Vayigash
Repentance & Forgiveness
I’m skipping the ‘live tweeting’ this time. [You can read my full running commentary on Parshat Vayigash at this link.]
Let’s go straight to Jonathan Sacks’ commentary in his 2 books Essays in Ethics and Lessons in Leadership (every week I appreciate the alliteration).
They overlap quite a bit.
Really interesting Essay in Ethics this week from Jonathan Sacks about how the story of Yosef is the first story of forgiveness in the ancient Greek literature because Judaism is a system of guilt while ancient Greek culture was about shame and honour.
Guilt is about the person’s act, and acts can be forgiven and “put right” in “processes of repentance, atonement, and forgiveness”.
Shame is about the person, and people’s egos can be appeased. Or not, and the person who did the act is “stained, marked, defiled”.
(All of the following quotes and translations are from Sacks.)
With Yosef and his brothers, they basically go through the 3 stages of repentance and teach us “what it is to earn forgiveness”:
Admit you did something wrong
Admit you are responsible for what you did wrong
When you’re in the same circumstance again, do something different
Yosef recreates the circumstances around his being sold into slavery. He holds Shimon hostage in exchange for their youngest brother Binyamin.
The brothers recognize the parallel and say they’re being punished now because of how they ignored Yosef’s distress back in the day (Gen. 42:21–23).
They bring Binyamin, and he ends up being framed for Yosef planting his belonging in Binyamin’s sack.
“They are told that Benjamin must stay as a slave.
“What can we say to my lord?” Judah replied. “What can we say? How can we prove our innocence? God has uncovered your servants’ guilt. We are now my lord’s slaves – we ourselves and the one who was found to have the cup.” (Gen. 44:16)”
They take responsibility; Judah takes responsibility collectively for them "(“we” not “him” re Binyamin).
“This is important [that Judah is the one to say this]. When the brothers sold Joseph into slavery it was Judah who proposed the crime (Gen. 37:26–27) but they were all (except Reuben) complicit in it… Judah himself says, “So now let me remain as your slave in place of the lad. Let the lad go back with his brothers!” (Gen. 42:33).“
Judah is now in the same situation where he can sell his younger brother, again, into slavery. The same circumstance once again.
But, this time, he’s “now willing to become a slave so that his brother Benjamin can go free.”
"Now Joseph can forgive, because his brothers, led by Judah, have gone through all three stages of repentance: (1) admission of guilt, (2) confession, and (3) behavioural change.”
But, while Yosef forgave his brothers, he doesn’t “explicitly use the word “forgive.” He told them not to be distressed. He said, “It was not you but God.” He told them their act had resulted in a positive outcome. But all of this was theoretically compatible with holding them guilty and deserving of punishment.”
“That is why the Torah recounts a second event, years later, after Jacob had died. The brothers sought a meeting with Joseph fearing that he would now take revenge. They concocted a story:
“They sent word to Joseph, saying, “Your father left these instructions before he died: ‘This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers for the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly.’ Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father.” When their message came to him, Joseph wept. (Gen. 50:16–17)
“What they said was a white lie, but Joseph understood why they said it. The brothers used the word “forgive” – this is the first time it appears explicitly in the Torah – because they were still unsure about what Joseph meant. Does someone truly forgive those who sold him into slavery? Joseph wept that his brothers had not fully understood that he had forgiven them long before. He no longer felt ill will towards them. He had no anger, no lingering resentment, no desire for revenge. He had conquered his emotions and reframed his understanding of events.“
(His reframe was that he was sold because of God, implementing a long-term strategic plan for the brothers/family to have food during the famine.)
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When not forgiven but appeased, there’s no behaviour change (or confession, or admission):
“When someone does harm to someone else, the victim is angry and seeks revenge. This is clearly dangerous for the perpetrator and he or she may try to get the victim to calm down and move on. He or she may make excuses: it wasn’t me, it was someone else; it was me but I couldn’t help it; it was me but it was a small wrong, and I have done you much good in the past, so on balance you should let it pass.
“Alternatively, or in conjunction with these other strategies, the perpetrator may beg, plead, and perform some ritual of abasement or humiliation. This is a way of saying to the victim, “I am not really a threat.” The Greek word sugnome, sometimes translated as forgiveness, really means, says Konstan, exculpation or absolution. It is not that I forgive you for what you did, but that I understand why you did it – you could not really help it, you were caught up in circumstances beyond your control – or, alternatively, I do not need to take revenge because you have now shown by your deference to me that you hold me in proper respect. My dignity has been restored.”
Neither appeasement nor deference is forgiveness.
“When we forgive and are worthy of being forgiven, we are no longer prisoners of our past.” “Forgiveness breaks the irreversibility of reaction and revenge.”
And, Sacks writes, “Forgiveness only exists in a culture in which repentance exists. Repentance presupposes that we are free and morally responsible agents who are capable of change, specifically the change that comes about when we recognise that something we have done is wrong, that we are responsible for it and must never do it again.”
In Lessons in Leadership, Jonathan Sacks writes about how we might assume Yosef “will emerge as the archetypal leader”.
“Yet history turned out otherwise. Joseph’s descendants, the tribes of Ephraim and Menashe, disappeared from the pages of history after the Assyrian conquest in 722 BCE, while Judah’s descendants, starting with David, became kings. The tribe of Judah survived the Babylonian conquest, and it is Judah whose name we bear as a people. We are Yehudim, “Jews.””
whaat?! “the man who proposed selling Joseph as a slave, whom we next see separated from his brothers, living among the Canaanites, intermarried with them, losing two of his sons because of sin, and having sexual relations with a woman he takes to be a prostitute.”
Yes, that same Judah.
Here’s why:
He persuades Yakov to let Binyamin go with his “quiet authority – “I myself will guarantee his safety; you can hold me personally responsible for him” (43:9). He takes personal responsibility for his younger brother. And does not (suggest to) sell this one into slavery.
When Binyamin is going to become a slave, he steps up and asks to take Binyamin’s place, recounting the above story, along with his father’s pain, to Yosef (44:33–34). He is willing himself to become a slave and not his younger brother, like last time. He’s in the same situation and chooses to do something differently.
(While Essays in Ethics talked about how Yosef was the first person to forgive, Yehuda was the first to repent, to “achieve perfect repentance (teshuva gemura), defined by the sages as one who finds himself in a situation to repeat an earlier sin but who does not do so because he is now a changed person.”)
And, he admits he was wrong with Tamar in the “first time in the Torah that we see a character admit that he is wrong.”
What happened there? “Having accused his daughter-in-law Tamar of becoming pregnant by a forbidden sexual relationship, he is confronted by her with evidence that he himself is the father of the child and immediately admits: “She is more righteous than I” (Gen. 38:26).
Also, Sacks brings in some fun language connections, about linking Yehuda’s name with his future: “though the verb lehodot from which [Yehuda] is derived means “to thank” (Leah called her fourth son Judah saying, “This time I will thank the Lord,” Gen. 29:35), it is also related to the verb lehitvadot, which means “to admit,” “to confess” – and confession is, according to the Rambam, the core of the command to repent.”
Sacks argues that Yehuda is the leader because “what marks a leader is not necessarily perfect righteousness. It is the ability to admit mistakes, to learn from them and grow from them. The Judah we see at the beginning of the story is not the man we see at the end”: He changes.
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It says something really interesting when the leader is the one who repents, and is not the one who forgives. About power dynamics and being magnanimous. Maybe even to repent more than to forgive.
Very poignant—a trying lesson .