“I am for the Other and not the Other for me.” — Emmanuel Levinas, “Totality and Infinity”
Then Judah went up to him and said, “Please, my lord (bi adoni), let your servant appeal to my lord, and do not be impatient with your servant, you who are the equal of Pharaoh. (Genesis 44:18)
“If you please, my lord,” (bi adoni) they said, “we came down once before to procure food. But when we arrived at the night encampment and opened our bags, there was each one’s money in the mouth of his bag, our money in full. So we have brought it back with us. (Genesis 43:20-21)
But Moses said to the Lord, “Please, O my lord (bi adoni), I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And the Lord said to him, “Who gives humans speech? Who makes them dumb or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord. Now go, and I will be with you as you speak and will instruct you what to say.” But he said, “Please, O my lord (bi adoni), make someone else Your agent.”(Exodus 44:10)
The first woman said, “Please, my lord! (bi adoni). This woman and I live in the same house; and I gave birth to a child while she was in the house…But the woman whose son was the live one pleaded with the king, for she was overcome with compassion for her son. “Please, my lord,” (bi adoni) she cried, “give her the live child; only don’t kill it!” The other insisted, “It shall be neither yours nor mine; cut it in two!” (1 Kings 3:17; 26)
[Hanna] said, “Please, my lord (bi adoni)! As you live, my lord, I am the woman who stood here beside you and prayed to the Lord. It was this boy I prayed for; and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him. (1 Samuel 1:27)
Yehuda is first person to use the phrase bi adoni, meaning, “Please, my Lord.” This simple phrase, the linguistic compliment to Vayigash (“he drew near,”) recurs throughout Tanakh. Moses invokes it when telling God to pick a different prophet. Hannah invokes it when supplicating Eli to take her son, Samuel, as a donation to the Temple. And an anonymous mother invokes it when she tells Solomon that she would rather give her child up for adoption than “split the baby.” What can these literary parallels tell us about Yehuda’s posture?
First, we see that those who say, “Please, my Lord,” stand in a position of vulnerability and power imbalance. Whether before God, Pharaoh, priest, or king, their request is a request not for justice but mercy. Their request is a request, not a demand. Their request, moreover, cannot be backed by threat. The ruler is free to deny the request.
Second, we see that all these petitions involve a form of self-sacrifice. To ameliorate the ruler, the speaker must give something up. Yehuda offers to stake his own life for Benjamin’s. The anonymous woman cedes her true claim to ownership in favor of letting her child live. Hannah relinquishes her most cherished possession for a higher cause, namely, that her son become a prophet. And Moses—his offering is rejected by God—but he is willing to offer his role as public figure to anyone more competent than himself. He cares less about the office and the honor than the mission. In his case, his very willingness to refuse power proves his credibility.
Third, we a find a paradigm of moral courage in the expression of bi adoni. While the speaker refers to the ruler as a master, and uses a formality, the speaker’s repetition of the personal voice, bi, adoni, suggests an unwillingness to defer or deflect. Like Hineini, bi adoni, is a summons to selfhood. The speaker asks the listener to listen not on account of what is being said, but on account of who is saying it.
Bi adoni can be thought of, in Levinasian terms, as the admission that “I am for the Other, but the Other not for me.” In other words, it’s the language not of reciprocity, mutuality, and equality, but of infinite obligation. The person who says bi adoni stands ready to substitute for the Other. Read broadly, bi adoni is not simply a rhetorical tactic for approaching kings, but a structure of the highest ethical ideal, one in which we ask not about what we can get or win, but how we can fulfill our moral obligation. Rather than tell Joseph that he’s wrong, Yehuda focuses on how he himself can be right. Rather than on focusing on what Joseph owes to Benjamin, Yehuda focuses on how he can help his brother. Ironically, when we take the grand view of Jewish history, it is Yehuda’s line via King David, not Benjamin’s line via King Saul, that endures. The person who self-sacrifices with no expectation of reward (not the person who is saved) is promoted to the position of leadership. Joseph saves the brothers from famine, but Yehuda saves Benjamin from captivity. The one is done by skill and foresight, but the other takes moral courage. While Joseph hides his identity, Yehuda owns his.
Rabbinic tradition offers us two messianic figures, a messiah from the line of Joseph and a messiah from the line of David, and thus Yehuda. The penultimate messiah, Joseph’s line, is accompanied by war and apocalyptic conflict. The deeper lesson of the doubled messiah is that redemption will come not simply through technological or political or economic achievement, but through moral grandeur. The hardest battle is the battle of character. Joseph saves Egypt and his brothers from starvation; Yehuda offers a spiritual example that saves us from decadence and enables us to survive both in times of peace and war. Josephs are needed to solve “special situations.” But Yehudas maintain the soul of the people.
Joseph dreams of his rise to power. But nobody dreams that Yehuda will rise to the moral occasion. In fact, if you looked at Yehuda during the sale of Joseph into slavery, or at Yehuda at the moment that he sleeps with Tamar, thinking her a prostitute, he is remarkably avoidant of any responsibility or leadership. While Joseph may be an appointed or even fated messenger, the reunion with his brothers is effected in a way that is surprising. We know, from the start, that Joseph will save his brothers; but we don’t know how his relationship with them will turn out. Yehuda emerges not as the naturally born leader, but as the experientially created one. Joseph is a natural; Yehuda is not. Yet his story arc is the one that can help us, especially as most of us are not naturals. Yehuda’s example is illuminated by the the teaching of Carol Dweck: “We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.”
If talent is simply given, we can all give up. If talent is the result of cultivation, then we all have an obligation to approach. What matters is not that we succeed, but that we try. By prefacing our attempt with bi adoni, an admission of humility and a request (especially to our harsh internal critics)f or forbearance, we give ourselves the chance to approach. In so doing, we do not fulfill dreams or align with constellations; we create the material of which dreams are made.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins