Parashat Vayeshev: On the Suffering of the Parent

It’s painful to be a parent. Someone once said to me that it’s like having your heart walk around in someone else’s body. It does feel like that sometimes – you feel your child’s pain so intensely.

Maybe that’s why in this week’s parsha, the only person’s emotional suffering we hear about is Yaakov, the father’s. Yosef is the one going through the ordeal – being stripped, thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, and wrongly accused and jailed. But we don’t hear a word of emotion from him. (Interestingly, in next week’s parsha, we hear the brothers speak of Yosef’s cries from the pit, but here, at the time, the Torah does not mention any such cry.) Yosef is busy dealing with the situation, making the best of it, turning failure into success and making friends with those in power. It is his father, at home without such action to occupy him, who does the suffering, crying endlessly.

Yaakov believes that his son is dead. According to the Sefat Emet, God did not reveal to Yaakov that Yosef was still alive in Egypt because He thought that would be even more upsetting to him, to worry over what was becoming of him. Perhaps that is so; to imagine each trial and worry over its outcome when one is unable to do anything to help – that would indeed be torture for a parent.

And yet, Yaakov seems on some level to have intuited that the death of his beloved child was not complete – why else would he refuse to ever be comforted? One cannot be comforted for a death that is not real.

Yaakov spent most of the rest of his days in pain over Yosef. Perhaps there was no other way. That is the price of connection.

But perhaps there was, there is a way. Avraham experienced a similar near-loss of his beloved son and was somehow far less scathed. Avraham’s experience, of course, was much, much shorter, only a few days of agony. And Avraham also seems to be a less emotional, and less attached sort of person than Yaakov (Sarah, on the other hand, seems to have died from the experience). But one also senses in Avraham a kind of unshakeable faith that helped him weather these storms.

The fact is that things did work out okay in the end for Yosef and also for Yaakov. Yaakov could not have foreseen that, but maybe he could have suffered less along the way if he’d been able to get to that place of faith, to move beyond the worry and simply trust that with all the ups and downs, his child would come out on top in the end. Maybe such a stance can help us all keep the heart that walks around in someone else’s body a calm and faithful heart.