|
Parashat Vayigash
Rav Haim Lifshitz
Essays and Articles:
|
"And Yehuda stepped forward"
Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai Or HaHaim HaKadosh writes: "In truth the simple meaning of the katuv is that it is a known fact of the custom of kings that the great people of the court and their ministers sit before them. If it should happen that someone comes, about a legal matter or a royal matter, he will not stand in the space between the king and the ministers that sit foremost in the royal court. Rather he will stand outside the circle, and speak from there. In this way Yehuda had been speaking up to this point, and afterwards - "he approached him" - meaning he entered within this divider to stand in his inner space, standing between the king and the ministers, in order that no one should hear his words other than the king." What was it that Yehuda whispered to Yosef beyond the divider? The murmurings of kings? "Like water reflecting water - face to face" - and heart to heart, as is fitting between brothers who have surely discovered that the same blood pulses in their veins? We know that it was not a negotiation between slaves and a king. The attempt to account logically for Yehuda's claims as they appear at first glance, does not seem convincing. After all, the three approaches that Yehuda has learned from his father, gifts, prayer and war, are effective only when they are applied cautiously and in the proper order: Prayer is always needed, before and after and during - prayer stands on its own merit. Not so gifts and war, for they are mutually exclusive opposites. Gifts are effective when offered first. Why approach to wage war if it is possible to reach an understanding by ways of peace? With Yaakov and Esav the gifts were indeed effective and prevented a war. " 'Like you - like Paro:' If you provoke me I will kill you and your master.'" First the threat of war, and only afterwards the appeasement of offering himself as a slave? It is difficult to view Yehuda's approach as the classic three-staged approach. There is no stage one leading to stage two but only a jumble of conflicting claims. Yosef's demand to bring Binyamin, as proof that they are honest seems ultimately to have no connection with the severity of their crime. Logic and meaning are jumbled here, as they are with the discovery of the goblet in Binyamin's parcel, and as they are further jumbled with the attempt to turn a prince into a slave. None of those involved seem to follow anything that resembles a logical train of thought. Yehuda's attempts to impose a logical meaning on the turn of events seem as flimsy as Yosef's attempt to build a persuasive body of evidence regarding the brothers' malicious intent. What was Yehuda relying on that caused him to expect Yosef to accede to his demands, and what was the breaking point, which caused Yosef to lift his veil? Perhaps we have a lovely lesson before us, on how to confront the mysteries of existence. Riddle versus riddle, absurdity versus absurdity: "With the innocent one, be innocent. With the corrupt one, be corrupt. Answer the stupid one according to his stupidity". Do not attempt to make a fool intelligent. The Torah's approach to the riddle of existence? When faced with two scriptures that contradict each other, look for the solution in the third scripture that resolves the two. Meaning, don't fall into the trap of the Romantics, who look for the solution outside or above life, and don't get caught into the despair of the Existentialists, who despair of any solution at all. Life is a locked riddle only to those who deny the Court on High, glimpsed through the cracks of the mechanical partition of two-dimensional existence. Look for the Godly presence behind the partition if you wish to find the logical meaning and purpose inherent in existence, the eternity contained in the fleeting moment, and the grain of truth visible beyond the immediately occurring event - a product of illusion's kingdom. Truth's simplicity is not "across the sea". There is no need to cut off from reality in order to reach the sky. "It is in your own mouth and in your own heart, to do it." Truth grows in man's garden. Its language is the language of the heart, and its logic is goodness of character - compassion, love, kindness. It was such a language that Yehuda spoke. First he demonstrated his power to Yosef - his monarchy over the kingdoms of physical power and spirituality. "Let the law pierce the mountain: It was by law that we sold our brother." Yet then he admitted: "Behold his blood is being demanded of us." We know there is a reason for the events that are taking place, a direct reason that pierces the partition of time and circumstance. We are not dealing here with our guilt over a theft, but rather over the blood of our brother, because we did not "see his soul's distress when he pleaded with us". Yehuda demonstrates that he has understood Yosef. Yehuda is discovering the sanctity of human life, and abandoning his belief in the sanctity of the idea, which requires the sacrifice of human life. Yosef has realized from the very beginning how very dangerous - how very foreign - such perceptions were. On the deeper level, Yosef is learning together with Yehuda, in havruta - learning with and learning from. In this encounter between kings, Yosef learns and teaches a lesson: What is the foundation upon which existential unfolding (all happenings, all events that take place) is built. What is the difference between a solid foundation upon which all existence rests and leans, and dependency - when existence seems dependent. "There is no one we can rest and lean