Parashat Vayigash: On Hiddenness and Revelation

Yosef reveals his identity to his brothers in this week’s parsha after a long period of hiding behind the mask of an Egyptian viceroy.

Hiddenness and revelation -- these concepts usually refer to God. Indeed, mystical interpreters like the Sefat Emet see this narrative as a parable for the soul’s search for the hidden aspects of God in the world.

There is support for such a reading in the narrative itself. Yosef is the first of our ancestors not to have direct communication from God, to live in a world – like ours – where God’s purpose is hidden. Yosef’s recourse is interpretation; he learns to see, or rather, to read, God’s purpose in dreams and life events. When he reveals his identity to his brothers, he also reveals something about God -- his interpretation of God’s role in his life, of God’s purpose in sending him down to Egypt to provide food for the family and for others. In a world where God is as hidden as Yosef is himself, divine revelation comes via interpretation.

Revelation is achieved by other means as well. Yehuda, too, plays a role in the process of unveiling Yosef’s identity. Through the speech which begins this parsha, he in effect forces Yosef to reveal himself. A midrash in Breishit Rabbah brings the following parable to illustrate Yehuda’s actions: It is like a deep well of fresh, cool water that no one can drink from because of its depth. Along comes a wise person and ties cord to cord, and thread to thread, until he is able to reach the fresh water at the bottom and draw it back up for all to drink.

Yehuda’s lengthy speech ties word to word and sentence to sentence to dig down deeper and deeper, reaching for the secret that he must have sensed lay hidden inside of this strange Egyptian viceroy. The midrash is an apt illustration of Yehuda’s task in relation to his brother Yosef – to uncover the depths of his hiddenness and to pull him back out of the pit they threw him into. But the midrash – with its use of the evocative figure of well water -- also seems to be reaching farther, to be implying a spiritual quest, an attempt to draw out of the depths of the world and all its hiddenness the cool fresh waters of spiritual sustenance, of divine revelation.

The midrash may also be referring to its own hard-won insights into the depths of the Torah. For the rabbis, the Torah is a deep well of secrets to be mined by those who – like themselves -- know how to tie cord to cord (and verse to verse) and keep digging until the fresh cool waters of the Torah’s secrets are forced to reveal themselves.

Revelation can be achieved by many means – by interpretation, by perseverance, and perhaps also through the kind of honesty, bravery and selflessness displayed by Yehuda in his speech. The key is to believe that there is something hidden to reveal in the first place, to have a sense of mystery about the universe, to be willing to dig deeply in the world and in the Torah in the hopes of reaching those fresh cool waters of revelation and inspiration.