Parashat Vayigash — Different dreams for different people

I am honored this week to share words of Torah that I learned from my beloved teacher and friend Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, the Rabbi Judah Nadich Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Rabbi Diamond died two weeks ago, after a long battle with cancer, and I think he would greatly appreciate his words of Torah being kept alive for new readers and learners. (His original d’var Torah is on JTS’s website, www.jtsa.edu.)

While this week’s parasha begins with the famous scene of reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers, it is a scene from later in the Torah reading that I want to share with you. Joseph arranges to have his father and entire family move to Egypt, and soon afterward arranges a meeting for Jacob with Pharaoh. In response to Pharaoh’s asking Jacob, “How many are the years of your life?” (Gen. 47:8), Jacob responds by saying the following, “The years of my sojourn are 130. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my fathers during their sojourns.” (Gen. 47:9).

For Rabbi Diamond, the incongruity of these statements, one by Pharaoh and one by Jacob, illustrate just how vast the divide was between father and son, between Jacob and Joseph. Rabbi Diamond details three differences between the perspectives of father and son. First, their understanding of the reunion between them. Joseph sees the reunion with his father as the culmination of a string of joyous events in his life. He occupies a position of power, fame, and fortune. His childhood dreams have been fulfilled and he has saved the lives of his entire family. He has been reunited with his beloved father and brother Benjamin, and they, along with the rest of his family, have seen how Joseph has journeyed from being a slave to the second most powerful person in all of Egypt.

Jacob, on the other hand, focuses solely on his son Joseph being alive. Joseph actually instructs his brothers to “tell my father everything about my high station in Egypt and all that you have seen” (Gen. 45:13), but when they reached Jacob and began to describe all of Joseph’s accomplishments to him, he responded by saying, “Enough! My son Joseph is still alive! I must go and see him before I die.” (Gen. 45: 28)

Jacob does not care about his son’s material wealth or position of influence. The preciousness of life, of the opportunity to exist in this world, is all that Jacob needs to know. Beyond that is immaterial.

The perspectives of Jacob and Joseph also differ in how they understand the significance of living in the land of Egypt. Joseph feels entirely at home in Egypt, and his childhood in Canaan seems to be a distant memory. It is no coincidence that he names his children Menashe (meaning “God has made me forget entirely my hardship and my parental home”) and Ephraim (meaning “God has made me fertile in the land of my affliction.”  Jacob, on the other hand, understands Egypt as one more stop on a much longer journey of wandering and suffering. He runs away from his brother Esau, he flees from a manipulative father-in-law, and his beloved wife, Rachel, dies along the way to the Land of Israel. Leaving his homeland (the Land of Israel) in order to be reunited with his beloved son, Joseph, in Egypt is the final straw. When Jacob reaches Egypt and has an audience with Pharaoh, he pours his heart out to him.

The third difference in perspective between Jacob and Joseph that Rabbi Diamond teaches about is their sense of history and vision of the future. For Joseph, the story at the end of the book of Genesis has reached a wonderful, happy conclusion. Joseph has power in Egypt and his family is safe in his adopted home. Jacob, on the other hand, understands that there is a dark side to being a guest in a foreign land, and that his family’s time in Egypt is anything but permanent. Their destiny lies elsewhere, and this is why Jacob demands of his children that upon his death they bury him in the Land of Israel. Jacob wants to be buried in a permanent home, not in a way-station that is neither permanent nor a real home.

These differences in perspective accentuate that Jacob and Joseph did not see the world in the same way, yet their love for each other never ceased or even diminished. For me, this idea is illustrated best by Jacob not caring about the riches or power that Joseph had assembled in Egypt. All he wanted to know was that his beloved child was alive. That was enough. Love triumphed over power, over riches, and over influence.

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond taught a Torah of love, of deep connection to God and to his fellow human beings. He taught a Torah of dedication to halachah (Jewish law), and devotion to pursuing truth and to deciphering the meaning of each text. And he saw our lives as texts worthy of study. His presence was a blessing in my life and in the lives of so many students, rabbis, scholars, community members and, of course, most of all, for his family. May the memory of HaRav Eliezer Ben-tzion ben HaRav Yehudah Idel v’Haya Golda always be for a blessing.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We will have an obituary for Rabbi Diamond in next week’s paper.]