on other than our Father in heaven" is the basic lesson. Why all the proliferation of efforts? Why the futile attempt to find logical meaning in all of it? Be confident in God. Leave off investing in those excessive efforts if you are drifting toward dependency on existence, but if you are looking for something to rest and lean your existence on, then invest tirelessly: Make every effort to build your reality out of existence's local ingredients. Follow an exact prescription for a Godly presence that has the substantiality of reality's tangible ingredients. The task requires great care, and devotion. It does not tolerate negligence, which could undermine the delicate balance upon which the whole system rests. A higher system composed of the lower ingredients of tangible reality is a vulnerable structure. It is built on intrinsic contradiction, and the balance that maintains it is of a dynamic nature, requiring perpetual restoration. Its equilibrium can be restored or undone; depending upon the attention granted it by its keeper, who holds the key to equilibrium in his hands - the man who serves God. We do not mean by this the mere fact of the human input that is demanded of the key holder - that he must cause earth and sky to meet and to connect, but rather of a specific type of human factor, highly qualitative in spiritual and human terms, that is born of an intense laboring to merge the two. "Man for toil is born", is the man whose labor is the work of making spirit and matter meet. He is not content to assume that the encounter will happen of itself, since encounter between two antagonistic elements can cause a trajectory of destruction sufficient to eliminate them both. One who serves God is charged with a task that has no equal in terms of the power to create: He must impenetrate the lower world with higher content. He must impenetrate matter with meaning, watching all the while over a perpetually occurring equilibrium. Only on Shabat is it appropriate to relax one's watch over equilibrium. "Whoever has labored before Shabat will eat on Shabat", refers to a labor of equilibrium that has been done properly during the six days of the work week. "Comes Shabat, comes rest", and the solid foundation - upon which the infrastructure of the universe has rested since Genesis' primal beginnings - is revealed. It is a foundation that does not depend on man but rather exists on its own merit. It is revealed as Godly presence, which is revealed as a foundation of sanctity, upon which the secular is built and rests, with no separation between the two. Havdala, the prayer that requests of God a distinction between the sacred and the secular, expresses the need of the one who prays to be able to distinguish between sacred and secular only in dynamic terms of decision-making and activism, rather than in terms of real substance. In terms of real substance, the sacred is the real substance of both the sacred and the secular. On Shabat, dynamic activism is superfluous - and may even blur the experience of real substance. It is the power to see clearly where real substance lies, one's dynamic efforts during the secular work week notwithstanding that is at the root of the havdala prayer - a request for the ability to make this distinction. The apparent conflict between labor and rest is at the root of the trials experienced by God's servant. The balance between confidence in God and the obligation to invest effort does not hang (depend) on a hook suspended above or outside of reality, but rather rests and leans upon this solid foundation: The sensation of the realness of the Godly presence, for which reality has been built and as the realization of which it serves. Yehuda and Yosef are exchanging views on this topic. Yehuda is whispering in Yosef's ear that he has learned the lesson of the element of humanness, and that he is not ashamed to admit he has learned this lesson through Yosef's tragedy. Nor is Yosef ashamed to admit that he has learned much about the meanings of this human element: That its meanings and its content consist of Godly values, that the element of humanness is the only medium through which Godly values can be expressed, and that without this content and these meanings there is no value that can grant any importance whatsoever to the difference between a king and a slave. I am a king and you are a king, Yehuda tells Yosef, yet both of us are obligated by a supreme value. In order to protect this supreme value, I have no difficulty in becoming your slave. You, however must accept this principle as well, and admit that the fact that you were made our slave in the past was also done "for the sake of heaven", in order to protect Father's true Torah. It was for the sake of heaven that we did what we did. We were mistaken, it is true, but it was not that we succumbed to the base midot of envy, hatred, or arrogance, God forbid. Yosef discovers to his great joy that it is the subjective goal, the inner intention of a Godly human being that determines Godly truth. This was a principle for the sake of which Yosef had always demonstrated absolute self-sacrifice, yet he had felt isolated in his campaign. I am an Ivri - "for I have truly been stolen from the land of the Ivrim". Ivri: From the other side. His grandfather's father too had been an Ivri, isolated in the world - he on one side and all the world on the other side. Now, to his surprise, he discovers that when the goal is an intention for the sake of heaven, it can also purify everyone involved. As a mikveh purifies, so are all the paths cleansed, and all the means, and all the existential ingredients that lead to pure