Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness

by Stephen Mitchell

  Favorites

  YAHWEH FAVORS ABEL OVER CAIN, Sarah favors Isaac over Ishmael, Isaac favors Esau while Rebecca favors Jacob, Jacob favors Joseph over all his other sons. What’s wrong with this picture? Furthermore, does congenital favoritism belong only to the archetypal Jewish family, or is it simply the way of the world?

  There’s a big difference, of course, between having favorites and playing favorites. I’m not very interested in a world without preferences. Even a buddha, when asked if she’d like vanilla or chocolate for her ice-cream cone, might say vanilla, though on a different day she might give a different answer. “The Great Way* isn’t difficult,” says an old Zen poem, “for those who are unattached to their preferences.” Some of us can’t help feeling more affinity with one child than with another, but we can help turning that affinity into preferential treatment. We can, and we do.

  Jacob, though, didn’t. He couldn’t. He could never find a way to be a good father to his twelve other children. He himself had grown up without a father’s love, in a state of constant craving for Isaac’s approval, until the craving led him, under his mother’s influence, to fraud, theft, and a guilt that lasted for decades. He had never learned impartiality; his parents’ favoritism had seeped into the very organs of his perception. Moreover, Leah had been forced on him by his cheating father-in-law, and though he was kind to her, he had never loved her. Her children and the handmaids’ children didn’t feel like his, because their mothers weren’t Rachel, the true wife. And though he did his best to love them, there was little warmth in it.

  Can you see how this will play out? It has to play out, since there is nothing hidden that won’t eventually be revealed. Whatever blind spots we refuse to acknowledge will burst into external reality at some point, to be seen, to be heard, to be either suffered or understood. Thus, in the closed system of the family, the momentum of Jacob’s favoritism was conserved in all interactions, through all collisions and separations. It transformed itself into arrogance and entitlement in Joseph, and in the brothers into a toxic resentment.

  The Ten Brothers

  BEFORE WE PROCEED ANY FURTHER, let’s move our focus to these ten half-brothers. Who were they? What were they like?

  All ten of them were rough fellows, more like their mothers than their father, without any of Jacob’s high-strung sensibilities or responsiveness to the demands of the spirit. They were bred to be shepherds, and they were content with no more than that. There was a particularly strong bond among (or between) the full brothers, but as Joseph grew up, all ten felt the bond that arises from having a common enemy.

  Reuben was the tallest and strongest of them. As the firstborn, he was the bearer of his father’s Blessing, until a troubling incident that you’ll hear about in the next chapter. Because of this transgression, Reuben had been demoted from the rank of firstborn, and the Blessing had been given to Judah instead.

  Simeon and Levi looked like twins, though they had been born a year apart. If anyone needed to learn gentleness from the sheep they tended, it was these two. They were brutal, stupid, and irascible, and their violence had once gotten the whole family into trouble. Here’s how it happened:

  One day Dinah went to the Hivite city of Shechem, unchaperoned, to visit some girlfriends of hers. She was in a flirty mood, and when she met Shechem, son of the king of the city, she found him irresistible. He felt the same way about her. There was an immediate intimacy between them, and, young and hot-blooded as they were, they saw no reason to hold back from each other in any way. So they slept together. That night, they exchanged vows of eternal love and promised to seal that love in public, in the presence of their families. In the morning, the young man begged his father to make formal arrangements for the marriage. So Hamor went out to Jacob’s camp with a few senior officials. He offered Jacob a very high bride-price, along with concessions that any father should have been thrilled with. Jacob nodded his head but didn’t commit himself; he sensed the young man’s urgency through the extravagance of the offering, and he knew he could hold out for an even better deal. He told Hamor that he would give the request his serious consideration and would speak about it with the girl’s mother, who of course had to be consulted.

