Joseph: Brat, Brother, Authoritarian, All Too Human

My teacher, Julius Lester, was appalled. "Joseph was not a brat," he stated.

It was the 1980's, and I had met Julius at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where (as a graduate student) I'd taken his course Blacks and Jews: A Study in Comparative Oppressions. 

But we were not in the classroom: we were at the synagogue where I taught, and he sometimes led services, and we were in the middle of the Torah discussion--sometime about this time of year. The Torah portion was part of the Joseph saga.

I never found out why Julius was so outraged at my statement about Joseph. Was it pure piety? Joseph was a man who could resist seduction by Potiphar's wife, who could interpret dreams and give all the credit for the interpretation to God. He could rise from prison to the palace, save the land of Egypt from starvation, rescue his family, and forgive them for having sold him into slavery. How could a man like that be less than a saint (or as we would say, a tzaddik)?

I don't know if that's why Julius was shocked at me. But here's why I thought Joseph was a brat.

The obnoxious little brother

Joseph was his father Jacob's favorite son--and he knew it.

 

Joseph's mother, Rachel, was the woman his father fell in love with and worked seven years to marry. The other women his father married were an afterthought. His father gave him the coat of many colors, a sign that Joseph was his designated heir.  

 

Then Joseph had two dreams that both signified he would someday rule over his whole family. Did he keep his dreams to himself? No. Did he tell his father privately? No. He told his whole family. How did he imagine his brothers were going to react?

 

The brat in power

Joseph seems to have had a blind spot for other people's emotions. Only if they had power over his life did he seem to care about them.  

 

* He refused to sleep with Potiphar's wife because of the loyalty he owed his master, not for any other stated reason. 

 

* He sucked up to Pharaoh's cupbearer in the prison to try to get himself out of jail, but once he was appointed to high office by Pharaoh, the cupbearer is never mentioned again. 

 

* True, he kept the people of Egypt from starvation, but the price they paid was turning over all their land and becoming serfs to Pharaoh. Can you say "authoritarian personality"?

 

A different way of understanding Joseph

Just this week, however, I learned a different way of looking at Joseph, one that makes me feel more sympathetic to him. (I give all the credit to participants in Rabbi Ruti Regan's #ParshaChat on Twitter.)

What if, instead of feeling superior as a child, Joseph just felt singled out?

It could not have been easy, being the youngest brother (because his mother had not yet given birth to Benjamin), and the half-brother of all these grown men, and being put on a pedestal by his father. Even if he sensed he had some kind of destiny awaiting him, he could not ignore the way it made his brothers hate him, right there, right then.

What if telling his dreams was not oblivious, not a power play, but a plea for understanding? 

It's not just Dad who thinks I'm special, he might be saying. It's not just me putting on airs. Look, there's a sign from God that I have a role to play. Can you please stop blaming me now?

But they can't. They throw him into a pit. Then, they sell him as a slave.

What Joseph learns, and what he never grasps

If this interpretation is right, it would explain why, in Egypt, Joseph takes care to attribute his dream-interpretations to God and not to himself. Raising yourself in other people's eyes is a dangerous business!

If this interpretation is correct, it would explain why Joseph takes an Egyptian name and an Egyptian wife and tries to forget the painful scenes with his family. He did everything he knew how to do to keep his father's love without incurring his brothers' hatred, and nothing worked. Now, as second to Pharaoh, he is competent and powerful.

If this interpretation holds water, it also contains new insights into why Joseph apparently torments his brothers when they come looking for food during a famine. Joseph may be testing them, to see if they've changed, but at the same time he is learning that he has changed, too. He has learned that other people have feelings too (especially Judah, who reveals his love for their father and his guilt for the way they treated Joseph in an eloquent speech). 

And he has learned there is an alternative to dominating or being dominated--and that is forgiveness.

Sadly, Joseph seems to have learned about forgiveness and love only in relation to his own family. He still wields power over the enslaved Egyptians in a way that foreshadows how the Egyptians will eventually exploit the enslaved Israelites. 

So, he is not entirely a brat, entirely a tzaddik, or entirely a reformed character who has learned from experience. Joseph is a complicated human being. That may be why, thousands of years later, we still read and reinterpret his story.