intentions. Thus are his brothers cleansed and purified. He weeps with joy. "And Yosef could not restrain himself." Truly were they tears of joy? Tears and joy - do these not contradict? Yosef is trying to prove to his brothers that there are no separate tracks in the labor of sanctity. One wept and the other wept, each river with its own tributaries, each weeping with its own meanings. Could we not be observing a tendency toward a dangerous pluralism developing here? Here is the Lita'i fortifying himself behind the walls of halacha: "Let the law pierce the mountain." The other is meanwhile dissolving in tears, riding the waves of romantic emotion, being dragged toward the fathomless deep, with no defined path and no clear goal. If so, then what they both have in common is that they are both ignoring reality, which insists that they must relate to it, in order to sanctify physical matter. For only in this way, by addressing reality, can Godly presence be actualized in the real world. Hanging from heaven while detaching from the ground is not Yaakov's way. Neither is plunging into the surging waves of emotion, for that is a path that lacks permanence, that lacks a value-based and halachic definition. Rather Yaakov's way is the "ladder set firmly on the earth". It is set on the foundation of Godly realness, and not on the illusion of the permanence and solidity of the material world, to which religious emotionalism is subject, even if it hangs it from a high and lofty hook. The search for a basis upon which to lean and rest is a search that recognizes an eternal solidity that does not depend or hang on any reality other than itself. Confidence in God means recognizing the solid reality of the Godly element as a given, as a foundation upon which alone rests the entire structure of creation. An unshakeable confidence in this foundation grants one the pure perception of heaven and earth as one, from which all private and public events do absolutely, derive, in existence's here and now and also in the long run. Such a viewpoint embraces both the ends and the means, precluding the error of a separation between the two. Yosef the tsadik prays - in longing and in yearning - that his brothers and all of his father's household may be privileged to comprehend this compound reality. He delves deeply into this topic with Yehuda, who represents the brothers' viewpoint, and who proves to Yosef that they have arrived at agreement with him, although from the opposite direction: From a halachic reality that ignored existential reality whose center is man, the brothers arrived at a recognition of God's oneness by discovering Yosef's distress. His human suffering has become a fundamental halachic principle in their eyes, one that forbids being ignored, to Yosef's great happiness and to Yosef's great surprise, for he has discovered that "from fierce came out sweet". Yosef learns from Yehuda that truth can be discovered by confronting crime. He is surprised to find that crossing the path through the darkness of evil can serve a purifying effect, can be the furnace from which the good and the pure come forth purged of all impurities, freed of the limitations that would have strangled them had they stayed huddled in the kind shelter of sensitive and easily swayed hearts, had they never had to confront the interferences that outside reality presents, having never had to rub shoulders with the evil creature urges that prowl about the entrance to man's heart. When Yosef discovers that man can be redeemed through suffering, he recalls his own suffering and weeps, bursting for the first time into tears that liberate and redeem. The foundation upon which the world leans and rests, upon which man was privileged to build Godly presence, includes also the shechina that goes down to exile with Yaakov's children, that descends into Egypt, that suffers their sufferings and sorrows their sorrows. We see here that the shechina is an actualization of Godly presence within man himself. According to this perspective, we may be able to reconcile the Ramban's attempt to cope with the problem of anthropomorphism raised by the Rambam in Moreh Nevuchim. In this way we can also understand the gradation detailed by the Or HaHaim HaKadosh with regard to the presence of the shechina in "God's congregation," and in the Bet HaMikdash, and in a group of ten, in a group of three, and even in the presence of one Jew who is occupied with the Torah. It seems that the reference here to the shechina is not a reference to a presence on high but to a creation of Godly presence that is brought about as the fruit of the sacred toil of God's servant, no matter what rank he may occupy. See Rambam (46:1) and Or HaHaim (3): "I can inform you that the gradations of the light of the shechina are many. Do you not find that 'ten who sit and are occupied with Torah...the shechina rests among them', and even two, and one...rather it is certainly true that there are innumerable gradations to the resting of the shechina, as indicated in the mystery of 'high guards higher..." and the light increases its immanence according to the sense of the one who has caused the resting of the shechina." From this it seems clear that it is the human being who is the cause, by virtue of his ability to actualize dormant potential, to draw out the Godly presence that is hidden within his own Godly element, by virtue of the fact that he is created in God's image. This ability is not dependent on the conditions or will of any factor other than himself. He need only raise the fact in his own consciousness - the fact of his being a Godly element and the fact of his ability