  When Simeon and Levi heard what had happened, they were incensed. It was beneath the dignity of a daughter of Jacob to consort with a Canaanite, they thought, even if he was a prince; and anyway, he must have taken advantage of her innocence—to be blunt, he must have raped her. So they accosted the young man outside the city walls and beat him up rather badly. Jacob had to exert all his diplomatic skill, along with lavish gifts and a good measure of groveling, to propitiate Hamor. Of course, Hamor said, there was no question of marriage into such a family of thugs. (Dinah, forbidden the young man’s company, was heartbroken. She never married.)

  In later years, the story swelled to grotesque proportions in the two brothers’ telling, and when they were in their cups, they would even boast of tricking the whole male population of the city into circumcising themselves, and then, on the third day, when the Hivite men were still in pain, of “rescuing” Dinah, murdering all the men, stealing their livestock, and enslaving their widows and children. None of Simeon and Levi’s drinking companions took them seriously when they launched into their tale of the massacre, since they were known to be outrageous liars, even when sober. There was also the fact that the city of Shechem was still a bustling metropolis, inhabited by Hivite women and children and by Hivite men with mercifully uncircumcised penises between their legs.

  So much for Leah’s second and third sons.

  Judah, the fourth son, was reputed to be as fierce as a lion’s cub, and that is true, on the rare occasions when his temper was aroused. But he was also the most mature of the ten half-brothers. You’ll hear more about him later, and about the fateful encounter with his daughter-in-law, Tamar.

  As for the sons of the handmaids (Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher) and Leah’s youngest sons (Issachar and Zebulun, who was affectionately called Zeb), they figure in our story mostly as a background grumble: the Jewish equivalent of a Greek chorus.

  Tattletale

  FROM TIME TO TIME JACOB instructed Joseph to report on his ten half-brothers. Joseph enjoyed the job; he felt like one of God’s recording angels. When he told on them, it wasn’t out of malice. He was always frank with his father. He had no sense of discretion, and he gave no thought to the consequences his brothers might face from these reports. It never even occurred to him to put himself in their place.

  In contrast to his brothers, he was usually free to come and go as he wished. Sometimes he served as assistant to Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s four sons, who put up with the boy’s chatter and even let themselves be charmed by his flights of fancy. After he tattled on them, though, they knew better than to let their guard down again.

  What could the men have been doing? Slacking off on the job? But isn’t “slacking off” the definition of being a shepherd? “A god has given us this leisure,” as Virgil’s shepherd Tityrus sings. You keep one eye on the flock, and for the rest, you idle your time away, singing love songs to your raven-haired, cherry-lipped, almond-eyed, amorous shepherdess sweetheart or improvising on your flute or harp, a spiritual descendant of Jubal (or is it Jabal?). In the fifth-century Midrash on Genesis, two of our rabbis, convinced that the virtuous Joseph was obligated to report the brothers’ misdemeanors, guessed at something more nefarious. Rabbi Meïr said, “The brothers must have been eating limbs from living animals”—one of the heinous sins that automatically excluded someone from the rabbinic heaven. Rabbi Shimon, on the other hand, said, “They were having sex with Canaanite girls.” He was right.

  One fine day, Joseph wandered out to a distant meadow where he thought the four men might be. As he descended from the top of a knoll, he saw Asher behind a clump of bushes, naked, with a naked Kenite girl in his arms. (Joseph recognized her; she lived in a nearby village.) Asher was feeding her from a bunch of grapes, in a moment of obviousl
y postcoital intimacy. As soon as the girl saw Joseph, she screamed and covered herself. Asher, looking sheepish, said, “We’re just having our fun. Please don’t tell Father.” Joseph snorted, turned on his heels, and walked home. He had learned a contempt for sexual promiscuity from his monogamous-at-heart father. When Jacob heard of the incident, he called all four men to his tent and berated them. Bilhah and Zilpah looked on in shame.

  Four months later, Joseph happened on Naphtali in flagrante delicto behind a bush in a different meadow, with a girl from a different Kenite village.

  He also brought his father several reports of Simeon and Levi getting drunk and brawling with the men of neighboring towns.

