This week Joseph gets his “get out of jail free” card, whenPharaoh has two nightmares that no one understands. When interpreting them to mean there will be seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, Joseph goes on to suggest collecting the surplus in the seven good years as rations for the famine to come. Pharaoh thinks this plan so good he makes Joseph the second n command of Egypt. He also gives him a wife Asnat, and the couple has two children Manasseh and Ephraim. The years of plenty come and Joseph collects grain for the royal storehouses. When the years of famine begin it appears that Joseph has done such a good job, that not only the people of Egypt come to Joseph for grain but also the people of foreign lands come for grain, and Egypt actually makes a hefty profit on the whole disaster. Among the foreigners are Joseph’s brothers. Joseph decides to jerk their chain by imprisoning one brother, Simeon, and finally threatening to imprison Benjamin after framing him for stealing Joseph’s goblet.
For the last few weeks we’ve talked about victimhood. We’ve seen a woman with more guts and action than the men in her life as one way of handling victim hood. Yet there is Joseph that exemplifies another way. We read in this week’s portion:
6. And Joseph was the governor over the land, and he it was who sold to all the people of the land; and Joseph’s brothers came, and bowed down before him with their faces to the earth. 7. And Joseph saw his brothers, and he knew them, but made himself strange to them, and spoke roughly to them; and he said to them, From where do you come? They said, From the land of Canaan to buy food. 8. And Joseph knew his brothers, but they knew not him.
This was not Joseph, but Zafnat-Pa’aneiach, royal Viceroy of Egypt standing before the sons of Israel. Zafnat-Pa’aneiach needs an interpreter to talk to these Hebrew beggars, he does not talk them himself. When eating, he eats at a separate table from his guests, so as not to mix with these people, whose eating customs were abominations to the Egyptians. This leader is very different than a young tattletale in fancy clothes.
Joseph knew his brothers because they had not changed much, but in the decades in Egypt, Joseph did change. The Midrash notes Joseph had grown a beard, which he did not have back in the days before his capture and sale. Torah tells us that Pharaoh changed Joseph’s name to Zafnat-Pa’aneiach. Joseph had a new identity, and really was a new man.
As we have been talking about for a few weeks, this might be the other way of recovering from trauma, While Dina was silent, and Tamar went and did what was necessary to achieve her desired outcome, thorugh the workings of Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu, Joseph changed his identity.
As I approach my 41st birthday, at the end of 2006, I was thinking back to the last time I wrote Shlomo's Drash Mikketz, before my 40th birthday. A year has gone by, and I’m in a bit of a reflective mood. Over the past few years there was change, and this year, there was a lot of it virtually all of it positive. I am a very different person than I was at 13, or at 22, when much of the trauma in my life happened, or at 30 when I began my return to Judaism. How much I have changed struck me in very much the same way it struck Joseph. At several parties this year, in places that people had not seen me in years, many did not recognize me. It was not that I was forgotten, but that I had changed so much both outwardly and internally. Sometimes, even I don’t recognize the Me of today, since I’m so used to the Me of years ago. The shy person and chronic wallflower I mentioned in last year’s Drash Mikketz was able to schmooze so much at a wedding this past year several people though I was family, and not just a friend of the bride and groom.
Yet I wonder about this change. The change in becoming a different person means one is no longer the victim, but someone else who did not feel that trauma. One cannot ever escape the trauma, even by changing identity because it will follow as I talked about two weeks ago. Yet, in changing identity it seems a lot less powerful than it did by claiming identity solely as victim. However there a question that has to be asked, both of me and of Joseph. Is changing the identity really a good thing?
I wonder that from a variety of perspectives. A problem with changing your identity is you are no longer the person everyone thinks you are. To save time and thinking we as humans have the ability to make assumptions, and one assumption we make is that people don’t change, and what a person does and wants in the past is what that person will do and want in the future – we are in a word predictable, our identity stays static. From there, however, it is only a short step to people expecting, if not demanding, us to stay the same and do the same things over and over again. Midrash tells us that Joseph’s brothers were going to look for Joseph while getting the food. They expected that Joseph was still too much of a wimp to be anything more than or a slave, or they assumed he had already died as a slave. To even conceive that they were bowing before their brother, arguably the most powerful man in Egypt, was unthinkable for them.
Joseph’s actions towards his brothers might be seen differently in this light. If he had revealed that he was Joseph to his brothers immediately, then that would have given the brothers a very different attitude to Joseph. Very likely this powerful man would have been pushed around in the same way as the old days. Joseph was not just testing them but establishing his new identity before he revealed his own. And even when he does, there is stunned silence from his brothers who can’t register it in their brains, so much so he has to repeat himself:
3. And Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph; does my father still live? And his brothers could not answer him; for they were troubled by his presence. 4. And Joseph said to his brothers, Come near me, I beg you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. [Gen 45:3]
Joseph had the advantage of distance and isolation in his case. Most of us are trying to change in environments where that is not true. Relatives and friends, who might mean well, ignore the accomplishments of the new identity, and often demand and depend on us being our old self. This pulls us back into that old self, the victim we are trying to escape from, and makes getting to the powerful place that Joseph represents more difficult, back into the place that is the victim. We want to be this new and improved identity, yet everyone keeps pulling us back, creating deep tension.
There is another question with changing identity as well: Is it genuine? Is the favorite son in the coat of many colors the genuine Joseph or is Zafnat-Pa’aneiach? As I made my own changes this year, I thought about that a lot, Am I now living a lie?
During the summer, I took an on-line self-improvement course. Many on the forums to this course wondered “Is what I am doing deception or is it genuine?” In our discussion I thought a lot, and gave a parable:
What can this be compared to? To a diamond encrusted in manure. We may only see the manure, but under the manure is a sparkling diamond. What we are doing here is not being the manure but uncovering the diamond so we can be our true selves -- the diamond that always been there.
I would also agree that some people hide behind a new personality, and do construct a living lie, but if we work towards a better, stronger identity, then this new identity is uncovering the best we are. Like the Hasidic Rebbe Zuzya, when we get to the world to come we need to be concerned not about whether we will be asked why we were not like Moses or Abraham, but why we were not like the diamond, were we like our own selves. Finding our own strong Neshama is part of the quest, to remove the shells around the shimmering core that is truly us.
I’m not sure if this is the most coherent Drash I’ve written, but I think it may be one of the most personal in a while. It’s been very hard month thinking about this idea of Identity. Like Joseph, I’ve had some bumps in the road. In the darkness that is the winter solstice while staring at six Hanukkah candles in the very long dark moonless night around us, we have nothing to look at but ourselves. I have been feeling the stress of this change in identity, and the subsequent tension in the transition from whoever I was to the man I want to be and will eventually become. I’ve tried to use Joseph’s story to sort my own views of change. I’m not sure I totally succeeded.
Nonetheless, Hag sameach.
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