Parashat Miketz and Vayigash: On Yosef's Healing

*With thanks to my son Asher for the insight about Yosef’s ambivalence in last week’s parsha, and with thanks to Shoni Mirvis for talking through ideas about trauma and healing in relation to Yosef.  

This week we witness Yosef’s healing from trauma, from the trauma of being thrown into a pit and sold into slavey by his brothers at the age of 17 and never hearing from his family, along with all the subsequent traumas of his life as a slave, and later, a prisoner, in Egypt.  

At this point in his life, Yosef is very successful; he is viceroy of Egypt, in full control of the country and all its citizens, with enormous power and prestige.    But this success does not mean he has recovered from the trauma.   It seems that what he has done in order to survive is push away the memories and erase the past -- he names his first child Menasheh, or “Forgetfulness,”  explaining that “God has made me forget [nashani] completely my hardship and my parental home” (41:51).   

This strategy works well, at least as a temporary band-aid, until his brothers show up, uncovering the old memories and unhealed trauma inside him.  He reacts in the typical fashion of a victim of trauma: he simultaneously tries to push them away and bring them close.   Part of him wants desperately to renew the connection; part of him wants equally desperately to stay estranged and to hurt the brothers and punish them.  What ensues is the push-and-pull dance of last week’s parsha.   One minute he is speaking harshly to them, accusing them of being “spies,” and the next minute he is asking kindly after the welfare of their father; one minute he is locking them up and the next he is honoring them in his home with a special meal.  He sends them away without revealing himself, resolving to remain estranged, but at the same time, he keeps one with him to maintain the connection and ensure they will come back.  Sending their money home with them in their bags is the perfect enactment of both of these parts’ desires; he is simultaneously showing his special care for them -- his own family shouldn’t have to pay for food from him -- and at the same time punishing them, knowing that they will suffer with worry over the false accusation of their thievery.  

As he is doing this dance of approach and avoidance, we see little cracks in his well-groomed exterior, signs of the deep hurt and vulnerability that lies hidden underneath.   At one point, he overhears his brothers’ speaking among themselves, saying that all this difficulty is coming to them now because of their guilt at not listening to their brother when he was crying out to them from the pit and pleading with them (42:21).   This is actually the first that we hear of Yosef’s having cried out in this way; the text had erased these emotions just as Yosef himself erased them inside of him.   Hearing about these desperate cries now -- being reminded of his own childhood pain through their memories -- Yosef’s covering is broken; he can no longer hide from the pain and turns aside and cries (42:24).   Again, upon seeing Binyamin in their second visit, Yosef is so moved by pity and love for his brothers -- a yearning for connection and perhaps some grief at all the lost years of seeing Binyamin, his only full brother, grow up -- that he again turns aside, to another room, and cries (43:30). 

These are little cracks, little glimpses of the intense pain that lies underneath his viceroy veneer.  In order for Yosef to fully heal from the trauma, he needs a full re-enactment, a full remembrance and coming to terms with the traumatic event itself.   It is for this purpose -- whether Yosef consciously understands it or not -- that Binyamin is brought onto the scene.   Binyamin is the stand-in for Yosef as a young boy.  Like Yosef, he is the son of the favored wife, especially beloved to his father in his father’s old age.   Yosef himself tries to add to this sense of favoritism, giving him extra food portions and clothing, as his father had done to him with the special cloak.    Next Yosef manipulates the situation so that Binyamin, too, is in danger of being sold into slavery before all of his brothers’ eyes.  Usually the explanation here is that Yosef is testing his brothers to see whether they have changed.   Perhaps another way of seeing it is through the prism of Yosef’s trauma, seeing that Yosef is actually --  whether consciously or unconsciously -- seeking healing, and he understands that in order for healing to take place, he needs to re-enact the original situation but with a different outcome, both for his own healing and perhaps also for that of his brothers.

