Vayigash 5780 Volume XXVII Number 14 Toras Aish Thoughts From Across the Torah Spectrum Which means: we cannot fully understand what RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS is happening to us now until we can look back in Covenant & Conversation retrospect and see how it all turned out. This means n our parsha, Joseph does something unusual. that we are not held captive by the past. Things can Revealing himself to his brothers, fully aware that happen to us, not as dramatically as to Joseph Ithey will suffer shock and then guilt as they perhaps, but nonetheless benign, that can completely remember how it is that their brother is in Egypt, he alter the way we look back and remember. By action in reinterprets the past: "I am your brother Joseph, the the future, we can redeem the past. one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be distressed A classic example of this is the late Steve Jobs' and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, here, because it was to save lives that God sent me that has now been seen by more than 40 million people ahead of you. For two years now there has been on YouTube. In it, he described three crushing blows in famine in the land, and for the next five years there will his life: dropping out of college, being fired by the be no ploughing and reaping. But God sent me ahead company he had founded -- Apple, and being of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to diagnosed with cancer. Each one, he said, had led to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was something important and positive. not you who sent me here, but God. He made me Dropping out of college, Jobs was able to audit father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler any course he wished. He attended one on calligraphy of all Egypt." (Gen. 45:4-8) and this inspired him to build into his first computers a This is markedly different to the way Joseph range of proportionally spaced fonts, thus giving described these events when he spoke to the chief computer scripts an elegance that had previously been butler in prison: "I was forcibly carried off from the land available only to professional printers. Getting fired of the Hebrews, and even here I have done nothing to from Apple led him to start a new computer company, deserve being put in a dungeon" (Gen. 40:15). Then, it NeXT, that developed capabilities he would eventually was a story of kidnap and injustice. bring back to Apple, as well as acquiring Pixar Now, it has become a story of Divine Animation, the most creative of computer-animated film providence and redemption. It wasn't you, he tells his studios. The diagnosis of cancer led him to a new focus brothers, it was God. You didn't realise that you were in life. It made him realise: "Your time is limited, so don't part of a larger plan. And though it began badly, it has waste it living someone else's life." ended well. So don't hold yourselves guilty. And do not Jobs' ability to construct these stories -- what be afraid of any desire for revenge on my part. There is he called "connecting the dots" -- was surely not no such desire. I realise that we were all being directed unrelated to his ability to survive the blows he suffered by a force greater than ourselves, greater than we can in life. (However, he did delay surgery for his cancer, fully understand. believing that he could achieve an alternative cure. In Joseph does the same in next week's parsha, this, he was mistaken.) Few could have recovered from when the brothers fear that he may take revenge after the setback of being dismissed from his own company, their father's death: "Don't be afraid. Am I in the place and fewer still could have achieved the transformation of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it he did at Apple when he returned, creating the iPod, for good to accomplish what is now being done, the iPhone and iPad. He did not believe in tragic saving of many lives. (Gen. 50:19-20) inevitabilities. Though he would not have put it in these Joseph is helping his brothers to revise their terms, he knew that by action in the future we can memory of the past. In doing so, he is challenging one redeem the past. of our most fundamental assumptions about time, Professor Mordechai Rotenberg of the Hebrew namely its asymmetry. We can change the future. We University has argued that this kind of technique, of cannot change the past. But is that entirely true? What reinterpreting the past, could be used as a therapeutic Joseph is doing for his brothers is what he has clearly technique in rehabilitating patients suffering from a done for himself: events have changed his and their crippling sense of guilt. (Re-biographing and Deviance, understanding of the past. Praeger, 1987) If we cannot change the past, then it is 2 Toras Aish 600 barristers and the Lord Chief Justice. I delivered TORAS AISH IS A WEEK LY PARSHA Britain's two leading economics lectures, the Mais NEWSLETTER DISTRIBUTED VIA EMAIL Lecture and the Hayek Lecture at the Institute of AND THE WEB AT WWW.AISHDAS.ORG/TA. Economic Affairs. I became a fellow of my Cambridge FOR MORE INFO EMAIL [email protected] college and a philosophy professor at several The material presented in this publication was collected from universities. I identified with the biblical Joseph email subscriptions, computer archives & various websites. It is presented with the permission of the respective authors. Toras because, so often, what I had dreamed of came to be Aish is an independent publication, and does not necessarily at the very moment that I had given up hope. Only in reflect the views of any synagogue or organization. retrospect did I discover that the Rebbe was not telling TO DEDICATE THIS NEWSLETTER PLEASE CALL me to give up my career plans. He was simply charting (973) 277-9062 OR EMAIL [email protected] a different route and a more beneficial one. I believe that the way we write the next chapter always there holding us back like a ball and chain in our lives affects all the others that have come before. around our legs. We cannot change the past, but we By action in the future, we can redeem much of the can reinterpret it by integrating it into a new and larger pain of the past. Covenant and Conversation 5780 is narrative. That is what Joseph was doing, and having kindly supported by the Maurice Wohl Charitable used this technique to help him survive a personal life Foundation in memory of Maurice and Vivienne Wohl of unparalleled ups and downs, he now uses it to help z”l © 2020 Rabbi Lord J. Sacks and rabbisacks.org his brothers live without overpowering guilt. We find this in Judaism throughout its history. RABBI SHLOMO RISKIN The Prophets reinterpreted biblical narrative for their day. Then came Midrash, which reinterpreted it more Shabbat Shalom radically because the situation of Jews had changed nd Joseph went up to greet Israel his father; he fell on his neck and he wept on his neck more radically. Then came the great biblical "A commentators and mystics and philosophers. There exceedingly” (Gen. 46:29) In these few words, has hardly been a generation in all of Jewish history our Torah describes a dramatic meeting between an when Jews did not reinterpret their texts in the light of aged father and his beloved son who had been the present tense experience. We are the people who separated for twenty-two years. Indeed, the father, who tell stories, and then retell them repeatedly, each time had given the coat of many colors to this favored son with a slightly different emphasis, establishing a as a sign that he would bear the mantle of the connection between then and now, rereading the past Abrahamic legacy, had been led to believe that his in the light of the present as best we can. beloved Joseph had been torn apart by a wild beast, in It is by telling stories that we make sense of our consequence of which he had been engulfed by lives and the life of our people. And it is by allowing the inconsolable mourning for more than two decades. The present to reshape our understanding of the past that son, who had basked in the glory of paternal favoritism, we redeem history and make it live as a positive force had been consumed with the agonizing possibility that in our lives. his father had been so angered by his dreams that he I gave one example when I spoke at the Kinus had sent him on a suicide mission “to seek after the Shluchim of Chabad, the great gathering of some 5000 welfare of his brothers….” Chabad emissaries from around the world. I told them And so they stand together now, father and of how, in 1978, I visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe to ask son, each still with unanswered questions, but his advice on which career I should follow. I did the nevertheless each with unfathomable joy at their usual thing: I sent him a note with the options, A, B or reunion. C, expecting him to indicate which one I should follow.