Still Alive
The Reunion of Past and Present
Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dumbfounded were they on account of him. (Genesis 45:3)
When Rabbi Elazar reached this verse, he cried: “And his brethren could not answer him, for they were affrighted at his presence” (Genesis 45:3). He said, in explanation of his emotional reaction: If the rebuke of a man of flesh and blood was such that the brothers were unable to respond, when it comes to the rebuke of the Holy One, Blessed be He, all the more so. When Rabbi Elazar reached this verse, he cried: “And Samuel said to Saul: Why have you disquieted me, to bring me up” (I Samuel 28:15). He said: If Samuel the righteous was afraid of judgment when he was raised by necromancy, as he thought he was being summoned for a Divine judgment, all the more so that we should be afraid. (Talmud Chagigah 4b)
In the lead-up to his self-disclosure, Joseph seeks to hold back his tears. Only when he can no longer restrain himself does he reveal himself to his brothers. Joseph has staged the entire revelation scene like a virtuosic director, and has perhaps even planned and rehearsed this moment since childhood, but even so, when the curtain lifts he is unprepared for reality. His tears are not the tears of an actor, but of a boy whose persona—slave turned viceroy—provides a pretext for genuine catharsis.
The brothers, for their part, are in shock. This is one of the most emotionally charged sequences in the Torah—an actor forgets he is acting and embraces his part with fervor. Joseph’s tears draw us in even as we know, upon each reading, how the story ends. What is more moving than a stylized, affected, calculated, controlled, and performative person giving way to a moment of realness?
The Talmud affirms that the scene is emotional not just for the characters, but for us, the readers. It provides a litany of verses that led various sages to break out upon reading them along with explanations of why they reacted as they did. I like to think this litany is a primitive version of YouTube “reaction videos” in which we watch ordinary people absorbing the impact of a song for the first time.
One of the sages featured in the collection of Talmudic “reaction videos” is Rav Yosef:
When Rav Yosef reached this verse, he cried: “But there are those swept away without justice” (Proverbs 13:23). He said: Is there one who goes before his time and dies for no reason?
The placement of Rav Yosef’s words after Rabbi Elazar’s reaction to the Joseph story intimates a connection between the Biblical narrative and the rabbinic endeavor to identify with it. Here, the sages’ emotions carry weight—they have something to teach us. We also learn something about the personalities of the sages from the specific verses that “triggered” them. If we aren’t crying or laughing or shouting when reading the Torah, we’re missing something, the Gemara suggests. Our emotions enable us to read closely where mere analysis locks us out.
Rabbi Elazar interprets the dumbfoundedness of the brothers as fear—fear of judgment or punishment. Rashi chalks it up to shame. But we don’t know why the brothers couldn’t respond. The text doesn’t supply an answer. By remaining laconic it invites us to imagine what we ourselves might have been feeling in the midst of the brothers’ reunion. Meanwhile, Joseph’s question to his brothers is also strange. He already knows his father is alive. By asking a question that presents as fact-based but is in fact more evocative he also scrambles the brothers’ wits. Both parties are flabbergasted.
One way Midrashic to parse Joseph’s rhetorical question “Is my father still alive?” is to read it allegorically as a reference to God—Avinu Malkeinu. “Is God still alive?” This is not a theological or metaphysical question asked in academic settings but is the kind of question that we might expect from trauma survivors. This is the kind of question we hear from newly liberated Holocaust survivors, or perhaps from recently released hostages. “Do I have permission to hope again?” “Can I trust humanity given what I’ve just gone through?” “Are my brothers, who have just atoned for abusing me and worse, really credible?” In the question is a desire to believe, but also a reluctance to believe. Woe is Joseph if he allows his brothers to violate him again and woe is Joseph if he does not accept that he and his brothers are no longer kids.
