Parashat Vayigash: One Wheel

“You shall not take revenge nor bear a grudge on other members of your people” -- What is this like? If one was cutting meat and the knife sliced his hand, would he then turn around and hurt the hand [that made the cut]? (Talmud Yerushalmi Nedarim 9:4).

We are all part of one body – if we hurt another, it is like hurting ourselves. This is the deep truth that both Yehudah and Yosef come to in this parsha. Last week’s parsha ends with Yosef saying – Let Benjamin stay as a slave and the rest of you “go up in peace to your father.” Go up in peace to their father?! If they have learned one thing from the Yosef incident, it is that if one person in the family is suffering, everyone is suffering. There will be no peace with Benjamin a slave in Egypt just as there has been no peace with Yosef gone. As Yehudah puts it: Nafsho keshura be’nafsho – Yaakov’s soul is connected to Benjamin’s soul; their fates are deeply intertwined.

What Yehudah understands from the suffering side of things – that when one person suffers, we all suffer – Yosef understands from the doing well side of things – when one person is successful, we are all successful. This great power and prestige I have earned in Egypt, says Yosef, is not for me, for my own good alone, but for the good of the whole family (and by extension, the whole of Egypt and its surrounds); his good is causing others’ good by providing them with essential food.

This attitude is the exact opposite of sibling rivalry, the primary modus vivendi up until this point in the Torah. From Cain and Abel to Yaakov and Esav to Yosef and his brothers, the feeling was always that if one brother received some benefit, it was to the detriment of the others; there was no sense of a joint enterprise. The whole notion of wanting to harm, to kill the other brother, came out of this misunderstanding of the individuals’ essential separateness. They didn’t understand that hurting another (especially a brother) is like hurting your own hand, that Abel’s blood would continue to cry out to Cain forever.

Now it is time for nationhood, and nationhood requires a joining of paths, an understanding that our brothers’s suffering is our suffering, and our sisters’ successes are our successes. If a single family can’t learn to feel this way toward each other, how can the world?

A symbol of this new perspective of connectedness is the wagon wheel. Wagons, agalot, are strangely emphasized numerous times in this parsha as the vehicle of choice for bringing Yaakov, his family and all their belongings down to Egypt. Perhaps it is because agalot, whose root is egol, “round,” representing its wheels, symbolize a joining together of fates; all the spokes are connected and turn together to make a whole, moving as one. Yosef’s first dream imagined 11 sheaves of wheat in a circle around him bowing down. It is an arrogant egocentric dream. But the same image in the form of a wheel becomes a symbol of unification and connectedness; we all turn together.

The wheel perspective is not an easy one to maintain; we think of ourselves primarily as individuals, even within a marriage or a family, and certainly in the community, and the larger world. But on some deep level, we are all part of the same wheel, in the same boat, part of the same planet, our fates inextricably linked. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnames Buddhist monk, uses the image of waves in an ocean. Does each individual wave think of itself as taller or smaller, more beautiful than the next, or are they all simply waves, made of the same water, a tiny part of a vast ocean? Yehudah and Yosef came to some understanding of this truth in this week’s parsha – that we do not and cannot exist separately – and there is great strength in this perspective.