever done something wrong, when you were absolutely sure that you were doing something right. If the answer is “never”, don’t think that you necessarily gave the right answer. It says in Kohelet that there is no tzadik in the land who shall do good and not sin. 

So that means that you apparently must have made wrong choices. Would you be in a better place morally if you thought you were wrong when you determined the direction to head, and headed that way anyway? If that’s the pattern that you have, the issue is not only moral; it’s an issue that may reflect a deep-seated desire to fail in order to validate your murky self-image. 

Or (very non p.c. possibility) you may be really dumb, at least in some areas. Let’s assume that this isn’t the way you work. 

Are there more possibilities?

Yosef’s brothers were great tzadikim. What that means concretely isn’t just that they did more good than bad, (which, as Rambam says, is how you are judged) – beyond judgment there is another aspect of your being. It is who you are essentially. 

You have a part of you that longs for eternity, loves good, and knows what the word inspiration means. There is also the part of you that loves self-empowerment and has no room for anything else; in which all the external transient desires fill up the screen; that turns everyone else into a rival or a loyal soldier in your own private army.

The battle isn’t just between “yes” and “no”. All of base drives are there for a reason. They are there for you to deny them “ownership” of your thought speech and action, or you can sometimes accept them and give them a way to find expression in the way that draws you closer to your higher self. When that takes place, your higher self now “owns” the lower part so that you no longer have a real battle.

Sounds great, but not awfully familiar?

Probably not. No offense meant, but you may be like most of us – a work in progress.

The tribes were much further along than we are. They weren’t petty. This makes the act that they did far less understandable. They heard Yosef’s dreams, in which he projected a vision of their future in which they would bow to him. 

There is one question that they couldn’t resolve until that day. How would they remain a people if one of the members declares himself to be more than equal? They understood that there would be 12 tribes, parallel to the 12 easily seen constellations, which, in turn, are a “map” that people in earlier times were able to use to discern the flow of Hashem’s providential giving. 

Today, we don’t know what astral signs mean or say (I hope that doesn’t mean that you have just lost hope of meeting a tall dark stranger or winning the lottery). However, the fact that each of the 12 was born under a different astral sign tells us that although they were united, they were also unique. The number 12 also is the number of ways to rearrange the letters of Hashem’s four-letter name. 

The message is (among other messages hidden deeply) that each personality, each mazal, has a path leading to Hashem and the glorification of His name. This is what unites us. This being the case, the brothers had reason to question where Yosef was coming from when he revealed his dreams.

What are dreams about anyway? Ramchal says that when you sleep your soul is elevated and your body is alive, but completely unaware. What happens to your higher self? It may be released to some 

degree from the bonds of time/space that we live with every moment. It may then be influenced to “review” events that took place or physical sensations (your third piece of pizza may return as armies choking you in a dream). There is also the possibility of seeing. If your thought during the day is absolutely honest, your dreams may be true. 

If you are not quite on that level, then your dreams may reflect your complexities – they may be true on occasion and may be false on occasion. The question that the brothers faced was whether the dreams were reflective of megalomania of the sort that would destroy the nascent people. They discussed this seriously. They didn’t see the additional party who attended their meeting. It was envy.

Yosef was a favorite by anyone’s definition. Yaakov, who could see things as they were, saw Yosef as being a leader, not as a destroyer.  He wanted to show Yosef’s potential to his brothers so that they would accept his leadership. It backfired.

Why am I retelling a story that you may know?

Maharal calls envy the “yetzer hara of the emotions”. You irrationally think that if someone else has or is more, the result is that you have less. The tricky thing is that theoretically this is true. If there are only two cookies and two kids, if one has more, the other one has nothing. This leaves the concept of Hashgachah out in the cold. 

The means by which Hashem brings about how many cookies you have may be via the person with the cookie jar giving more to someone else than to you, but the cause is that Hashem wants you to have exactly what you have. 

It’s easy to confuse cause (Hashem’s decision of what you need to do the job for which you are destined) and the means by which he provides you with what you need (financial success or conversely financial failure, brilliance, talent, the opposite, early marriage, late marriage, etc.) which are enormously varied. 

If you lose sight of the One who is in charge, you are more or less capable of doing what the brothers did to Yosef. You can sit down with yourself and others, think things through, and draw the wrong conclusions.

We are presently so unified. So beautiful. It’s clear that we all have something to give to the whole that no one else can do. We need the learning, the tefillah, the army, the ladies who bake cakes, and more. There is no envy – Hamas isn’t letting us get there. Being able to recognize that we are all the same, part of the People, and all different, with different personal destinies is the one lesson we can learn from the war.

Let’s skip ahead. Yosef told his brothers not to be concerned or afraid (all you did was sell me into slavery, cause me to suffer the kind of humiliation that you will never even understand...). He was able to do this because he saw how every step along the way was part of Hashem’s plan for him and for them, and ultimately for all of their descendants.

 

May we hear and see the hidden Presence,

Love,

Tziporah