Parashat VaYeshev

 

Rav Haim Lifshitz

 

 

 

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Parashat VaYeshev

 

 

 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

 

  the mutual influence between ego and self

          creates hatred in Yosef’s brothers.

  

 “And to inform us further,

  That the decree is truth,

  And that excessive effort is false.”

  (Ramban 37:15)

 

The no-man’s land between spirit and matter is the Jew’s challenge; he turns it into a territory for creative conquest.

 

The Kotsker Rebbe said: Whoever believes in the truth of all the the Hassidic tales of their wonder-working masters is a fool, and whoever believes they could never have happened is a heretic.

 

The Jew exists in the encounter between what is and what should be.  He feels comfortable and quite at home in both areas.  Tangible reality and dreams mingle, serving him separately and joined.

 

Yaakov dreams about a ladder that connects and unites heaven and earth, and is surprised that he has not seen this vision wide awake.  The dream is more tangibly real than reality.

 

Yosef dreams and runs to tell everyone.  He relates to the dream as to a reality that is more tangibly real than the immediate reality, which might react hostilely to the reality of the dream.  He attributes no importance to the narrow boundaries of reality’s contingencies, and grants more value to the dream.

 

In contrast to the dreaming Jews, Paro awakens from his dream disturbed and troubled, to the point that he must search for a way out, for a road that bypasses the dream.

 

The Jew sees reality as being the result of a theoretical principle.  He mends reality to fit the principle, rather than altering the principle to fit reality.  It is only according to this principle that one can understand the wide range of approaches to the Torah’s interpretation, offering an endless array of peculiar facts, despite the fact that events are clearly spelled out in the scriptures – in Yosef’s behavior toward his brothers and, immeasurably more serious, in his brothers’ hatred toward him, to the point of murder! 

 

This is as regards Yosef.  There is also Yehuda’s behavior with Tamar, who disguises herself as a loose woman.

 

Obviously, commentaries such as the Or HaHaim, the Alshich, and above all the Ramban explain that Yehuda  – as the Creator’s messenger – was occupied with creating Mashiah: Saving the sparks of kedusha from which the soul of the eternal David King of Israel would come forth.

 

“To teach you that in the decree lies the essential truth, and that excessive effort is false,” in the pure-gold wording of the Ramban, regarding Yosef, sent by his father “to see his brothers’ peace”.

 

This mingling of boundaries between reality and theory is what  opens the door to an understanding of Jewish behavior, which can demonstrates pessimism in the face of what appears to be a clearly positive reality, and a peculiar optimism precisely when confronted with what appears to be a harsh and hopeless reality.

 

Or perhaps – confusing cause and effect: On the one hand, the Israeli media conceals the truth from, and brainwashes the public, yet on the other hand, it relies on public opinion surveys.  As though, so to speak, public opinion were a real entity that had to be considered, and policy built upon it accordingly, despite the fact that this public opinion is the effect of brainwashing and of an utterly one-sided consciousness.

A Jew does not relate to reality as it is, per se`.  Thus he does not view reality’s rules or nature’s laws as obligatory.  Reality, for the Jew, serves only as an expression for actualizing the Godly idea.

 

Yosef’s brothers’ hatred began with envy, and ended as a perception of an ideological expression which to them was the antithesis of their father’s truth:  For the brothers, truth stood outside of reality.  It was midat hadin, the measure of judgement.  Truth did not take reality into consideration.

 

Yosef seemed, to their opinion, to be enslaved to his own personal, human, reality-bound needs.  They viewed his path as a danger to their father’s Torah.

 

The deficiency of the brothers’ approach was in the fact that ignoring the egoistic system’s cycle of self-preservation does not help you break out of it.  Any stimulation of the self-preservation system, such as envy – if the self does not know how to guard against it – can steal into and penetrate the self, which is the source of quality, which is free of the elements of kina, ta’ava, and kavod, and which is incapable of breeding hatred.

 

Hatred is only grown in the regions of self-preservation.  The hatred of the sacred brothers, shivtei kah, “God’s own tribes”, had to have begun with the mechanisms of self-preservation, and since the brothers had never known or encountered anything resembling such mechanisms, they stumbled over them.

 

Crude and selfish envy wormed its way, penetrating, burrowing mole-like underground into the inner region of the self, there to draft the self’s quality into its own service.

 

Just as the yetser hara can serve the yetser hatov, and the cycle of survival can serve the self, as it says, “when the voice is Yaakov’s voice, then the hands – Esav’s hands – do not dominate”, so the opposite can be true – the yetser tov can fall into the net spread by the yetser hara, and become its servant.

 

And indeed, such a thing occurred to the brothers.  While Yosef was drafting the yetser hara to serve the yetser tov, and therefore he is called tsadik, in the meantime, vayered Yehuda, “Yehuda went down, ‘for he went down from his greatness,’” and fell into the net of the yetser hara.

 

Since the brothers’ cavana, intention, had never been bad from the very beginning, they therefore never deviated from their Godly course, from the destiny that had been decreed upon them by the hashgaha, which was in no way damaged by their bad free choice.  Therefore good came out of their deed, out of the sale of Yosef.  And out of Yehuda’s deviation, the root of ben Yishai emerged.

 

We can see then that with Esav, hatred existed even within the yetser hatov, which had enslaved itself entirely to the yetser hara.  With Lavan, hatred remained in the boundaries of the yetser hara.  With the brothers, hatred was never able to push the yetser hatov entirely aside, and therefore they never lost their good free choice entirely, and were able to return to it, and to function through it and according to it.

 

Separating reality from what emerges from it, focusing only on the results, and drafting them to the Godly purpose, is a guarantee of protection against the danger of falling into the trap of slavery to the laws of matter, which are the selfish self-preservation system.

 

The Festival of Hanuka

“We have no permission to make use of them, but rather only to see them.”  This is the miracle of the jar of oil.  It is the light that emerges from the Menorah, rather than the heftsa, the tangible object, that determines.  Addressing tangible reality contains the danger of limitation, of losing the infinite shefa.  “Bracha does not rest, except upon what is concealed from the eye.”  The object itself is limiting, and it is only what radiates forth from it for avodat Hashem, for the service of God, that constitutes “the decree”, the leshaim shamayim.

“Excessive effort” is enslavement to the dictates of physical matter, and this is what brings one to falsehood.  Reality is falsehood, and light is truth.  We see then that light and darkness are truth, and the object itself, is false.

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