“Forgiveness All Year Long,” Rabbi Elaine Zecher’s Shabbat Awakenings
January 3, 2025 | 5785
Welcome to Shabbat Awakenings, a reflection as we move toward Shabbat. You can listen to it as a podcast here.
We are well versed on the idea of forgiveness. We beat our chests or touch our hearts as we spell out the alphabetic acrostics of our wrongdoing. We confess, we beseech, we plead for forgiveness. Yom Kippur lays out a path forward to overcome what we might have done but also to rise to a new level above retribution and revenge.
So why talk about forgiveness now?
In the portion this week, Vayigash, we are witness to how forgiveness happens in real time.
Joseph, sold by his jealous brothers, to a traveling caravan, ended up in Egypt. It did not go well and he ended up in prison. It was through his gift of dream interpretation that he foresaw famine that brought him before Pharaoh. He envisioned a plan that pleased Pharaoh. His brothers, however, not knowing of Joseph’s rise to power and prestige, suffered from the famine that was also in Canaan. Their father sent them to Egypt. They appeared before Joseph but did not recognize him. Joseph immediately knew them. But he tested them, and they ended up with the threat that they would have to leave their youngest brother Benjamin, who shared the same mother as Joseph, behind.
Our portion opens with Judah drawing near to Joseph to beseech him for Benjamin’s life. In one of the most dramatic moments of the Torah, Joseph revealed who he is, dumbfounding his brothers. He invited them all to draw closer and he spoke to them:
I am your brother Joseph, he whom you sold into Egypt.
Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.
It is now two years that there has been famine in the land, and there are still five years to come in which there shall be no yield from tilling.
God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance.
So, it was not you who sent me here, but God — who has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his household, and ruler over the whole land of Egypt. (Genesis 45: 3-8)
Joseph did not air previous grievances. He did not hold grudges. Here we may be challenged by his reception and attribution to God but let’s consider for a moment how his gracious acceptance recognized that there was a larger purpose that it happened at all.
Hatam Sofer, a preeminent Orthodox rabbi in the early 19th century, said we don’t understand our path in life until we look back and behold the steps we have taken that have brought us to that moment. He attributed that understanding as Divine. It is a sacred recognition. It is also a perilous explanation but also a qualitative meaningful assessment that does not apply to everything.
The story of Joseph recognized intergenerational wounds that have the potential to regenerate in a continual struggle. The book of Genesis ends that familial challenge in the name of the larger picture of how those brothers would form a people, Am Yisrael, as the narrative continues in Egypt to the sea to Sinai to the wilderness to the land of Canaan.
The story of the Jewish people endures fueled by the presence of forgiveness and graciousness all year long.
Shabbat Shalom! שבת שלום
I welcome your thoughts and reactions HERE
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Rabbi Elaine Zecher