The scene is set.   The youngest brother -- favored by father and now viceroy -- has been caught red-handed and in danger of becoming a slave.   In steps older brother Yehudah, in a remarkable speech, feeling his way and managing to say exactly the things that Yosef needs to hear.   First, that this younger brother will not be abandoned here and left to a life of Egyptian slavery, but instead, his brothers will rally around him and save him and stand in his stead.  Imagine how this message hits the hole inside of Yosef caused by the trauma.   He was abandoned, left alone to a terrible fate, no one caring to save him or coming after him to rescue him.   Surely the trauma is not just the terrible life of slavery itself, but the gnawing sense of abandonment by his family, the emptiness of feeling that no one really cared what happened to him.  Now Yehudah’s love and courage and loyalty seep into those hurt places inside Yosef, so that he is reliving the original event but this time with a brother who cares.   He is not alone in the pit, crying out with no one listening.  He is safe and cared for, like Binyamin, surrounded by brothers who will stand up for him and not abandon him.  

Second, Yehudah emphasizes their father Yaakov’s emotional attachment to Binyamin and the unbelievable pain that it would cause him to lose Binyamin after having lost Yosef.   Yehudah also mentions that Yaakov believed that Yosef had been killed by a wild animal.  Many have questioned why Yosef never contacted his father during his time in Egypt.  I wonder whether Yosef didn’t feel abandoned by his father as well as his brothers.  Yosef didn’t know that Yaakov thought he was dead.   He also didn’t know how sad his father was.  Perhaps Yosef imagined that his father gave up on him quickly and moved on with his many other sons, not missing him enough to send out a rescue squad and look for him.  Of course, Yosef was the favored son, so he should have trusted that love, but think back on the scenes immediately preceding the trauma; Yosef had been reporting his dreams and his father had rebuked him (37:10).  Right after that, his father sent him off to see about his brothers’ welfare.  Yosef may have understood these two acts as signs of his father’s increasing disapproval of him and concern for his brothers at his own expense.  So that then, when he is sold into slavery and no one comes to rescue him -- not knowing the story about the wild animal -- Yosef must have felt deeply hurt and abandoned, perhaps beginning to doubt his father’s continued love for him.  .   

Now, in this re-enacted scene, through Yehudah’s speech, Yosef finds out that his father thought he was dead and also the depth of his father’s sadness -- Yehudah speaks of the intensity of the sadness that would ensue from the loss of Binyamin, and surely Yosef can feel that Yehudah knows of this paternal despair from a previous experience, that his father has been decimated by his own absence as well.   Yosef now feels the intensity of that sorrow, of his father’s yearning for him and sense of loss, and in opening himself to that loss, Yosef also opens himself to feeling his father’s love, a love he must have buried deep inside him and not felt for a very long time.    That place inside him that was so hurt -- that felt so abandoned and unloved -- now opens and is nourished by these words of Yehudah, by the image of his loving, mourning father. 

When Yosef hears Yehudah’s speech, he can feel something happening inside him, some transformation, some opening, and he calls out for all the Egyptian officials around him to leave the room.    What he is doing, in essence, is removing the Egyptian viceroy mask he has constructed for himself over the years, the mask that has covered over his pain and his trauma.   Now, opening to it again, to the past and to remembering and to feeling it all, he needs first to ask the parts of him -- both those outside and inside him -- that have done the masking and protecting for so long -- to please step aside, to allow room for the vulnerable traumatized child inside him to emerge.   

What happens next is a cry, a cry so intense and so long-held and so deeply felt, that all of Egypt could hear it; the whole world shook with the emotion that Yosef let out that day.   It was a cry of great pain -- the pain of his childhood self in the pit, the pain of his sense of abandonment and homesickness and suffering in all the years that followed, and of his grief at all the lost time with his father and family, of all the years he suffered alone, without the love and care of anyone around him, the pain, too, of his brothers in all their shame and embarrassment and regret, and the pain of his father in his inconsolable grief and despair and broken heart.     Having remembered and re-enacted the trauma in a new way through Binyamin, Yosef manages to bring up all that pain, and for the first time, in the comforting presence of Yehudah’s words, to allow himself to fully feel it, and, by feeling it, to release it into the wider universe.  The losses -- his own as well as those of his family -- needed to be fully mourned and expressed before moving on.  The cry is one of pain, but it is also one of tremendous release and relief; crying is the last doorway out, the key to letting go and healing.   