to reveal this element. "Not in heaven is it and not across the sea...It is in your own mouth and in your own heart, to do it." This is his entire task in the world, and "his portion from all his toil": To become the footstool for the shechina that radiates from his own self. The only reality that has substance is the one that man has made into Godly presence. It is important to note here that many good people fall into the error of superficiality: They believe that Godly reality is entirely separate from existential reality - that God's servant occupies a separate planet, that he ignores and refuses to participate in or even consider anything that takes place around him. This is indeed the way many biographies are written, the way that the lives of the eternally great have been described by modern-day writers - as though service of God were above time and space. It is not so. Service of God is the art of exposing - in every situation, for better or for worse - the quality of Godly presence that that situation has come to demonstrate. The fact that God's servant has been planted within a particular reality indicates that he has been charged with the duty of exposing the sanctity that is hidden in that situation. If it is a difficult situation that he was given to deal with, let God's servant view this as a compliment, as a recognition by the Divine Providence of his ability to transform this reality into a sanctifying of God's Name. It is not intended to try him in order to cause him distress. A tsadik leans upon and rests upon reality in order to fulfill his task, to actualize his own potential, through and by way of the specific reality in which he is placed. It is in this light that we may understand this key paragraph in Rav Haim Volozhin's Nefesh HaHaim (3:12): "And in truth, it is a great matter and a great asset to remove and to nullify from upon oneself all the laws and the wills of others, that they might not rule one, nor make any impression at all. When a man determines within his heart to say, 'is not God the true Lord, and there is not beside Him, be He blessed, any other power in the world...and all is filled only with His oneness...and he cancels [everything else] in his heart - with complete and utter cancellation, and pays no attention at all to any power or will in the world, and he subjects and bespeaks the purity of his thought towards the one single Master alone...then He...will enable him inevitably to have all powers and wills in the world rendered null and void as far as he is concerned, in that they will be unable to act upon him in any way." A superficial reading of this sacred and wonderful paragraph could tend to interpret it as an approach that recommends ignoring the variety and the uniqueness of different situations by clinging always to the kernel of Godly presence concealed within them while ignoring all the rest. This is not the case, rather the opposite is true. It means that one is to specifically relate, in-depth and with great precision, to the specific details of every specific reality, and to search for its natural characteristics, that make it different from every other reality, in order to use it specifically to express the unique Godly kernel hidden within it, within the specific details and components that characterize it. "Between Noah and Avraham." In this Avraham was different from Noah - that Noah was dependent upon the Creator: "With God did Noah walk." He was obedient, fulfilling God's will only after he had been commanded. His Godly reality was locked into the Ark with no relationship whatsoever to the real world, whereas Avraham knew how to create a Godly reality out of any situation, including those that were unpredictable and those that could not possible be merged with natural reality. Avraham was not dependent upon God, but rather know how to lean and rest upon the Godly truth that existed within him: "Walk before Me..." The difference between mashiah ben Yosef and mashiah ben David is that Yosef strove for absolute perfection. He merged emotion with rational mind by applying them to and merging them with the track of halacha. Such radical demands of perfection cannot be the lot of the general public. A perfect merging of midat hadin with midat harahamim can only be the lot of those of God's servants who have attained to the inner shrine. Therefore, this path has no permanence, because it is incapable of withstanding the pressures of existence and normal human needs. Therefore Yosef dies before his brothers, and mashiah ben Yosef is killed. However Yosef was privileged to become the model of perfection: One who determines this model as his goal may succeed in at least approaching it, whereas one who determines his goal to be built on a relative model will not actualize anything higher than the mediocre level. For this reason, mashiah ben Yosef precedes mashiah ben David. The former is killed - he is untenable on a permanent basis while the latter merits eternal life, because he attains the maximum that is humanly possible to be learned from the former. David signifies a total relating to reality. He is called "adin ha'etsni", preoccupied with the shafir ve'shelya, the blood and guts of the human needs of the simple people, while rosho verubo "his head and most else of him" are in the heavenly heights, meaning both the higher and the lower are actualized in him. Yosef discovers that Yehuda has accepted his (Yosef's) path as being lechatchila - the path comprising all human needs, including emotion and rational mind joined to the track of halacha. Yosef's path, the path of lechatchila, paves Yehuda's path. Go To Top
|
|