Miketz. What can we learn from Yosef haTsadik?

If we stick to the pshat, the plain meaning of the story, Joseph’s reunion with his brothers is difficult.

“And he recognized them, but made himself a stranger to them” (Genesis 42:7), the text tells us:

וַיַּכִּרֵם וַיִּתְנַכֵּר אֲלֵיהֶם

Vayakirem / Vayitnaker — the root is the same, yet the meaning

is opposite.

Lehakir, to recognize, is to connect. Lehitnaker is to dissociate, to distance oneself, to place oneself in a posture of estrangement from the other.

Everything seems to indicate that Joseph—still wounded by having been taken away, thrown into a pit, and sold into slavery by his brothers—responds to them with coldness and harshness, now that he is in a position of power.

And yet.

In his reading of this scene, the Hasidic master Kedushat Levi turns the entire interaction on its head: it is precisely here, he teaches, that Joseph earns the title of tzaddik, the righteous one.

How so?

It was in order to spare them, the Hasidic master explains, that Joseph initially pretended to be a stranger to them.

“By human nature, when one person defeats another, and the defeated knows who defeated him, this causes him great pain and deep anguish.But when one is defeated without knowing by whom, the suffering is far less.”

והנה דרך הטבע כשאדם מנצח את חבירו וזה יודע שהוא מנצח אותו, 

דהיינו שיודע שמזה האדם היה לו הנצוח אז ירע לו ויש לו עגמת נפש גדול 

אבל כשהוא מנצח ואין חבירו יודע ממי הוא מנוצח אז אין לו רע כל כך. 

Victorious in the past, mistreating their younger brother—the favored and arrogant one—his brothers now find themselves in a position of weakness: strangers from Canaan in Egypt, driven by famine to kneel before the master of the land.

According to the Kedushat Levi, it was in order not to humiliate them, as they bowed before him exactly as in the dream he had foretold so long ago, that Joseph feigned coldness.

The lesson could not be more relevant.

As Israel is barely emerging from two years of such devastating war, and as the global world seems inflamed by hatred, power struggles, and violence, here we are celebrating, with Hanukkah, the victory of the minority over the majority, of freedom of conscience over totalitarian oppression, of the weak over the strong—Joseph comes to remind us that the true victory is the victory of the heart: not humiliating the defeated.

The beginning of ethics, Joseph reminds us here, is compassion.

Using force to defend ourselves when necessary—and tragically, it is all too often. But also knowing not to abuse our power when we have it.

That is how true greatness is revealed.

And this is the ethical call at the heart of Judaism:not to do to others what we would not want done to ourselves, according to Shammai;and according to Hillel, if we are able—to love the other as ourselves.

Did this idea not, in fact, become the central message of a young and remarkably subversive rabbi of the Second Temple period, whose birth our Christian friends are about to celebrate?

We are entering Shabbat Hanukkah, which is also Rosh Chodesh Tevet, the month that Sefer Yetzirah associates with the eye and, symbolically, with the capacity for vision.

As the Hanukkiah will soon shine with all its lights, and as Jewish communities around the world are suspended between the shadow of mourning and the light of hope—hope nourished by the memory of so many fractures already overcome throughout our long history—this is the moment, whatever night surrounds us, to cultivate the clarity of awareness of who we are, and the light of love, trust, and just compassion, chosen anew each day.