Yosef shakes out all the pain he was holding from the past and returns to the present, fully himself, fully alive and feeling for the first time in a long time -- “I am Yosef” (45:3) -- and then, with the pain of lost time still in him, and an eye to the future, to not losing any more precious time with those he loves -- “Is my father still alive?”   Can I still connect to him and love him and feel his love, which I had written off for so long?   

Yosef returns to himself, wanting connection and reintegration, turning next to his brothers -- who are too frightened to respond -- turning now to them, not, as before, in inner conflict, approaching and avoiding,  but with a full and clear heart, simply wanting to pull them close -- Geshu na elay, Come close to me (45:4).  What Yosef says next to his brothers shows the full extent of his healing.   First, he says out loud what needs to be brought into the open -- I am Yosef, your brother, whom you sold down to Egypt.   We are not going to step around it and hide from it.  It’s out there: You sold me.  But what follows is full of compassion and love;  don’t be sad or upset about it, Yosef says; it was all part of God’s plan and all very much for the best; I was sent here to provide food for everyone.    In owning and releasing his pain, Yosef has stepped into his largest possible Self, stepped into the Self that is connected to God, that sees the wholeness in everything, even in the pain, that sees purpose and meaning in every step of his own suffering life, and that can, with great generosity and beneficence, from a well-spring that is beyond normal human capacity, offer his brothers not just forgiveness but compassion and peace.   The trauma -- facing it and releasing the pain around it -- has turned into a doorway to a larger version of himself.   

God’s role here is significant.   It is through his connection to God that Yosef finds the strength to work through his trauma and come out -- not broken and bitter -- but whole and at peace and with a strong sense of his place in the universe.  God serves as his therapist and his refuge and his rock, not just here, but throughout his time in Egypt, holding him through the times of pain, helping him survive at first by forgetting, as he needed to do, and later, bringing him back to wholeness through Yehudah and the brothers.   Yosef emerges here, post trauma, so much stronger and wiser and larger than his 17 year old “everyone will bow down to me” dreaming self, and this growth happens not just through the suffering, but through his awareness of God in the suffering.  

The power of this story is in its optimism and faith in our human capacity -- with God holding us -- to fully face trauma and suffering and to heal from it; to feel the pain and release it; to be able to reimagine and retell the story of our own suffering in meaningful terms, and, at the right time and with a willing counterpart, to reconnect to those who hurt us and also to those who love us.  

A Chanukah Lights Meditation

You can do this meditation either at night while looking at the Chanukah lights or during the day, in preparation.   May you have a Chanukah filled with light!

To play the meditation, click here.  

For Chanukah and Parashat Vayeshev: Becoming a Vessel

The Chanukah menorah is a kli, a vessel, to hold the oil or the candles that bring light into the world.    Light needs a container.  In order for blessing to enter this world, it needs a container.   

In the book of Kings (II Kings 4), when a destitute woman approaches the prophet Elisha, he tells her to go gather from around the neighborhood kelim rekim, empty vessels.  Only after she has these vessels can she receive the miraculous oil that fills them.   Blessing requires a container to hold it.  

The Sefat Emet suggests that the Chanukah menorah is a symbol for us, for our own capacity to be vessels that carry God’s light in the world.  As it says in Proverbs,  Ner Hashem Nishmat Adam -- “the soul of a person is the lamp of the Lord” (Proverbs 20:27).   The soul of a person --  each one of us -- is meant to be a ner, a lamp, a container to hold the light of God.   

If we think about it, physically, we already do function as a container of sorts.   Your body is an open vessel that continually holds and lets go of life-giving air; your lungs and your belly are empty receptacles; they fill up and then let the air out, making room for the next round, becoming a vessel again and again with each breath.    

