Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness

by Stephen Mitchell

  He lay there for a few minutes, savoring its power and the warmth of his body under the blanket. Then he stood up, washed, dressed, and hurried out of the tent. He had to tell his brothers. Surely this time they would recognize what a blessing had been granted to them, through him. The meaning couldn’t be clearer. How happy they would be!

  He was still smiling, though he wasn’t aware of it. The smile clung to his lips for a moment, like a dewdrop on the tip of a blade of grass.

  Not Happy

  THE BROTHERS WERE NOT HAPPY.

  Nor was Jacob, when Joseph told him. Jacob scolded him and commanded him not to tell them about any future dreams. The act of bowing down before his own son was humiliating, and it was obvious how much ill will it would cause among his other sons. But Jacob kept thinking about this dream for a long time afterward.

  The boy was extraordinary in many ways, and heart-achingly beautiful. His intelligence, too, was beyond anything Jacob had ever encountered, and he was quick-witted as well, eloquent, practical, and charming. There had never been a reason to worry about his future. But after this dream, Jacob began to worry. Sometimes he was so alarmed by his thoughts that he couldn’t fall asleep. He would watch Joseph’s sleeping figure and listen to his breathing, and images of great peril would rise in him, quickening the pace of his heartbeat. Many times he prayed for Joseph’s safety, but his prayers stayed earthbound, like birds that have lost their wings.

  What did the dream of subordination mean? He knew God’s disregard for conventional order, but this would be going too far. It was one thing for the younger brother to be favored over the elder, but for the father to bow down before his son? That would be unheard of, intolerable. Surely the dream couldn’t mean that.

  But if not that, what did it mean? He worried about Joseph’s self-confidence. It is dangerous to think so highly of yourself. On the other hand, the boy was lavishly blessed, and only a fool would fail to recognize that degree of blessing in himself. No, he would be fine, whatever happened. He was destined for great things, however God in His mysterious grace decided to bring them to pass. Jacob was sure of that. But then he had been sure that his beloved Rachel would always be at his side.

  Still, it would all turn out for the best. He knew it would. He hoped it would.

  The Last Straw

  AH, BUT HOPE ISN’T ENOUGH. It’s the Siamese twin of fear. It’s the projection of a small personal desire onto the infinite possibilities of the future.

  We have come to a point where our story’s world has become fatally unstable. Think of it as a balance scale. Up to now, with Joseph in one weighing pan and his ten half-brothers in the other pan, there has been an equilibrium of sorts. But now our storyteller is about to put an additional weight into one of the pans, and the pointer will tip all the way over to one side. Which pan is rising, which sinking? There’s no way to tell yet. All we can know is that the center will not hold.

  And the weight that’s about to drop: what specifically is it? Joseph’s second dream? Some undisclosed thoughtlessness on his part? Or will that roughneck Simeon simply wake up one arbitrary morning in a foul mood, so that the mere sight of his beautiful brother, the chosen one, the delight of his father’s soul, is enough to tip him over into a murderous rage? Can we know? Do we care?

  I am reminded of the old Arabian story about the greedy camel driver who piles bale after bale of straw onto his favorite animal. Finally, eager to squeeze out one last bit of profit, he places still another wisp of straw on top of the load, and the camel’s back breaks. A foolish friend of his comes to visit, in an effort to help him assess the situation and avoid future disasters. The friend examines the dead camel and the bales of straw scattered over the ground; then, in an effort to isolate the cause, he asks the camel driver to show him which straw was the last one. The driver chases him out of the yard with a measuring rod.

