This was the D’var Torah I gave for Parashat Vayiggash in 5782, on December 11, 2021. Some of what I said then was specific to that moment in the Covid-19 pandemic, but I’m leaving that in now as an example of the broader themes and messages of my D’var Torah.
On Paul Simon’s 1983 album “Hearts and Bones” is a song called “Train in the Distance”, and there’s a line in it that’s always stuck in my head: Negotiations and love songs/are often mistaken for/one and the same.
That could be the title of my Dvar Torah: negotiations and love songs.
Our parasha opens in the middle of the final conversation between Yosef and his brothers, when they still don’t know who he is or what their fate will be, after they’ve been dragged back to Egypt one last time for supposedly stealing Yosef’s special goblet of divination.
Last week’s reading ended with a negotation — there was an exchange of bargaining proposals and in the scroll the scene continues, but the people who split up the parasha stopped in the middle and inserted a big to-be-continued cliffhanger. No other week has that. Then today we resume the scene, with a stage description: וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ אֵלָ֜יו יְהוּדָ֗ה Vayiggash eilav Yehudah. Yehudah went up close to him, to Yosef.
I looked in the concordance, which lists every time every Hebrew word is used in the whole Bible, and this is the only place in the Torah where someone comes up close to another person without being asked.
Yehudah makes a unique move. It’s dramatic and physical, it creates something so personal even though it’s in front of all these other people. All the other brothers. All of Yosef’s Egyptian entourage.
And, the spoken words that come next are so different from what came just before. Up to this point, this brothers think they’ve been negotiating, for food or to stay out of prison, and it hasn’t been going well — so finally Yehudah stops negotiating, and starts… a love song.
וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ אֵלָ֜יו יְהוּדָ֗ה, Vayiggash eilav Yehudah. Yehudah came up close to him.
He shifts from bargaining to backstory, about his family and and his younger brothers and especially his father. It’s not clear at all why Yehudah is telling it to this guy he thinks is a stranger.
But we know that this physical move of וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ vayiggash, along with Yehudah’s story, his love song, unlocks everything. It enables Yosef to reveal himself, to take off his mask and come out of his hiding, and it brings the brothers together in a reunion and resolution. So what is it about וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ אֵלָ֜יו יְהוּדָ֗ה Vayiggash eilav Yehudah, that moment, that worked the way it worked?
The way I look at a Torah story is to map out all the elements of the situation that might be parallel to us, who aren’t in Egypt and didn’t sell one of our siblings to a caravan or merchants. Who are the two people in this conversation?
Yosef is in this conversation, in an emotional situation he hasn’t told anyone about. These are his brothers and they don’t know and the Egyptians around him don’t know. And he’s trying to manage a famine. And he’s a Hebrew who still has to prove himself all the time to his Egyptian entourage, even though they report to him. They work for him but they don’t eat with him, so Yosef is alone in a profound sense. That’s a lot going on.
Yehudah is here, far from his home base. He’s used to traveling all over Canaan and getting into and out of scrapes with the local tribes. But this famine has completely wrecked whatever kind of economics and government Canaan might have had, so he has to go to Egypt which is far away and overwhelming. Yehudah is also alone, even in this large family — he’s got his father who is old and has been mourning for years. He’s got three older brothers who have each proven to be foolish, and a youngest brother whom he has sworn to protect with his own life. That’s a lot going on with Yehudah too. Yehudah has tried to take over the negotiations to get as many of them as possible out of there safely, and back home.
So we’ve got these two individuals, each with a lot going on, each in front of their group, each one up to now negotiating with the other about the problem in their life and their group, in this shared situation they don’t yet know how to share.
They are not getting anywhere in that negotiation, until Yehudah goes right up close to Yosef, stops negotiating and starts talking in a different way.
It’s more than just getting close to another person, talking honestly and really listening. What Yehudah did and what he said were more layered than that.
One midrash says that the word וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ vayiggash, he came close, is aggressive language. This wasn’t intimate and vulnerable, but in-your-face. Saying: I don’t care what you think your power is right now over me, and over this situation and over how we talk about it — you will listen to me. There’s a nice comment by Rashi, on Yehudah’s opening words — “let not my lord be angry with your servant.” Rashi says this is Yehudah saying: Yeah, I’m going to say some things that could make you angry, and tough, you’re going to hear them anyway. And Yehudah doesn’t wait for Yosef to say okay, speak — he just plows ahead.