Indeed, when God created the human, God took earth from the ground and formed a receptacle and then breathed life into it.  Vayipah be’apav nishmat hayim.   “God blew into his nostrils the breath of life.”  We were made to be receptacles for God’s gifts.  

Expanding this notion, what would it mean to become -- like the Chanukah menorah -- a vessel for God’s light?   What does it mean to be a container?  How do we make ourselves into such a vessel to hold God’s light?   There are two aspects to any container, the structure that holds whatever is to be contained, and the empty space inside.  On the one hand, we need to create space, to empty ourselves, to make sure that we are not too full to receive from above.   On the other hand, we need to have the strength to actually hold the light, to contain it so that it does not just diffuse and disappear into the atmosphere.  Space and embrace -- both are needed to become receptive to the light from beyond.

I will examine each aspect in turn.  First, space.  We are so full much of the time, full of thoughts and feelings that have power over us, that take us over so that there is nothing left, no room for anything from above to enter.   We are preoccupied by worries and plans and hurt feelings and jealousy and striving and attempts to control what happens.   We are preoccupied with ourselves, and we take up a lot of room and energy in our internal systems.  So creating space inside means finding some emptiness, some silence, amidst all the noisy swirl of the small self.   Our preoccupations won’t disappear, and we probably don’t want them to, but they can be moved out of center stage, to allow room for something else to emerge, something that will only flow through us if we are empty enough to receive it.    

Turning to the parsha for a moment, before Yosef could become God’s vehicle in history, he had to be stripped of his colorful cloak -- a symbol of his small self with all its arrogance and ego-centric dreams -- and thrown into the pit of emptiness and surrender.  Vehabor reik, eyn bo mayim.   “The pit was empty; there was no water.”   The emptiness of the pit mirrors the emptiness that Yosef needed to cultivate inside himself to make room for God, to become a vessel. “There was no water”  -- no help, no recourse.  Yosef was forced to completely surrender, to acknowledge his lack of control and total reliance on God.  We don’t necessarily need to experience the emptiness and surrender in the same extreme way as Yosef, to hit bottom -- the bottom of a pit -- but this Yosef incident is a good metaphor for the work of emptying ourselves and of letting go of our colorful cloak, our ego’s peacock feathers.  

It is interesting to note that the tradition reads the doubleness of this verse about the pit -- the mention of the empty pit as well as the lack of water -- as implying that there actually was something in the pit (snakes and scorpions); it wasn’t truly empty.  This is precisely the point of emptiness; it turns out that there is indeed something in nothing, that to open oneself to emptiness is to open oneself -- to connect oneself -- to the greatest something in the world.  

But being empty, letting go, is not enough.   Oil can’t be poured into full jugs, but it also can’t be poured into thin air; we need a container, an empty one, but still, a container, a structure, to hold the blessing.   Internally, this container is made of desire, of the positive energy and strength of wanting to serve, wanting to receive, wanting to be close to God, wanting to function as a carrier of divine light and love in the universe.   While the emptiness requires a letting go action, a relinquishing, the containment needs us to embrace, to hold with both hands, to love.   I am thinking of the Piasetzner Rebbe’s notion of the machshavah ahat tehorah, the one pure thought that a person should have at all times -- a desire to be close to God.   Everything else recedes to the background -- we let go of all other desires and create space -- but there is still this one strong yearning, and it is this yearning that creates a container inside us to actually hold the blessing.  

There is strength here as well as energy.  While the emptying  is a release, the holding is an act of power and might   A bag in a grocery store that is weak will not be able to withstand the weight of the groceries it is meant to hold; this act of holding and containing requires building up the strength of our container, the muscle of our faith and our presence.  

Perhaps the best example of such a strong container is Avraham’s hineni -- Here I am -- at the akedah, the binding of Isaac.  God was asking him to let go of his most favored possession, his beloved child -- there was certainly a surrender here, a relinquishing -- but there was also an embrace, a Presence, a sense of rising with energy and strength to meet the divine.  

