Download Vayeshev-5764

VAYESHEV 5764
Joseph is a troubling character. At the outset of parashat Vayeshev, we see him as a smart-aleck,
lording over his (older) brothers with his tales of his self-aggrandizing dreams. His father favors
him and treats him as the first-born (which he is, from Rachel, though not in terms of all of
Jacob’s sons). And ultimately all this does him in one day when the brothers have finally had
enough… We know where the story leads.
Yet as Joseph is taken to Egypt and sold as a slave to Potiphar, as he resists the advances of
Potiphar’s wife, as he is thrown in jail and forgotten, we are moved to identify with Joseph. He is
no longer the cock-sure teenager egging on his family, but a struggling youth, abused by his
siblings and unremembered in a foreign land.
The height of the story, and in many ways the symbol of Joseph’s purity, is his refusal to sleep
with the wife of his master Potiphar. And yet, perhaps because of lingering doubts about Joseph’s
character, or perhaps because he is a good-looking adolescent, the Rabbis of the Talmud question
what really went on between Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar. Their discussion comes in the context of a
question about the basis for the Rabbinic assumption that there are 39 avot melacha, archetypal
forms of labor, which are forbidden on Shabbat:
It was asked in the Beit Midrash: Where does the Mishnah’s teaching that there are 39 types of
forbidden work on Shabbat come from? Rabbi Hanina bar Hama said, “From the types of labors
done in the tabernacle.” Rabbi Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Elazar, “Thus was said by
Rabbi Shimon in the name of Rabbi Yose ben Lekunya: ‘From the number of times the word
‘work’ is mentioned in the Torah--39 times.’” Rav Yosef asked about the verse, “And [Joseph]
came to the house to do his work”--is it among the 39 mentions of work, or not? … He said,
“What troubles me is that there are two traditions of interpretation about this verse: one
understands that he was coming to the house to honestly do his work, and the other understands
that ‘his work’ really means adultery.” Teiku—the question stands. (Shabbat 49b, my paraphrase)
This is a fascinating discussion for a number of reasons. First of all, we only find this suspicion
about Joseph’s true intentions expressed here and one other place in the Babylonian Talmud. In
all other rabbinic treatments of the verse, no one is worried that Joseph may have had ulterior
motives in coming to work that day. Second, the statement that the 39 types of work are derived
from the 39 mentions of work (“melacha, melechet, melachto” in the original) is manufactured—
in fact there are 47 mentions of these words in the Torah! So not only are the Rabbis creating a
new understanding of the basis of the 39 types of labor, but they going out of their way to make
that understanding hinge on whether or not Joseph wanted to sleep with Mrs. P. Why?
In his essay “Toward a Jewish Sexual Ethics,” the 20th century Jewish philosopher Eliezer
Berkovits posits that the goal of a Jewish approach to sexuality is to personalize what can be the
most impersonal of encounters—sex can be simply about fulfilling the desires of the body, but it
can also be, and should be according to Rabbinic tradition, the expression of the deepest intimacy
between two people:
Because of the tremendous power of the sexual instinct, man falls into the thralldom of mighty
impersonal forces when he liberates himself from social taboos. The sex act is not so much an act
as a letting go. It is not man who acts; rather it is something that happens… through man. This
may be enjoyable for a while, but… in the long run it cannot but depersonalize man as a whole,
dehumanizing him far beyond the sexual aspect of his life… If one wishes to be human, one has
to commit one’s freedom to personalizing the impersonal within man’s bio-psychic reality… [The
sexual instinct] can be raised to the personal level of human existence as the natural outcome of
the personalization of the relationship between a man and a woman who encounter each other in
the completeness of their bio-psychic being.” (Berkovits, Essential Essays on Judaism, pp. 114,
120)
In the moment of sexual encounter, the person across from us can be merely an object (an It, to
use the Buberian typology), over whom we exercise power and who exists to satisfy our physical
passions; or that person can be fully a subject (a Thou), to whom we express our love and with
whom we experience ourselves, individually and collectively, as a Part of God’s creation.
Adopting this view, we can go back to the Rabbis’ question. What kind of “melacha,” work, was
Joseph intending to do that day? Joseph, a strapping young man, is alone in the house with his
master’s wife, and indeed he could submit to her if he so desired. Freud of course would say that,
certainly on a subconscious level, Joseph can’t help but want it. And maybe this is what the
Rabbis are getting at—how is it possible that Joseph was simply showing up to work? They are
acknowledging a psychological reality, which for them leads to halakhic implications: for
instance that a man should not be alone with a married woman.
Ultimately, as Berkovits points out in his essay, the worldview he espouses is not limited to
sexuality, but is really about our posture towards Creation in general: “The humanizing of the
impersonal does not in any way take away from the enjoyment of the sexual act. It does not
attempt to spiritualize it. It wants what it says, to humanize it, including also its full enjoyment
within the bio-psychic human reality. In fact, the enjoyment itself is part of the living realization
of Judaism… Such affirmation of earthly needs and vital impulses is characteristic of the whole
system of Jewish law.” (p. 114) On Shabbat, God’s Day, we do not fast, for instance, but instead
make the day holy through eating, resting our bodies, and—more than coincidentally—engaging
in relations with our spouse. This, according to Berkovits, is an example of Judaism taking the
potentially impersonal, dehumanized things of the body—food, rest, sex—and making them into
personal, humanized parts of our lives.
Thus if we expand our thinking for a moment and try to understand the Rabbis a little more
metaphorically, perhaps they are making less of a statement about sex than about “melacha,”
labor, of the type they are discussing in tractate Shabbat. It is not only people that we have the
potential to depersonalize and dehumanize. It is possible to depersonalize all of Creation, to have
no human consciousness of it. It is possible to spend all of our hours without investing ourselves
in our labors. We can show up to work every day for years, decades, with no enjoyment and not a
moment of humanity: automated, lifeless, dead. And thus the question the Rabbis are asking is
not whether Joseph had lewd thoughts about Mrs. Potiphar, but rather about what type of work he
was doing: Was his “melacha” that day, as a slave in Potiphar’s house, a melacha of purpose that
reflected his humanity, or was it something less, something passive? If the former, then we count
him among the forbidden melachot of Shabbat, since it is this kind of purposeful, creative human
work that the Torah forbids. If the latter, then we don’t.
Joseph was a slave, and yet he was free, as he himself says to Potiphar’s wife: “I am second only
to him in this house.” His condition was, perhaps, not so dissimilar to our own: we are free—and
in a fundamental way in which Joseph was not—yet we are still subject to laws and employers
and powers beyond our control. The Talmud does not answer the question of what type of labor
Joseph was doing, perhaps because the line is sometimes hard to discern, or perhaps because the
level of personalization we achieve in our human activity is ultimately something only we and
God really know. Yet the Talmud gives us an ideal, for our relations with the world and our
relations with people, and Shabbat reminds us of it every week: we are here to do the Lord’s
work, in the full manifestation of our potential as Creations in God’s image. Kein yehi ratzon—
make it so.
Shabbat shalom, v’chag urim sameach.