We Have Never Been Normal
Reflections on Conflict, Competition, and Reconciliation
As [Joseph] sent his brothers off on their way, he told them, “Do not be quarrelsome on the way.” (Genesis 45:24)
Because they felt ashamed he feared that they might quarrel on the way about his having been sold, arguing one with another. One would say: “It was through you he was sold.” Another: “It was you who made slanderous statements about him and caused us to hate him.” (Rashi on Genesis 45:24)
Rabbi Elazar said: Joseph said to his brothers, “Do not become occupied in a matter of a halakha [law], lest you fall out on the way.” (Taanit 10b)
Joseph is reunited and seemingly reconciled with his long lost family in this week’s Torah reading, Vayigash (Genesis 44:18-47:27). He tests his brothers to see if they will treat their brother Benjamin as they once treated him, but the brothers seem to have changed. In an act of moral courage, Yehuda tells Joseph to let him take his brother Benjamin’s place and serve out Benjamin’s sentence for him. Yehuda’s act of “drawing near” (Vayigash Yehuda…) from which the parasha takes its name, compels Joseph to reveal his true identity to his brothers. Joseph is in tears. The brothers are dumbfounded.
S’forno compares Joseph sending his brothers back to return to Canaan to the moment at which, after wrestling all night with Jacob, the angel asks to be released. If the parallel holds—by way of the word (shalach=send)—Joseph is wounded by his brothers, but he’s also positively altered, and even fortified by the whole saga. Joseph is Jacob and the brothers are like the angel that has both blessed, renamed, and injured him. Joseph’s recuperation of his original name corresponds to Jacob becoming Israel. While Jacob gets a new name to signify his transformation (neologism), Joseph discovers a new life in his given name (paleonymy). The former strategy is that of innovation through invention, the latter of innovation through re-membrance.
Like Jacob, Joseph doesn’t win. He doesn’t defeat his brothers, just as Jacob doesn’t defeat the angel. But he ties. And this is a better and more sustainable for fraternity, where a zero-sum mentality is transformed into a collaborative one. Rather than fighting over a small pie (a father’s love, a scarce resource like a multi-colored coat), Joseph and his brothers expand the pie, by each contributing their unique selves. At least, that’s the ideal for how the people can take the enmity of Cain and Abel they’ve inherited and alchemize it into something generative. The reason Jacob and the angel come to a stalemate is that Jacob must unlearn the mindset ingrained in him since he was a twinned embryo that more for you means less for me. That tying can also be a blessing—that not all battles need winners and losers—is itself a breakthrough. The twelve tribes will only be held together if they can learn to seek “win-win” relationships.
S’forno’s parallel suggests that just as Jacob can’t remain in a suspended state, Joseph can’t either. Our wrestling matches with the deepest (and often most challenging) parts of who we are get a lot of play in our psyche, but life isn’t only, or even mainly, wrestling. It’s also and mostly getting up and walking day after day with only the traces of the wrestling match still creaking in our gait. Joseph sending the brothers away represents a new step not just on their journey, but on his.
S’forno’s parallel also highlights that Joseph is giving the brother’s permission to leave. Joseph is releasing his brothers. Of course the plain, externalized way to understand this is that Joseph is giving them legal permission to go to Canaan; he’s using his sovereign power to free them from jail. But the spiritual read is that Joseph is giving himself—and them—permission to move on, to leave the past in the past. Joseph’s forgiveness is their release; the Egyptian palace-prison in which they had found themselves was just theater, an elaborate illusion they and Joseph co-created with their “energy,” their dynamic. Now, as if by magic, with the simple words, “I am Joseph,” the stage and all its props has just vanished, as if it were a dream. This, too, is similar to what Jacob must have felt right after the angel departed.
But if everything is resolved, if the forgiveness and reconciliation have really worked, if the transformation has really occurred—why does Joseph tell the brothers not to quarrel or not to be agitated along the way of their return? The point the Torah is trying to make is that even (and perhaps especially) after moments of exaltation, sabotage, messiness, and challenge kick in. The Torah is realistic, not idealistic, about familial relations—we should aspire not to be like Cain and Abel, but to think we’re all going to sit around and sing Kumbaya all the time isn’t what family is about. Families quarrel. That’s what they do.
A world with no tension between brothers, where everyone shares one opinion, one worldview, one set of values, sounds like the dystopian scene of the Tower of Babel. If each person is created—singularly—in the divine image, conflict is inevitable. The only question is how we manage it. The Torah’s reconciliation of the brothers at the end of Bereishit is not the happy ending of fairytales but the anticipatory beginning of a fraught history of intra-Jewish conflict and “divided kingdoms.” The promise of healthy families, free from the violence and internal conflict that occupies so much of the book of Genesis turns on whether they can quarrel well and whether they can, in certain moments, set their quarrels aside.
