Beth Am Israel

05/17/2010 - What If Joseph Had Shared His Coat

Shalom, The following essay was written by a friend who chooses to remain anonymous. He discussed it at his Seder this year.I found it thought provoking, and thought that others would. My anonymous friend would appreciate feedback. Chag Samayach - BR

 

Spring 2010

What If Joseph Had Shared His Coat?

 

Passover Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Religious Tribalism

Every spring the Haggaddah tells us three things: first, to regard ourselves as having personally lived through the Exodus; second, to remember that in every generation others rise against us; and third, to recite the story of enslavement, emancipation and arrival at the place where we as a people received sacred commandments enabling mankind’s redemption. But this year as I recite the Passover story, I again feel the pain of another story I have known all my life as well: the story of my people’s tragic relations with other peoples of the world. That other story is a saga of vulnerability to chronic hatred despite our enormous contributions to mankind, both spiritual and secular. As I grieve for the pain of the past and fear for the future, I want us to ask a fifth question at Passover: why this second story and is there anything that we can do to help change it?

This Passover before I reread the Haggadah, I chose to read the JPS Tanakh translation of the Exodus story and I realized that the long Jewish sojourn in Egypt actually began with Joseph. The importance of Joseph as part of the story and its omission from the Haggadah jolted me, as I have often sensed that the relationship between Joseph and his brothers, marked by their hateful envy and the obliviousness of the youthful Joseph to it, has parallels to the problem of the recurring upsurges of anti-Semitism in history. My work with troubled people has taught me that envy is an intense human emotional response to feeing dismissively excluded, much as anger is a human emotional response to injustice or disrespect.

The Exodus, our great narrative of enslaved suffering, followed by emancipation and election, tells us of our beginnings but does not help us to fathom the mystery of the historic suffering that followed. If we were to start the Exodus story with its actual Josephic beginnings, we might then sense that how we have traditionally framed our own formative narrative may inadvertently have been adding to the tendency for the same kind of trouble that the youthful, naive Joseph was fated to get into at the hands of his brothers (who later went on to become the patriarchs of the Twelve Tribes.)

Our ancestor, Joseph, shortsightedly in his youth lived out a message to his brothers declaring: “I’m the favorite son and you’re not”. Similarly, have we not borne a tradition that declares: “We are the Chosen” while our liturgy and rituals have failed to form any mention of the reality that half of mankind has joined themselves on the great tree of monotheism for the past millennium and a half? The Tanakh goes on to tell of the later mature and empowered Joseph who in the wisdom of age forgave his envious brothers their brutal deeds when they came to Egypt seeking relief from famine, transcending his grievance and reaching out to them for the sake of a greater good, seeing in his blindness to them and their past cruelty to him a larger Divine plan to save life.

Our religious identity as a people, which began in a pagan world wherein every people had their own gods, has been based on a special relationship to a universal Deity which much later came to be adopted by all subsequent monotheisms. Our focus has faithfully remained unchanged: the preserving and elucidating of the great ancient moral and ritualistic commandments, an effort through long ages to hasten the fulfillment of mankind’s highest moral purpose. Seen through our own eyes, we have eternally embraced a commitment to carry out all the commandments, especially the first, an absolute necessity in the pagan world which surrounded us for the first millenium and a half of our monotheistic mission. If we had not striven to separate ourselves during our formative years of tribal gestation and moral development, how could we have carried out our historic role in bringing and sustaining monotheism to the world? In the pagan world, our steadfast separation from amoral pagan deities was hardly noticed and it did not provoke the visceral anti-Semitism that arose in the new post-pagan world where we continued to stand apart, a new world of huge monotheistic branches that sprouted to the east and to the west from the ancient tree of faith long rooted in Jerusalem. How difficult and troublesome has been our inability to respond to the challenge of Saul/Paul, who was the first to enable to extension of the monotheistic tradition of seeking righteousness beyond the ethnic.

---

---

On 07/08/2010 Bala Rebbe said...

From Shlomo the Fool of Narbeth

Shalom Rebbe,

I read our friend’s essay “What if Joseph had shared his coat?” slowly(for I am an Idiot) and with interest. Our friend suggests that anti-Semitism might, in part, be due to the exclusion of others from entry into the Community. While it certainly isn’t helpful, I believe
that another deeper contributing cause may also be at work. This argument has grave implications. If it is valid, it suggests that anti-Semitism is irremediable.
In the classical world men were as gods, or rather gods were altogether too much like men. The boundary between the human and divine communitieswas porous. Gods could forswear their divinity or have it removed by a
more powerful god and, significantly for the present argument, humans could be elevated to godhood. The human to god transformation didn’t happen often. If it happened to you, you were right to be surprised. But apotheosis was possible.
In the polytheistic world, the sky was not the limit.
And monotheism ruins it all. A critical implication of the assertion that there is only one god is the declaration that no human will ever be a god. The consolation prize for human status is not unattractive. It is written:

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.”

But this is a consolation prize. There is only one god. It isn’t you, and it never will be. No matter how hard you struggle and how brilliantly you succeed, you will always be a second class citizen. With a message like that, who won’t hate the messenger? It is to be understood that this emotional connection between Jews, monotheism and irreversible human limitations is not, typically, experienced consciously. But in the world of emotions, conscious processing counts for little. Judaism draws a line across human emotional history between a time when all was possible and when this was no longer the case.

If the emotional impact of the declaration of monotheism is indeed an element in the etiology of anti-Semitism, then we have a problem. The exclusionary nature of Judaism discussed in our friend’s essay is a human creation and is subject to human correction. But monotheism is nonnegotiable. If this is the cause of the problem, the problem is beyond solution. I hope that I’m wrong.

These are thoughts from my corner in the basement of the library behind the boxes.

A footnote: Let us recall the great Joseph mentioned in our friend’s essay. Pharaoh gave Joseph the woman Asenath, the daughter of Potipherah the High Priest of On. Presumably this was in response to a particularly
favorable Annual Performance Review. Perhaps Joseph would have preferred a cash bonus, but Asenath is what he got. Given her family background, one assumes that Asenath was not a Jew. Ephraim was born of this union.
If one insists that the only entry into Judaism is by birth to a Jewish mother, then Ephraim was a gentile. Jacob adopted Ephraim and his brother Manasseh to share inheritance equally with his own sons. Ephraim
is the founder of the Tribe of Ephraim. His descendents include Joshua and Jeroboam. Ephraim’s gentile status is, therefore, problematic.

Shabbat Shalom

Shlomo the Village Idiot of Narberth

---

Previous Posts

09/21/2010 Acknowledging outstanding contributors (Most Recent)
05/17/2010 - What If Joseph Had Shared His Coat (Current display)
04/23/2010 - The Zealots of Israel
03/27/2010 - And God hardened Pharaoh`s heart
02/22/2010 - Chazzan Harold`s Dilemma
02/15/2010 - Get Ready for Purim!!
02/09/2010 - Question from a confused Jew
02/05/2010 - Puppets at Beth Am
01/30/2010 - Photo: Rebbe and Arnie chatting
01/25/2010 - Response to Reb Joe Finkelstein
01/11/2010 - Mah Jongg
01/07/2010 - Eagles Prayer Improved Results
01/06/2010 - A Prayer for The Eagles
01/03/2010 - Shalom from the Bala Rebbe