This was the D’var Torah I shared for Parashat Vayiggash, a culmination of the story of Yosef (Joseph), on January 4, 2025.
My father has a number of go-to sayings, one of which is: The story is never over. Another is a quote from possibly Mitch Album quoting someone else who said: There is no sentence in the English language so seductive as “Tell me your story.”
The first one means of course that no matter what has happened in your life up to now, there is always more, something unknown or surprising that can’t just be predicted by what has happened until now.
The second one means that the most profound way each of us is known is when someone listens to our story. Stories themselves are important, but it’s telling, and paying attention to someone who is telling a story about themselves. And just like there is Rabbi Jon’s rule that on Shabbat everyone has a beautiful singing voice, everyone is the greatest story-teller alive when the story is about yourself.
These two ideas about our stories come together in the Torah’s story of Yosef and Yehudah (Joseph and Judah). Because the most significant things that happen in this part of the Torah are when each of them tells the exact same story about their shared past yet again. The story is never over, because the same story is never told twice in the same way.
Each time Yehudah and Yosef tell it, they have learned or are in the process of learning something different about themselves and each other.
Over and over, the Torah gives us the story of Yosef’s brothers throwing him into the pit, which was the turning point of everything. The Torah initially tells the story as a third-person narrator (Genesis 37), but even there it’s not clear. It’s not clear if the brothers after deciding not kill Yosef intended to abandon him, or sell him, or just scare him. It’s not clear if they sold him to traders, or traders just found him. There is no way to get a forensic truth about what happened, which as we know is important in court but rarely the most important thing in life. All that really makes a difference is how the story is told later, and what it means in the lives of the people who still think it’s important to tell it.
The first one who retells it is Yosef himself, after he becomes Tzaphenat-Paneach, the Egyptian vizier. He tells it really short when his first son is born. Yosef calls him Menashe, explaining: God has wiped my memory of my hardship and the house of my father (41:51). As if he wants to be finished telling this story forever, but of course not, because why else would you put this story on your child that way.
Twenty-some years after the pit, when the brothers first go down to Egypt during the famine and talk to the official who they don’t know is Yosef, they say: Your servants are twelve brothers of one father, sons of one man in the land of C’naan, and the youngest is with his father today and the one is not around (42:13). They tell part of it so true, truer than you would expect – why do they say all of this to a stranger after all this time?
And then there’s one part they can only tell slant: v’ha’echad einenu, which might mean “the one is no more”, or “the one is not here”, or “the one is gone”. They might just be saying our one brother, or it might be One with a capital O so-to-speak, which they might or might not be saying straight or with a tiny snark in their voice. They don’t say he’s dead – maybe they don’t know for sure. They certainly don’t talk about their role in his being einenu.
After being imprisoned for three days, and Yosef offers to send them back with some food if they leave their brother Shimon behind, all the brothers say to each other: All this trouble now is punishment for back then, when our brother was pleading with us but we didn’t listen (42:21). They’re telling each other a detail we hadn’t heard before, a sensitivity they had suppressed or an extra cruelty they are making themselves say out loud. This comes out as the brothers try to make sense of their current situation, which now they see as part of the same story.
Our parasha begins (44:18) after the brothers have been hauled back, caught with Yosef’s special goblet in Binyamin’s possession. Yehudah had tried to negotiate with Yosef over who should be punished and how, and Yosef had said no, he’ll just keep Binyamin and the rest can go. Now, Yehuda goes up close to Yosef, and instead of making some new kind of offer in this bargaining, Yehuda tells their story again.
Yehuda says: The first time you asked about us, we told you about our family and our father, and how one of our brothers was dead. Which is not what they had said before – they hadn’t said he was dead, just that was not there. Even now Yehuda isn’t saying we killed him, or we put his life in danger — but this is the closest he has gotten so far.
Then Yehuda talks about their father, and how the loss of Yosef has led him to cling to Binyamin, Yosef’s full brother. Yehuda describes Yaakov’s connection to Binyamin in the same intimate words that the Torah used to describe Yaakov with his arms wrapped around the angel with whom he fought the night he received the name Yisrael. Yehuda talks over and over about his father, and he says I made my father a personal guarantee, to protect Binyamin’s life even at the cost of my own.
This is Yehuda telling his story as teshuvah – going back over it, and while he doesn’t nail all the details about the past, he is saying: I won’t let this story go on and make the same mistake again.
When Yosef hears all of this, he responds by retelling the story in a way that’s new for him. First he says, I am Yosef, and when his brothers are dumbfounded, he says, I am Yosef your brother, whom you sold to Mitzrayim. Don’t be troubled that you did that; God sent me here to save lives, to rescue you. It wasn’t you who sent me here, but God (45:3-4). I imagine this is not what Yosef has thought the whole time; it wasn’t what he said at all when he thought about his family at the time Menashe was born. Something in Yehuda’s telling their story, changes what the story means to Yosef.
Our stories are never over even when the events have passed. Or at least the story is never finished. We tell stories about ourselves to figure ourselves out. We tell stories about ourselves to others as a way to explain who we are and why we are committed the way we are. And if the story is important, we tell it again and again, and differently as we learn, from how a story in our life continued or from the responses that come from the people who graciously listen.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner taught that the only thing a person can actually change is the past. The future is unknowable, but the past is completely in our control, because it only exists in how we tell it. That’s true of our personal stories, and it’s true of the histories we are part of as well, because we tell our collective past in a way that points us to what we ought to do next. And we can always affirm or edit or change how we retell any of those stories.
And to do that we have to obey another quote, not from my dad but from Winnie the Pooh, who once said: It’s a long story, and longer when I tell it. To get the most out of our stories, we have to tell them long. We can’t just summarize them, whether it’s the story of our own life or the story of our people going from oppression to freedom. Moral and political concepts can be expressed in a few sentences, but we can’t really understand them without exploring them in stories.
We have to tell our stories long, which is hard in our impatient age, when don’t get together enough or long enough, when stories are told in Tik-Tok-sized and Twitter-sized bites. The vignettes of our lives that seem most significant, we ought to take the time to spread them out, in conversation or in writing. It’s what Kiddush is for and Shabbat dinners. We need to hear ourselves telling our own stories long enough, so we can see how they change in what they mean to us, whether what we emphasize or which episodes we talk about change over time, just as Yaakov and Yosef tell the same story with different words or different focus points each time.
And it’s the same for our group stories. If we are going to tell the story of America as a land of immigrants, or the story of the Land of Israel and our connection to it and the conflict within it, we need to tell long stories. With room for detail, for all the relevant characters and moments. For new things to be incorporated in the next telling, as one story elicits another from someone else, just as Yosef could only retell his story in a radically new way after Yehuda told his new version. The stories of our people and our country, we need to know them as they have been told to us, and also not be limited to those tellings.
As the writer and activist Muriel Rukeyser said, the universe is not made of atoms, but of stories. So too our lives, and the lives of nations. And so as we say at the Seder, whoever retells and expands on such stories is to be praised – v’chol hamarbeh l’saper, harei zeh meshubach.
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