  Murder

  THE BROTHERS HAD HEARD the story of Cain and Abel from Jacob’s lips, but it meant nothing to them. Like all the old stories, it had happened beyond resonance, in a distant past that had nothing to do with their present. They didn’t realize that the first murder was a direct consequence of the first jealousy and that Cain’s jealousy was theirs as well. Cain’s jealousy, like theirs, resulted from a sense of rejection. He had brought a handsome offering of fruits and vegetables to the altar, in good faith, but Yahweh rejected it, and Cain “was very troubled, and his face fell.” (Of course his face fell!) About this verse, an ancient Galilean rabbi, Hanina the Shoemaker, said, “He was like a child who, after he is punished, takes it out on his smaller brother. As it is said, ‘Happy shall he be who dashes your little ones against the rocks.’” (Ps. 137:9) Another ancient rabbi, Shimon bar Zonin of Magdala, said, “Cain thought that if his brother died, the Lord would love him best. As it is said, ‘He will swallow up death in victory.’” (Isa. 25:8)

  But in the greater scheme of things, the brothers were blameless. They had no control over their rage, no way to question the hate-drenched thoughts that arose in them with the almost irresistibly seductive power that lust has. They were under the illusion that Joseph was the cause of their suffering; destroying the cause, they thought, would destroy the effect. Had they been better listeners, they would have understood why it turned out so badly for Cain: how his brother’s blood continued to cry out from the ground and how his punishment, inflicted from the inside, felt greater than he could bear.

  One last detail: Cain’s famous question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” has two equally valid answers. It requires a good deal of practice to discover where the yes fits and where the no.

  The Errand

  ONE DAY JACOB TOLD JOSEPH to see how the brothers were doing and bring him a report. Joseph blithely went off on his errand. His willful ignorance is easy to understand, but what about Jacob’s? He certainly knew about brotherly rage; he had fled from the rage of his own brother, Esau, who had vowed to kill him after he found out that Jacob had cheated him out of the Blessing. Shouldn’t Jacob have been more prudent now?

  Well, in hindsight, yes, of course. But the fact is that he never thought Joseph was in danger. For one thing, the brothers had known better than to show their true feelings to him, so he hadn’t been exposed to their fuming and gnashing of teeth. For another thing, in spite of his worries, he felt that Joseph was somehow protected. After all, not only was he one of Abraham’s great-grandsons, he was the chosen among the chosen, a being of such beauty and brightness that he seemed invulnerable to earthly sorrows. Even the death of his mother, when he was six, hadn’t affected him for more than a few weeks. He had cried himself empty every day, and then the grief was over, and he returned to his usual cheerfulness, with the memory of his mother a gently fading beacon at the center of his heart.

  “Here Comes the Dreamer”

  IT WAS NOON WHEN JOSEPH arrived in Dothan, where his brothers were tending their flocks. In the meadows there were a number of stone cisterns, which were used for gathering and storing water during the rainy season.

  Simeon was the first to see him. “Look, here comes the dreamer,” he said. “Now is our chance: let’s kill him and throw him into one of these pits and say that a wild beast ate him. Then we’ll see what good his dreams have done him.”

  The brothers all nodded in approval. Some of them laughed bitterly. (Judah, the only one whose hatred hadn’t reached the boiling point, was in a different meadow, tending to a newborn lamb.)

  As Joseph caught sight of them in the distance, he smiled. He was happy to arrive, and he thought they would be happy too. He couldn’t parse the angry faces as he drew near. Simeon and Levi ran up and pinned his arms behind him. Someone was shouting, and before he knew it, his coat was torn off, then his tunic, and someone was hitting him in the face, and his mouth was bleeding. They were dragging him by the feet now. His head bumped along the ground. There were shouts and hoots all around him. Then he was falling. His right shoulder slammed against a wall, he lay stretched out o
n a rock, his head ached, there was a burning in his shoulder, suddenly the light dimmed, and he was alone in the shadows.

  In the Pit

  AT FIRST, HE WAS TOO SORE and frightened to move. He kept drifting in and out of consciousness, and he lost track of time. Was it only for hours that he had been lying here on the cold stone slab, or had it been for days? He heard some animal groaning, and he was frightened again. Then he realized that the animal was him.

  As the pain subsided a bit, he was able to think. Why had his brothers done this to him? How could they be so cruel? How could they not see who he was?—the chosen one, the salvation of them all. He felt sad, angry, and bewildered. Nothing made sense.