“Here I am.”   The small self recedes, but something else emerges inside us.  A new/old Self, an “I” that is strong enough to contain the flow from above, that was born to do precisely this job.  Here I am.  Ready to receive.  This larger Self is born in the moment, in the “here” of presence, of being ready and present right now, at this very moment. to receive God’s light    We may feel it as energy -- to get up in the morning like a lion to serve our Creator -- energy that flows through us, making our hands tingle, wanting to do something, wanting to make a container in the world through our actions, to bring the blessing out into the universe.

To become a vessel of light like a Chanukah menorah involves both these motions -- the space and the embrace, the emptiness and the containment, selflessness as well as a strong Self.  Yaakov had two intense divine encounters; in one, the ladder dream, he was lying down, totally open and receptive; in the other, he was standing up, engaged, fighting.  To become a vessel for God’s light, we need both these gestures, both the stillness and surrender of the corpse pose and the strength and power of the warrior pose.   

At this point, becoming a vessel may seem impossibly difficult, requiring a huge amount of effort, both of the letting go and of the holding on varieties.   But Chanukah speaks to us of only expending a small amount of effort, and of doing it daily.   Just light one candle and do it for eight nights in a row.  Gradually you will be able to light more, a little more each night.  Start small, with low expectations.   Can we hold a tiny bit of God’s light inside ourselves for a short period each night?  Just a glimmer of possibility, of the possibility that God’s light -- like our breath --  is in fact flowing through us at all times, but we have not noticed it.  Maybe all it takes to become a container is to open ourselves to this possibility, to be, like a container, strongly but also simply, receptive.  

Parashat Vayishlah: Yaakov's Rebirth

Yaakov’s struggle with a “man” the night before he meets up with his brother Esav can be read as a rebirth.   It is a transformative experience at the end of which he receives a name change, as if born anew with a fresh way of being in the world.   

It is like a rebirth in another way as well: Yaakov’s original birth happened in the context of struggle, too.   He and Esav were wrestling inside their mother, Rivka’s, womb, and when Yaakov emerged, he was still engaged in this struggle, holding on to his brother’s heel, trying desperately to be the first out. 

The confrontation with the angel is a therapeutic replay of Yaakov’s first birth.   Yaakov seems to have emerged from his birth with a sense of inferiority and insecurity.  He is born trying to catch up to his brother, with a sense of being behind and secondary, and later his insecurity manifests as a need to actually dress up and pretend to be his brother in order to receive his brother’s blessing.   It is as if he is not comfortable in his own skin, not confident that who he is, even as a second born, is equally worthwhile and blessed.  

And so the angel helps him to replay that original birth scene in order to begin to heal those wounds.  They wrestle as before, but this time, face to face, as equals, rather than one behind the other in the birth canal.   Whereas before it was Yaakov, as the more desperate one about to lose the battle to be first born, who hangs on to Esav’s heel, here it is the angel who touches Yaakov’s hip; the angel is losing, and knows it, and this is his only way to make a mark on Yaakov, a last ditch effort to be victorious in a losing battle. Yaakov, in this rebirth, as the angel sees and declares, is the stronger one, the one in control.   The angel has to ask permission to leave -- to be “sent out” from their interplay like a baby into the world.  This time, though the other is still the first to leave, to be born back into the dawn, it is Yaakov who has sent him out.  

And so Yaakov leaves this encounter a new man with a new name.  He is not Yaakov, the insecure heel-grabber, but Yisrael, one who “has striven (sarita) with beings divine and human and prevailed.”   As the name Yisrael implies, he is a sar now, a leader, a person in charge, in control, not just of others, but also, primarily, of himself.   He has God in his name, a sense of presence and of his own infinite capacity and worth.   He is eminently capable, as the angel lets him know -- vatukhal, “you prevailed,” or literally, “you were capable” in this fight; you did it; you have the capacity to do anything.  He is a full person, not secondary, but a sar (officer) of God in his own right (much like “Sarah,” his grandmother), a fair match for even an angel.    Soon after, when he travels again, the Torah describes him as shalem, “whole”; he has a new sense of completeness and wholeness, not needing anyone outside him to affirm him, but complete in himself.   