  But the most serious instance of his talebearing concerned big Reuben, the firstborn. One afternoon when Joseph was fourteen—it was a mild March day; the meadows were ablaze with poppies, anemones, mustard, iris, lupine—he was walking past the women’s tents when he heard the sound of moaning from the tent of Bilhah, his dead mother’s slave. He hesitated, but then he couldn’t help coming closer and peeping in through the tent’s front flap. Bilhah was lying there, naked, in Reuben’s embrace. Joseph gasped. It was as if Reuben had taken his father’s dignity and smeared it with feces. How could he have dared to do such a thing? Bilhah was his father’s concubine; it was, symbolically, like sleeping with his own mother. Had he forced her? Had she given her consent? Both options were unthinkable. Joseph ran to Jacob’s tent frightened, enraged, weeping with shame for his father, compelled to report what he had just, horribly, seen.

  In the Greater Scheme of Things

  “THE WORDS OF A TALEBEARER are like wounds,” says the Book of Proverbs.

  The brothers were deeply offended by Joseph’s tattling. They resented him not only as their father’s darling, but also as his spy. Joseph’s very presence made them feel uncomfortable. It felt like a judgment, an attack. When they saw him approaching on his nasty little missions, they hardened their hearts and drew back into themselves. Their usual mode of speech to him was sarcasm, though when their father was present they mustered enough self-control to act with civility. Joseph, for his part, was oblivious of his brothers’ resentment. He interpreted their sarcasm as churlishness and ill-temper, and he couldn’t imagine that it had anything to do with him.

  At what point does innocence turn into willful blindness, trust into naïveté, appropriate self-esteem into narcissism? But if Joseph hadn’t been so obtuse, he would never have been able to arouse his brothers’ hatred, and thus he would never be sold into Egypt, and thus the whole family would die of starvation in the coming famine. So in the greater scheme of things, his failure of empathy was everyone’s salvation. And his moral flaws—the arrogance and insensitivity that resulted in such apparent mistakes as talebearing and flaunting his father’s preference—were really blessings, woven into a deeper texture of reality. The very notion of mistakes is questionable here; later on, our storyteller shows that he sees it as self-centered short-term thinking. What seems to be a mistake in our lives may actually be a step forward that leads to the Great Way, though we had no way of recognizing that at the time.

  The Coat of Many Colors

  WHEN JOSEPH WAS SEVENTEEN, his father bought him a coat of many colors. It was the pièce de résistance of a Midianite caravan headed southwest. Jacob spent a whole morning bargaining for it, and in the end, he had to pay through the nose, so brightly had desire glittered from his eyes. The coat had been woven of the finest wool, dyed scarlet, crimson, maroon, yellow, green, royal blue, turquoise, and Tyrian purple. Its collar and the ends of its sleeves were threaded with gold and silver, and on its front was embroidered a scene of the earthly paradise: at the top shone the sun, moon, and stars, and underneath them was a garden of brilliant flowers, in the middle of which, on either side of the Tree of Life, two curlicue-bearded angels, with large furled eagle’s wings, stood facing each other. Both were grinning, as if Yahweh had just told them an excellent joke.

  What had Jacob been thinking when he bought this coat? Certainly not about the consequences, and in that blindness he resembled his favorite son. He saw only what he wanted to see: an occasion for lavishing his affection on Joseph by expressing it in the most material of ways, like a rich man who buys a diamond ring for his young mistress while skimping with his wife and children. There was a desperate, an almost demented quality to his passion for Joseph; you might even say that it was a form of idol worship. But the genius of the unconscious mind, which functions as a mode of providence, was clearly at work here. It is Jacob’s very unwisdom that forces the plot of our story to its tipping point. In the words of Job:

  My worst fears have happened;

  my nightmares have come to life.

  What Jacob most feared was losing Joseph. But that loss was precisely what his gift precipitated.

  After his purchase, Jacob held a ceremony to mark the occasion. He killed the fatted calf and told everyone to eat and be merry. During the feast, he presented the coat to Joseph and held it as the young man put his arms through its sleeves. “You are the true son,” he whispered in Joseph’s ear, with love and sorrow. “You are the true son of the true wife.”

