Parashat Vayigash: On Rapprochements and Scarcity

This parsha is about the coming together of Yaakov’s family, its rapprochement and reunification. This is the first family in the book of Genesis who does come together in this way. Cain kills Abel, Yitzhak and Yishmael are estranged from one another, and Yaakov and Esav, while meeting and making peace, ultimately each go their separate ways. But with the children of Yaakov is born the nation; all of his sons are our ancestors, and so they must come together, must be permanently reunited.

The parsha is called Vayigash for good reason. Vayigash means “And he approached.” The verse refers to Yehudah, but everyone does some approaching and meeting in this parsha. Four separate meetings take place – that of Yosef and his brothers, Yosef and his father, Pharaoh and the brothers and Pharaoh and the father. That’s why they live in “Goshen,” the place of approaching or coming together. Yosef uses the same words to coax his brothers to come toward him after his frightening revelation of his identity, geshu na elay, “Come towards me.” Coming together is the name of the game.

What strikes me about all this coming together is that it is driven by scarcity. There is the scarcity of food all around them, the great 7-year famine which physically drives the brothers to go down to Egypt first once and then a second time, ultimately leading to their reunification with their brother.

And then there is another type of scarcity, a sense in which time feels scarce, especially the time left in Yaakov’s life. It is this worry over his father’s approaching death that drives Yosef’s revelation to his brothers. He hears Yehudah speak of his father’s death, of how likely it is that his father will die from grief if Binyamin does not return (44:31), and Yosef is scared. All along, he’d been asking about the health of his father and heard it was fine (“shalom,” 43:28), but now, when he hears death might be around the corner, he realizes he must reveal himself immediately; there is no time to waste. “I am Yosef,” he says, “Is my father still alive (45:3)?” In other words, wait. Hold on. Can I still stop the story early enough to change the ending, to keep my father alive right now so I can still see him and he me before he dies? Hurry, hurry, he says to his brothers. Bring my father to me right away.

There is a deep lesson here. We most appreciate our loved ones when we are faced with the prospect of losing one another. Whoever has had a child come close to death and escape it, feels forever the gift of that child’s life in a different way. The trick is to remember that death is eventually the end for us all, so that life is always scarce, not just at the end. We should love and hunger for each other, desire such “Goshen” meetings, like we would hunger for scarce food in a famine. Part of what makes this parsha such a tear-jerker (Yosef himself cries 4 times) is our sense of regret, of the loss of all those years the family spent apart. They needed that time and that suffering to learn some lessons, but perhaps we can learn them just by reading their story.