Joseph’s command to his brothers not to quarrel suggests that he knows something remains unresolved or unresolvable. It also demonstrates his insight into the way that casual conversation “on the way,” as in an airport, or in a car, can sometimes turn unexpectedly vicious. States of transition heighten anxiety. Discourse is civil until it isn’t. It’s reasonable for the brothers to want to unpack what they’ve just witnessed, opine about it with all of their hottest takes, and deliberate about what they’re going to tell their father, but it’s also tragic—punditry, hearsay, rehearsing the past, these things will take them out of the magic of the moment they’ve just experienced and turn them back into their mundane, petty selves—at least this is what Joseph fears.
The Talmud imagines that Joseph is warning the brothers not to discuss matters of halacha, Jewish law, or more broadly, Jewish thought and theology—which is clearly anachronistic, but bears a deep truth. It points to the fact that passion and sincerity can just as easily break up a group as bring it together. It also suggests Jewish law as something so “hot button” that it can tear Jews apart even when it is the very thing that should bind them—us—together. Is this the Talmud’s version of “Don’t talk politics at Thanksgiving”? The seed of the liberal state, which seeks to make freedom of religion a personal rather than public affair so that we can all enjoy a neutralized public square free of favoritism, bloodshed, and holy war? Is “Don’t quarrel on the way” the equivalent of separation of Church and State? Perhaps if we are always on the way we should never argue, never fight.
But though, as spiritual seekers, we are always on the way, as worldly people we dwell and gather in places. The injunction not to quarrel along the way—as read by the Talmud—thus implies that when we are settled we can and must quarrel. After all, we can’t live in a state of liminality and anomie forever. Where there is halacha there is argument.
The Kedushat Levi has a strange and creative read of the Talmud’s read. He argues that the brothers were commanded by Jacob to study halacha each day. Jacob was concerned that because he didn’t know when the brothers would die (but assumed they might die young, like Joseph), they should always be studying halacha. (If he knew when they would die, he’d only have them spend a third of their days on it, but since he didn’t know he imposed on them a stringency.) Joseph is telling his brothers, then, that they don’t have to worry—they can take their time; they only need to spend one out of three days learning halacha.
The ingenious inversion in Kedushat Levi’s read is that Joseph isn’t telling the brothers not to quarrel, he’s telling them not to worry. The quarreling is a byproduct, in a sense, of the worry. The desperation for life is what drives the passion for study, as well as the neuroticism in study. Joseph is also counseling them not to absorb their father’s trauma—which they caused. Things can be different. Just because a bad thing happened to him doesn’t mean it’s the rule. Read even more deeply Joseph is telling the brothers not to over-extrapolate from his case. He’s a singularity, an exception. Don’t try to make patterns out of exceptions.
Reading the Kedushat Levi and Rashi together, psychologically, we can see that Joseph is telling the brothers not to displace their emotions and true thoughts in intellectual (be it political, legal, or theological) discussion. Just as Joseph has taken down his Egyptian mask to say, “I am Joseph,” the brothers must remove their rabbinic masks to say, “We are Joseph’s brothers.” While avoidance is an inevitable human phenomenon—we’re always talking and thinking indirectly about things—we can’t let halacha or any other topic become a screen for deeper, existential investigation. (For more on this, see my recent thread on Heidegger.) “Do not be quarrelsome along the way” means: do not get caught up in superficial quarrels that leave you off the hook from exploring their underlying cause. Or, make sure that when you do quarrel you are doing so with self-awareness, curiosity, and responsibility.
After the brothers and Joseph meet as adults, life doesn’t go back to normal. There is no returning to normal. It was never normal between the brothers to begin with, and so whatever “new normal” emerges after their encounter is really a “new abnormal.” In fact, life is arguably less normal for them now, because, though together again in person, they are in Egypt, on the precipice of a long period of terrible times ahead.
Adorno writes, “Only if what is can be changed is that which is not at all.” Only if the brothers and Joseph can truly change, can their origin story be negated; otherwise, their story is just the unfolding of one continuous chain of cause and effect. Teshuva, repentance, involves a leap into a new reality, a rupture, that mechanistic thinking cannot grasp or validate. The Torah hedges: Teshuva is indeed always possible, near at hand, as in the case of Yehuda’s transformation, but it is also profoundly elusive. If the brothers quarrel after their meeting with Joseph, if the Israelites worship a golden calf after witnessing the splitting of the sea, the Torah wants us to know that old habits die hard. We live with the revolutionary possibility of teshuva in one pocket and the realism of human nature in the other. We have never been normal.
The fact that Joseph and his brothers reconcile even as they have “unfinished business” is a charge to be cautiously optimistic about human progress. That the brothers will quarrel even after living through a beautiful face-to-face encounter means Enlightenment isn’t going to come just because we sincerely say “I’m sorry” and/or “I forgive you.” Vayigash—whose theme is proximity and intimacy—teaches that conflict is normal and inevitable. But consider the tremendous progress that occurs in the span of one book—from Cain killing Abel and the brothers selling Joseph into slavery to a brief moment of collective ingathering. May we know such moments of ingathering in our own lives, and may we find occasions to enjoy the diverse company of others with whom we would quarrel—if only on the way.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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