  Later that day, Joseph told his brothers what their father had whispered to him.

  Levi gave voice to what they all were feeling. “The true son? The true wife?” he snarled. “Does that make us bastards? Does it make our mothers whores?”

  Levi is always so irritable, Joseph thought.

  On Edge

  JOSEPH PARADED AROUND IN the coat every day. It was gorgeous in itself, but it was also a visible sign of his chosenness, and it set the brothers’ teeth on edge. They began to call him “the little prick” behind his back, and sometimes to his face.

  Their hatred grew by the day.

  The First Dream

  ONE NIGHT, AT THE BEGINNING of the spring harvest, Joseph had a dream: he and his brothers were out in a field binding barley sheaves, and suddenly his sheaf stood up, and their sheaves formed a ring around it and bowed down to it in allegiance.

  As soon as he woke up, he knew that the dream was of the utmost importance.* He could have kept it to himself and mused on it, instead of blurting it out to his brothers, but because he projected his own delight onto them, he didn’t hesitate to let them know. It was a true dream, after all; that is, it was a dream that would someday come true, a dream of salvation, and it just so happened that he was at the center of it. (It was only right, of course, that he should be at the center.) What they needed to be saved from, he didn’t bother to ask. The point was the salvation, which was for them all, the whole family. His brothers would be as thrilled as he was!

  Early that morning, before they all went out with the flocks and herds, Joseph sent word that they should meet him behind his father’s tent. The sun had risen, the birds were singing, and though there was still a nip in the air, the day was going to be a warm one. When they had all arrived (Issachar was the last to straggle in, yawning), Joseph told them he had dreamed a marvelous dream. He laughed as he described it to them, and when he was finished, he looked as if he expected them to clap their hands and rejoice with him.

  The brothers were shocked. Then their shock turned into dismay, their dismay into a dull rage. Unbelievable, they thought, the brazenness of this arrogant little shit as he rubs his superiority in our faces.

  “So you’re supposed to rule over us?” Simeon sneered. “Is that what your dream means?”

  What’s the matter with him? Joseph thought. This dream is very good news.

  Later

  THE BROTHERS MET. They were buzzing with rage, like hornets in a poked nest. Words spilled out.

  “It can’t go on like this.”

  “We’ve got to do something.”

  “What? What can we do?”

  “He’s lying. He didn’t dream any such thing.”

  “But what if it’s true? That’s even worse.”

  “It would all be perfect without him.”
>
  “It would be better if he had never been born.”

  Eyes darted to other eyes, then to the ground. It would be better if he were dead, they were all thinking.

  The Second Dream

  THREE NIGHTS LATER, Joseph had a second dream. The dream was so vivid that he felt as if it were taking place before his waking eyes. I am dreaming, he said to himself in the dream. But whose voice was this? The self who heard the words or the self who spoke them? Were they the same? Did he even have a body now?

  His consciousness seemed to be floating, expanding on all sides, alert for some event that was on the cusp of becoming. He was looking up at the sky—was it day or night?—and now he was in the sky, and now he was the sky. A luminous figure glided into sight. It was the sun, but it had the form of a man, and it was also his father. Then in glided a woman who was also the moon, and it was his mother, alive again. Then eleven smaller figures, his brothers: eleven flickering stars. They all bowed to the ground (suddenly there was a ground) before him. It was the most matter-of-fact gesture imaginable, a simple acknowledgment. They were stating what had been obvious to him all his life. Everyone knew it; they just hadn’t known that they knew. This is a dream, he said to himself, but it is true.

  He opened his eyes. He remembered everything. It was a second dream of salvation, even more powerfully shown than the first one. He could hardly believe his good fortune—their good fortune, since it affected the whole family. His father was part of it too, this time, and so was his mother. What did it mean that she had bowed in front of him, even though she was dead? How could that be a portent of the future? But it didn’t matter. This was obviously a second dream of the utmost importance.