Parashat Vayigash: Revelations

Maybe there is always some deep unknown truth lying just beneath the surface of our daily lives.

Yosef’s brothers spent months (years?) now living in this weird covered up reality of not knowing that the powerful man who was treating them so harshly and at the same time so kindly was in fact their long lost brother.

There was this cloud of untruth and confusion whirling around them. What did it take to finally break the silence and the mystery – to force the truth to be revealed?

Yehudah’s forthrightness and courage. As the Sefat Emet points out, Yehudah had no real claim as to why this vizier shouldn’t take his brother Binyomin as a slave. Yehudah acted from the heart, speaking from a place of desperation and genuineness that was so powerful it forced the truth to uncover itself. Yosef could no longer hold back.

We are familiar with this scenario. In relationships and in Torah and in education and in other areas of life, we go through long periods of confusion and cloudiness until finally something breaks and we have a sudden vision of truth and clarity and connection.

These are moments of revelation, moments when we are offered a glimpse of the divine undercurrent in every aspect of our lives. We do all live in a haze most of the time, like the brothers, not really seeing the truth. And what finally uncovers the truth for us is our own true heart seeking desperately to see the light, not always directly – like Yehudah, we don’t know what it is we don’t know – but instinctively searching, pleading, yearning until finally the very search itself with all its heartfelt urgency breaks down the barriers and we understand that the vizier is our brother and that God Himself lies behind it all.