Parshat Vayigash 5768: The Five Men

This week Judah pleads for the freedom of Benjamin, and is so moving Joseph reveals that he is their brother in a fearful and tearful reunion. Eventually Jacob and the whole Mishpocha comes down to Egypt. They all live happily off the fat of the land of Egypt at the request of Pharaoh.

When Joseph presents his family to Pharaoh, he does something odd:

1. Then Joseph came and told Pharaoh, and said, My father and my brothers, and their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have, have come from the land of Canaan; and, behold, they are in the land of Goshen. 2. And he took some of his brothers, five men, and presented them to Pharaoh. [Genesis 47:1-2]

The Hebrew text, Targum Onkelos, Targum Pseudo Jonathan and the Socino translation all note five men went with Joseph. Of course this creates two questions: Which five? And why these five?

To understand the rabbinic answer we have to understand their source for this answer: the blessings for the Tribes by Moses in Deuteronomy 33. For some of the tribes, Moses repeats their name as follows:

33:7. And this is the blessing of Judah; and he said, Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah, and bring him to his people; let his hands be sufficient for him; and be you a help to him from his enemies.

33:18. And of Zebulon he said, Rejoice, Zebulon, in your going out; and, Issachar, in your tents.

33:20. And of Gad he said, Blessed be he who enlarges Gad; he lives as a lion, and tears the arm with the crown of the head.

33:22. And of Dan he said, Dan is a lion’s cub; he shall leap from Bashan.

33:23. And of Naphtali he said, O Naphtali, satisfied with favor, and full with the blessing of the Lord; possess you the west and the south.

33:24. And of Asher he said, Let Asher be blessed with children; let him be acceptable to his brothers, and let him dip his foot in oil.

Why repeat these six names? The rabbis differ on that question. Midrash Rabbah to Genesis states:

And why did the righteous Joseph take these five of his brethren? Because he knew who were the strong men among his brethren, and he reasoned wisely: If I present the strongest to Pharaoh, he will on seeing them make them his warriors. Therefore he presented these five, who were not mighty men. How do we know that they were not? You find them in the blessing of our teacher Moses. Every one whose name he repeated in his blessing was mighty, while he whose name he did not repeat was not mighty. [Genesis Rabbah - XCV:4]

Using this argument, The Midrash states the brothers who were presented to Pharaoh were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Benjamin, and Issachar, whose names were not repeated. Yet the Talmud and Targum Pseudo Jonathan have a reversed list:

Thus said R. Johanan that ‘they were those whose names were repeated [in the Farewell of Moses]. But was not the name Judah repeated too? He replied: The repetition in the case of Judah was for a different purpose, [Baba Kama 92a]

So If Judah was for a different purpose, we have the five brothers as Zebulon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. We can see rabbinic commentary isn’t helping much.

Looking at this conundrum, I thought of two possible answers. One is a commentary on the commentators, the other on the text. Recently I was in a Talmud study session at my Synagogue, and we were studying a rather bizarre text about the biblical kings not allowed into the world to come. Among their atrocities:

Ahaz permitted incest; Manasseh violated his sister; Amon, his mother, as it is written, For he Amon sinned very much. R. Johanan and R. Eleazar [dispute therein]: One maintained, He burnt the Torah; the other, he dishonored his mother. His mother remonstrated with him: ‘Hast thou then any pleasure in the place whence thou didst issue?’ He replied: ‘Do I do this for any other purpose than to provoke my Creator!’ [Sanhedrin 103b]

The facilitator had one interpretation. This was part of a power struggle with the prophets. The law of Kings was struggling with the law of God. By violating the sacrosanct law of incest Amon tried to destroy the Torah. Our facilitator saw many problems and issues with modernity in his interpretation. Our group discussed, or was lectured to, on that point for quite a while. I never got to give my explanation, but my idea has a lot to do with the problem of which brothers were before Pharaoh.

I am of the opinion one cannot look at a piece of Talmud without understanding the people who were making these statements. In both the Baba Kama piece about the brothers and the Sanhedrin part about the incestuous kings one of the rabbis involved was the Amora R. Johanan. He lived at a time where most of Israel was overrun with Romans, many of them converts to Christianity. Given Roman oppression and increasing pressure to convert, most Jews were either converting or running away to the lands of the East, to the diaspora in present day Iraq. Torah knowledge was waning in Israel, and about 150 years after R. Johanan, scholarly work disappeared completely for close to a thousand years in the land. R. Johanan, seeing the warning signs, was instrumental in preserving that knowledge in the first Talmud, the Talmud Yerushalmi.

Alternatively, The Tanna R. Eleazar ben Azaria lived at a very different time. The time of the Tannaim were the times in the shadow of the destruction of the temple and the time of the massacres in the shadow of the Bar Kokba rebellion. The Jewish world was undergoing radical change, as sacrifice was no longer possible and Jews were severely punished and executed for the slightest offence.

For me, given this historical context, I saw something different in the Sanhedrin piece. This was not a fight between God’s law and Man’s law, but answering a question of why do people sin. For R. Johanan it was forsaking the tradition as a minority people for the majority. For R. Eleazar it was to spite the God who would allow such horrible things to happen to His people. My interpretation of the text was R. Eleazar was talking of the reaction to the Shoah of his day, R. Johanan to the assimilation of his time. After the session I told this to a friend of mine who had an interesting response: “I guess every generation has its answer”

It is these same two generations the Tannaim and the first Amoraim which flip the answers to which of Jacob’s sons appeared before Pharaoh. Both use the same proof text, but come up with different answers. These texts don’t give us enough information to make good assumptions, but there is one possibility I thought of based on the biblical text. With the exception of Zebulon, the brothers who appear in front of Pharaoh are the sons of the hand maids, of slaves. This was a prophetic message: Just as these were from slaves and are now free men, so too will we be free men again. How? Going back to the blessing we read of Zebulon

18. And of Zebulon he said, Rejoice, Zebulon, in your going out; and, Issachar, in your tents. 19. They shall call the people to the mountain; there they shall offer sacrifices of righteousness; for they shall suck of the abundance of the seas, and of treasures hidden in the sand. [Deuteronomy 33:18-19]

It will be by sea split into two so the people can walk on sand the people will go out, and then go to the mountain to offer sacrifices. Zebulon is there as another statement in front of Pharaoh.: We will go out and it will be by sea. For the world of R. Johanan, who saw the Jewish world once again beginning an exile, the five repeated names show a prophecy of exile and redemption as in Torah’s story of enslavement and the Exodus from Egypt we will begin reading in a few weeks. For the Tannaim of the Mishnah, showing your mightiest heroes meant they would get conscripted – or killed.

That at least is my idea. Midrash is more a reflection of the person giving it than necessarily an accurate description of events. Not only in my own mind games with the text, but even in Talmudic times was this true. The redactors of the Talmud, centuries after Johanan, added their own editorializing. Each generation does interpret things differently. In my interpretation, it’s important to remember that every generation has its interpretation.