This d’var Torah was given by Rabbi Amelia Wolf on Saturday, December 9, at Congregation Etz Hayim in Arlington, VA.
After Yosef’s brothers cast Yosef down into the pit, they were hungry. The Torah tells us they sat down for a meal. A picnic at the edge of the pit.
The commentators tell us that in their own eyes they were acting righteously. They say that they were good, righteous people in general, and had they any inkling of the wrongs they were committing as their brother languished in the earth, they would have fasted, not feasted.
They didn’t know. They didn’t know.
The commentators teach that the brothers were really and truly afraid of Yosef. This brilliant, favored younger son of the favored younger wife.
These brothers were the sons of the unloved and sons of concubines and from birth they could not have competed. These brothers had been neglected by their father their whole lives and here was Yosef, who had no issue proclaiming to them all that one day, each and every one of his brothers would bow down before him.
Recognize his authority. Submit to it.
The commentator Sforno takes it a step further. He says that these brothers were acting according to their own sense of self-preservation because they thought Yosef might hurt or even kill them.
Now in the parasha, the brothers had been off far away from home to pasture their sheep and Yosef struggled to find them, eventually relying on the help of a stranger.
And Eliyahu Munk, a contemporary translator and commentator, writes that the true reason they were so far away was because they were peacemakers. They distanced themselves from their brother lest it come to a fight, and when Yosef sought them out anyhow, even when they had signaled clearly that they did not feel safe with him, they assumed the worst, fended him off.
Understandably. Tragically.
And so they cast him into the pit.
In this parasha Yosef is silent.
In fact, it is not until next week that we will hear from his brothers. It’s only in the face of their own possible punishment and imprisonment, as Binyamin their youngest brother is ripped away from them by “the viceroy in Egypt”, that they reflect upon mistakes made:
אֲשֶׁ֨ר רָאִ֜ינוּ צָרַ֥ת נַפְשׁ֛וֹ בְּהִתְחַֽנְנ֥וֹ אֵלֵ֖ינוּ וְלֹ֣א שָׁמָ֑עְנוּ
This is because we saw Yosef’s distress but we did not hear him pleading with us.
These brothers were righteous people. In order to sit and eat at the lip of the pit, they had to first look away from his pain, they had to first plug their ears so that his screams did not reach them.
They had to reason with themselves, actively convince themselves that they were in the right. They had to distract themselves, think about other things. Think about their own wounded pasts, their own trauma, the humiliation their mothers had felt when neglected by their father, the humiliation they themselves had felt in the face of beautiful clothing gifted only to their brother.
Their fear that their brother would rise up against him. And not only that, but their fear that their father and his household would not stop him.
Because they were less loved. Because they were uncared for.
So they did not see and they did not hear and they were able to eat at the lip of the pit as their brother begged for help.
And as I studied this text, as I felt myself drawn over and over to this verse, not even a verse but a segment of it, וַיֵּשְׁבוּ֮ לֶֽאֱכׇל־לֶ֒חֶם֒, they sat down to a meal that comes right after the description of the pit itself: וְהַבּ֣וֹר רֵ֔ק אֵ֥ין בּ֖וֹ מָֽיִם. The pit was empty, there was not even water in it!
It compelled me to ask, whose suffering are we ignoring? Who has no water when we sit down to eat? Whose cries do we shut our ears to because we find ourselves too threatened by them to answer their call?
Again, these brothers are not evil. They must have been doing good in other places, they must have had people they took care of, there must have been cries of distress that they did answer.
But the Torah doesn’t tell us about those stories. The Torah is focused on their response to their brother in the pit.
More and more I begin to believe that we are as defined by those calls for help we do not answer than as by those calls that we do.
And I do not say this to diminish ourselves. Any self flagellation is between ourselves and our therapists; I do not believe in shame as a tool that leads to the improvement of anyone’s behavior, at least not a shame that is externally imposed.
What I do believe is that over and over and over we have the chance to stand up from our meals at the pit and look down and address Yosef down below and answer the question from the very first parasha from the Torah, the question I asked that first Shabbat after October 7th:
I am my brother’s keeper.
And I must especially be my brother’s keeper when my brother scares me, I must especially be my sister’s keeper when I think she may be my enemy, I must especially be my sibling’s keeper when they, like Yosef, represent a ruthless challenge to everything I should by rights be able to peacefully claim for myself.
It is because it is much harder for me to be the keeper of a Palestinian child in the rubble in Gaza than it is for me to be the keeper of a Israeli Jewish child who has been kidnapped to Gaza that I must hold them both in my heart.
That I must see them both as my responsibility.
It is because the world demands that I choose between them that I say I will not. We all have multi-chambered hearts, which means in all of our hearts there is room to hold and advocate for our traumatized and our injured and our dead and our violated Israeli siblings even as there is still room to hold and advocate for the thousands of civilians, of children, killed in response to our own family tragedy.
There are so many horrors in this world and we in this community cannot starve ourselves by refusing to break bread as our siblings cry out from the pit, but we can and must listen to them.
We are good people. We are complicated people.
We are Reuven who spoke up against his brothers but ultimately failed to stop them. We are Shimon and Levi, cursed by their father for the violence they committed, massacring an entire city to avenge their sister’s violation.
We are Yehuda, Judah, the man for whom we are named as Jews, who sought to mitigate harm by selling his brother as a a slave rather than kill him, the man who learned from his mistakes and who will, just next week, put his own life on the line to save another favored brother.
We are Dan and Naftali and Gad and Asher and Yissachar and Zevulun, collectively acting, collectively eating, collectively protecting ourselves, collectively harming others. Who knew what any of them were thinking. None of them spoke up.
And sometimes we are Yosef, in the pit ourselves, crying out to a humanity who will not listen.
We are good people. We are complicated people.
And we do not have to wait until next week’s parasha for a moment years and years after this one to say, ֲ
אֲשֶׁ֨ר רָאִ֜ינוּ צָרַ֥ת נַפְשׁ֛וֹ בְּהִתְחַֽנְנ֥וֹ אֵלֵ֖ינוּ וְלֹ֣א שָׁמָ֑עְנוּ
We saw the suffering of their bodies but we did not heed their pleading.
In fact, we can listen right now, from the edge of the pit. In fact we can set down our food and lower a rope. In fact, we can say, I am your keeper. And in fact in doing so, we might make room for them to turn out to be ours.