Once we appreciate that Joseph’s question is not about Jacob, but is a theodicy question, and ultimately a psychology question, we can better appreciate the emotional reactions of the Talmudic sages to various verses. All of them, in their own moments of crying out before the Torah, admit a tension between affirmation and doubt. Neither the skeptic nor the dogmatist cry. The sage cries because he experiences the betrayal of his idealism by the encounter with evil.
Rabbi Elazar (literally, Rabbi “God helps”) shifts the blame onto the brothers, while defending God. In answer to the question “Is my father [God] still alive?” he answers that evil is a human problem. It has no bearing on whether God lives. The brothers can’t respond because they know they are guilty; and Rabbi Elazar, so to say, cannot respond, because he knows that he—and we—are guilty. Rav Yosef, by contrast, weeps not at human error, but at the possibility of divine error. How can God allow people to die before their time?
The anguish of the sages meets the anguish of the brothers and serves as a reunion between two classes of estranged brothers: the heroes of the past on the one hand and the living commentators on the other, a text that derives from Sinai, on the one hand, and a text that unfolds in Babylon. Written Torah and Oral Torah meet in moments of interpretive intimacy. Just as Joseph saves his brothers from famine, the rabbis save the Written Torah from oblivion. The sages, with their Babylonian customs and Aramaic language look and sound as Jewish as Joseph. They are strange. Meanwhile, the Oral Torah poses a question to the Written Torah, “Is my father [God] alive?” Barred from a direct relationship with God, the sages had to improvise in Exile. The Written Torah is dumbfounded by the question.
While my rhetoric may seem extreme, let’s remember the Talmudic passage in which Moses appears in the back of Rabbi Akiva’s class room. Moses is confused by the apparent dominance of Rabbi Akiva. Moses, as the giver of the Written Torah, stands humbled before the rabbinic project, much like the brothers stand before Joseph. At the same time, Rabbi Akiva assures his students that their reasoning is grounded in “the law given to Moses at Sinai.” Think about the brothers, then, not just as two character types, but as two epochs. Each by itself fails to create a sense of tradition. The thinkers of the past can’t anticipate the innovation and disruption that endanger them; but the saviors of the present want and need to be gathered to their long-lost origins.
Vayigash describes the creation of a lineage as a drawing close between orientations: the provincial traditionalist in search of modernity and the avant-garde assimilationist in search of ancestry. The former is dumfounded by the pintele yid that is still alive and the latter by the pintele Gott that is still alive. In spite of so much horror, so much error, so much enmity, Joseph still lives. Jacob still lives. God still lives. Says the present to the past: Ha-od avi chai? Says the past to the present: Am Yisrael Chai.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
This powerful reframing of Joseph’s exclamation and the brothers’ dumbfoundedness, as the encounter between the written Torah and rabbinic Judaism, might be hinting at another reframing for the next stage: Joseph’s emotional encounter was soon followed by hundreds years of absence of G’d from the scene in Egypt until G’d heard the children of Israel’s collective cries and put in motion the events leading to Mt. Sinai. Perhaps the period of the Rabbis’ most emotional encounters hundreds of years ago can similarly be seen to have been followed by a progressively assimilationist and emotionally constricting Enlightenment. And now the confluence of the Anthropocene, AGI, hopes for off-world human existence, ..., may be raising a new collective knocking on G’d’s door, triggering the next unenslavement and a new revelatory era.
Two of my favorite points: "Written Torah and Oral Torah meet in moments of interpretive intimacy. Just as Joseph saves his brothers from famine, the rabbis save the Written Torah from oblivion. The sages, with their Babylonian customs and Aramaic language look and sound as Jewish as Joseph. They are strange." And this: "Think about the brothers, then, not just as two character types, but as two epochs. Each by itself fails to create a sense of tradition. The thinkers of the past can’t anticipate the innovation and disruption that endanger them; but the saviors of the present want and need to be gathered to their long-lost origins." These insights and so much else in your post are life-giving. Thank you for your work here.