  Then, in the midst of his confusion, a glimmer of insight. Something he had done had so deeply offended his brothers that they wanted to kill him. Was it something, or was it everything—his whole way of being? Across the endless shivering hours, he could see himself from the outside, as the pampered favorite who sits at the right hand of the father, expecting the whole world to come worship at his feet. He was appalled. His heart ached at the arrogance of it and at his foolish sense of entitlement. He realized that he was entitled to nothing, not even his own life.

  Naked, chilled, bruised, bloodcaked, terrified, stinking of urine and feces, he prayed not for forgiveness but for a little understanding of how he had gotten himself into such an unholy mess. He prayed for a little humility, which, if he ever emerged alive, he could follow through the night, as a caravan follows the North Star.

  Learning Humility

  “THE WAY UP AND THE WAY DOWN are one and the same,” wrote an ancient philosopher. The stone cistern where Joseph lay was the womb of his transformation. He had to descend to the depths of himself and stay there, in that inner darkness, without refuge, without hope. This was the only path that could lead him upward. Then he had to find his way through a world of paradox, where exile is homecoming, slavery is freedom, and not knowing is the ultimate wisdom.

  No one, of course, wants to suffer. And yet the fortunate among us manage to learn from our suffering what can be learned nowhere else. We become—clearly, joyously—aware of the cause of all suffering. Instead of sleep, the remembered pain drips into the heart, and an understanding dawns on us, even against our will, that there is a violent grace that shapes our ends. Humility follows as a natural result. We learn how to lose control. We discover that we never had it in the first place.

  Humility looks very ordinary. It’s hello and goodbye. At first, it may seem like dying. What you were so proud of when you were flying high, you now recognize as selfish; it falls apart under scrutiny, and there is a profound change that takes place within you. There is no humiliation or shame in any of this. It’s total surrender to what is. You discover that you have let go into an intelligence that is incomparably vaster than yours, and it’s the gentlest, most comfortable feeling. You stand in what’s left of you, and you die to self, and you keep on dying. It’s like a tree that lets go of its leaves. That beautiful clothing has fallen away, and the tree just stands there in the cold of winter, totally exposed, totally surrendered.

  Celebration

  THE BROTHERS SAT DOWN TO EAT, on blankets they had spread on the grass. The flocks and herds were nearby. It was a cool day, but not cold enough for a fire.

  They passed around the bread and cheese and goatskins of wine. Laughter; joking. Simeon said that the pit was an excellent place to dream in. Levi said that if Joseph was such a great dreamer, he could dream himself a staircase to heaven, or at least a staircase to the top of the pit. Everyone laughed.

  In the silence between the jokes, they could hear Joseph’s voice. “Save me,” it whimpered.

  “Let’s see if God comes to save him,” Zebulun said.

  When Judah returned, his brothers told him what they had done. Judah was appalled. He realized what a devastating blow to Jacob the boy’s death would be. He hated Joseph almost as much as the others did, but this was not the way. They couldn’t do this to their father. He wanted to object, but he realized that nothing he might say would help. Their rage was out of control, and if he made himself their enemy now, they wouldn’t listen to him later. Now was not the time to intervene.

  Levi passed him the wineskin and told him not to be so stuffy. Relax, drink some wine, celebrate with them. What they had done was only right. The arrogant little prick deserved it.

  A Gradual Letting Go

  FOR A DAY AND A NIGHT—for days and nights, it seemed, as he drifted in and out of consciousness—Joseph lay in the pit, struggling with the realization that had dawned on him. The cold, filth, and physical pain were negligible in comparison with the moral pain he was feeling. Memories of his arrogance and unkindness toward his brothers flickered through his mind and made him heartsick. He was deeply ashamed of himself. It felt as if he had become Adam, in the story his father had told him so many times, and had eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it was a good thing, because suddenly his eyes were opened, and he knew that he was naked before God, before himself, stripped of all defense and justification. How could he have been so self-absorbed, such a sleepwalker? And where had his sense of chosenness led him but to this great sadness, which sat on his heart now like the weight of the sorry world?

