A rabbinic colleague purchased a new Swingball set for his family. Gazing at the emergent large oblong cardboard box, the five-year-old screamed “A giant pizza!” In the child’s paradigm, only pizzas came in oblong cardboard boxes.
It is not only pizza-mistaken children who are too caught up in a paradigm to embrace reality as it is. The Joseph story is deeper than a musical — it is a chorus of misunderstanding owing to preconceived notions, the most audible of which is the brothers’ failure to read the many signs staring them in the face that the Egyptian viceroy was their brother.
The brothers knew Joseph was in Egypt and the viceroy looked somewhat familiar. Later, the Midrash recounts that Joseph sat the brothers in age order and told them their family history up until Joseph’s sale, beckoning Benjamin to sit near him since “both of us do not have a mother”.
Yet the brothers fail to read the clues, flabbergasted when Joseph reveals himself. Why? Accepting that the viceroy may be Joseph would have meant they had been wrong for over a decade; consequently, they did not let the thought enter their minds.
We too can be guilty of fact-distortion due to preconceived notions. This can be true in how we approach and interpret Torah. When Joseph does reveal himself — in Parashat Vayiggash — he tells his brothers, “Hashem sent me here to sustain you.” This means that to understand the Joseph episode without an element of Divine plan is mistaken; Hashem had told Abraham that his offspring would be enslaved and the Joseph story was the catalyst. This does not negate the brothers’ freewill: it merely provides the philosophical backdrop.
More broadly, not only in failing to acknowledge God in the Joseph story do we fail to evaluate it fully, but as the Chief Rabbi has lamented, far too often God has been “taken out of Judaism” too. Elements of Jewish education and even Jewish community talks will speak about Jewish survival, Jewish politics, Jewish values, but not mention God.
It is all too familiar to hear religious level expressed as commensurate with mitzvah performance or even synagogue attendance, yet seldom is there a mention of belief and devotion to God.
Unlike the musical, there is no Elvis in the Joseph story, but if we want to raise a generation whose Judaism is fully Jewish, we’d better make sure there’s a little bit more God in our conversation.