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.
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.