Yehudah says let’s not just talk about the food we’re trying to buy, or how the goblet got in our bag. You need to understand who you’re talking to and what all brought me here and to the requests I am making. The Sfat Emet notices in the words וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ אֵלָ֜יו יְהוּדָ֗ה Vayiggash eilav Yehudah, the Torah doesn’t say Yehudah went up close to Yosef. It just says Yehudah went close to “him”; only Yehudah’s name is in the phrase — Yehudah went close to himself.
Negotiating isn’t working so I am going to talk about me. My family, my brother who isn’t around any more and my youngest brother who is, and my father who I cannot go back to without the boy. This is my love song. Mr. Egyptian prince, you told us to leave the boy in prison and the rest of y’all go up to your father in peace. Let me tell you what peace is like for me, what peace and grief are like for these people with me, and for this father of ours who is not here in the room. I am not talking any more about food and goblets and money and prison until we talk about all of this.
There are two repeating words in Yehudah’s talk: אֵינֶנוּ Beinenu — what I’m missing, what we don’t have — and אָבִי avi, my father. He wants Yosef to pay attention to those words, to the song of love and yearning, before they talk any more about the situation they are in.
And it reaches something inside Yosef that Yosef didn’t expect. Another midrash says that Yosef is still spiritually in the pit where his brothers had cast him, and Yehudah is the rope Yosef can use to finally climb out. Yosef who had been so controlled, so unready to reveal what’s really going on with him, is able to say I am Yosef your brother who you sold, is my father still alive. All the things that were bottled up in him he figures out how to say. His own love songs and longing songs, which he’d been covering with negotiations.
I have to say I’m really identifying with this Yehudah these days. If you’ve been part of any of the committees discussing Covid rules for the shul, you’ve seen me at my most testy. Like Yehudah I’m tired of only just negotiating about goblets and food and prison — about rules and rules and plexiglass and rules. I want to talk about what’s missing, not just concretely here in this room and at the shul, but deeper down. I want to sing about how my own story and life have been disrupted, my own and mine with my family and mine with you.
I think we need to talk about things like that, even when it’s not clear how that relates to the negotiation of the moment over a policy or a rule. It’s not a waste of time. We all have a lot going on that we aren’t saying yet, just like Yosef and Yehudah before their breakthrough.
Yehudah teaches us not to be afraid of the frustration emotion in ourselves right now — it shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid talking out what’s on our minds. And he teaches that it’s okay not to know what you’re trying to say until we start talking up close with someone.
And that if two people can’t agree to talk this way, one person can try anyway.
As a community we’re fortunate to have enough people in our lives who are far more on our side than Yehudah and Yosef seemed to be. Anyone in this Zoom or room could be that counterpart for you.
So if the winter weeks do end up slowing down our sense of the future, and our negotiations about the guidelines for what that future should be like, they can still be good weeks for us. Weeks for Yehudah conversations.
Jot your notes about what you’ve truly been missing and who you’ve been missing and why, and what you think it will mean to go back in peace. The notes for your own love songs.
If you can talk about them with someone, or if you can offer to listen for someone else, it will help. It will help you, and it will help the other person, and it will help create a climate, a Yehudah climate that brings a reconciling moment.
I want us to have some times to talk in small groups, for וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ vayiggash moves even if it’s hard, about what it’s been like and what you are waiting for. And I invite you to use me in your Yehudah process — I will hear your speech, your love song.
Our pandemic stories and reflections, and the yearnings they help us understand, are so important, just as important as the next version of whatever rules we have to follow. The goal is to get out of our masks, in more ways than one. I am sure that following Yehudah is the best and most healthy path toward what all the Yosefs need, toward climbing out and saying I am your brother, and this happened in our past, and we will be okay together.
There is so much more to our lives than statistics and ongoing discussions about pandemic rules. It’s negotiations and love songs. We will get better every time we can be like Yehudah with Yosef, speaking real, getting closer.
Shabbat Shalom!
Leave a Reply