  He needed to make amends to his brothers—that was clear. But how? An apology seemed like a poor kind of restitution. Besides, they would be too enraged to listen. They would see it as an attempt to talk his way out of danger. Anyway, the point was moot. He might be left to die here. He might be dragged out and beaten to death.

  The shame burned inside him. Forgive me, he prayed, not to God but to his brothers, though he knew this was absurd. There was no way out. There were no solutions. There was nothing to do, nothing to pray but May Your will be done. He found himself sitting up now, with his back against one of the pit’s stone walls. Overhead, the stars looked on in their frigid brilliance.

  May Your will be done. But there was something very odd about the prayer. Wasn’t it too an act of arrogance? Who was he to be telling God what should or shouldn’t happen? Of course God’s will would be done. How could it not? Everything that happened was God’s will, or else it wouldn’t have happened. You would have to be dull indeed if you didn’t realize this. Had his brothers acted against God’s will? It was insane even to think it. So, strange as it sounded, it was God who had thrown him into this pit. It was God who would let him live now or die. His brothers ultimately had nothing to do with it; they were just God’s instruments. And he himself—think what he might, do what he might—could do nothing but God’s will. Not I, but You, he thought. Not what I want, but what You want. I am not doing any of this, nor are my brothers. Whatever we think we are doing, we are all doing what is best in Your sight. We are all doing Your will, dear Lord, because we are all the work of Your hands.

  This conclusion was not reasoned out. It came to him in a flash. It was not an idea; it was a certainty.

  All the shame and sorrow he had been feeling began to dissipate, as if the sun were beginning to shine out from behind a layer of impenetrable fog. Even more: he began to be aware of—could it be?—a sense of elation rising in his chest. Was life really this simple? Could what had happened actually be something good?

  What he had been struggling against was now letting go of him, or he of it. He had been trying to fight against the current of reality, and now he was riding it, his mind a sleek skiff in the onrushing river, letting it take him wherever it wished. The direction didn’t matter. His life didn’t matter. All that mattered was the letting go.

  Caravan

  THE NEXT MORNING, AS THE brothers were finishing their breakfast, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites growing larger in the distance.

  “What would we gain by killing Joseph?” Judah said to his brothers as the caravan approached. “Why not sell him to these merchants? There’s no need to harm him. After all, he is our own flesh and blood.”

  So t
hey pulled Joseph out of the pit, and they washed him and gave him a clean robe and some bread and wine. By the time the merchants arrived, he looked (barely) presentable.

  The Ishmaelites

  THE ISHMAELITES WERE ON THEIR way from Gilead to Egypt. They were descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham and his slave Hagar—a boy who, as prophesied, grew up to be as free as a wild donkey, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him. (This was no surprise, since he had grown up seeing his mother constantly abused by his stepmother.)

  Ishmael’s descendants were still somewhat wild, but in the course of the generations they had evolved from bandits and raiders to canny businessmen. They were dressed in kaffiyehs and white robes, with swords and daggers hanging from their leather belts. On their camels’ backs they had placed manageable loads of spices, balm, and resin, which were highly valued in Egypt as medicine, cosmetics, and embalming aids. They also earned some profit on the side by buying children at very low prices from impoverished Canaanite farmers, who were only too glad to earn a few shekels by getting rid of the extra mouths.

  The caravan halted. Its leader got down from his camel and wished the brothers peace, then asked them if they had any merchandise to sell. (There was no need for an interpreter, since the Ishmaelite language was a close cousin of Hebrew.) Thrilled that the merchants had arrived at such an opportune moment, the brothers said that in fact they had a very attractive slave for sale. The Ishmaelites inspected Joseph, huddled together, and offered twenty shekels for him. Twenty shekels was, the brothers knew, a ridiculously low price for such a handsome and intelligent young man, but haggling would have been entirely beside the point. So they accepted.