And so Yaakov emerges from this rebirth with the confidence to meet his brother face to face without wanting to supercede or replace him.  Yaakov is generous and gracious, giving him gifts and bowing submissively to honor his brother, with no hint of fight or insecurity or the need to show himself as the superior.  Yaakov has the courage for the first time to show up as himself, and this makes all the difference in his interactions with his brother. In the past, Yaakov’s insecurity had caused strife between them; not being content with himself, Yaakov fought with Esav, extracting first the birth right and then the blessing from him, trying to fill the hole inside himself by taking something from his brother.   Now, in this new encounter, Yaakov’s sense of his own completeness allows him to view his brother more generously.   He can prostrate himself before Esav seven times because he has the confidence and self dignity to know that he is a sar of God.   And out of this confidence comes peace and graciousness, so that, for the first time, the brothers meet and hug and kiss, accepting one another as equals.  

What has happened here is remarkable and inspiring.  Yaakov has managed to do one of the most difficult things in the world -- to let go of his baggage and step into a larger version of self.    The name Yaakov symbolizes all those parts of his small self that have been burdened and constricted by the insecurity he has been carrying around since birth.   Now he is letting go of some of those burdens in a new birth process.  It is interesting to note that, just before this encounter with the angel, Yaakov takes everything he has -- his wives, his children and all of his possessions --  and moves them across to the other side of a river; it is as if he is symbolically letting go of all of his earthly attachments, all of his baggage, for a short time, in order to come into contact with some larger, purer version of himself.  The name Yisrael symbolizes this new (or perhaps, old, original) larger self, one that is connected to the divine and therefore infinitely capable and generous and confident and courageous.    After wrestling all night with a divine being, Yaakov receives from that being a tiny piece of divinity, or, more accurately, Yaakov receives the ability to access the divine part of his own nature that was always there inside him.  The angel functions as a mirror, allowing Yaakov to see his own divine side, his Yisrael-ness.

And so, in a way, the struggle that took place that night was between these two parts of Yaakov himself, his small human wounded self, and his larger divine perfectly whole and confident self.   All night, as they wrestled, these two sides were getting to know each other.   The word for wrestle, vaye’avek is understood by some to mean “embrace” as in the not dissimilar word vaye’havek (the letters alef and haf can sometimes be interchanged).   The angel wrestles with Yaakov, engaging him and connecting to him, and he also embraces him in all his Yaakovness, beginning to heal his young wounded parts.  Interestingly, in the process, the angel creates a new physical wound, hurting Yaakov’s hip, causing him to limp.  Perhaps this wound can be understood as an externalization of the internal wounds that are being healed, a way of bringing them out into the open for healing, to expose them to the sun that is said to shine the next morning for the express purpose of healing Yaakov.  Vayizrah lo hashemesh.    “The sun shone for him.”   Yaakov has emerged from his long night of suffering and insecurity into the dawn’s light of clarity, confidence, and courage.  

Yaakov is reborn here as Yisrael, but note that the Yaakov side of him isn’t eliminated, but embraced; the Torah continues to refer to this patriarch by both names, showing that both personas remain.   What happens here is that Yisrael becomes the sar, the leader, of the internal system, so that the human Yaakov, with all his special talents and capacities, can now act in the world out of a place of confidence and wholeness rather than insecurity.  

What would it be like to undergo such a transformation, to be reborn in this way, to let go of some of our wounds and be whole and free and able to show up for ourselves fully without a gnawing sense of insufficiency?   I think about this sometimes while immersing in the waters of the mikvah. I imagine that the mikvah is like a womb, cleansing me of my old habits and stuck places and insecurities, and allowing me to be reborn afresh --  like Yaakov after his night of wrestling and embrace -- pure and whole and connected to the divine inside me.   The feeling generally doesn’t last, but the glimpse is helpful, as it surely was for Yaakov/Yisrael, the vision of a possibility of becoming one’s own  sar, internally led by the sense of our divinely given wholeness, exuding a confidence that is gracious and generous, always mindful -- without a sense of competition -- of the other’s equal wholeness.