Vayigash—Diplomatic Protocol

Yehuda had learned the lessons the hard way.

He learned them in ways his forebears may not have, the painful nature of of their travails notwithstanding; it’s one of the major reasons the enduring messianic kingdom is ultimately established through him.

What did he do that they didn’t?  And where was he effective where they might not have been?

One irony of the Yehuda narrative is that unlike the ostensible mistakes of his ancestors, which usually involve midrashic amplifications of what textually seem like minor infractions but are exegetically revealed to be actions that carry heavy spiritual consequences, Yehuda’s warts are blatantly narrated and are otherwise apparently exegetically blunted.

Starting with the sale of Yosef, his primary role in deceiving Yaakov and temporary loss of prestige as a result, going through his become an eminent personage among Canaanites, his sons’ rather sordid deaths, and the entire episode with Tamar.

Meanwhile, he has forced himself into a corner by essentially pledging himself as a surety for the return of Binyamin, in part as a penance for the sale of Yosef, but in part because, as the enforcer of the code of silence regarding the sale, he hasn’t left himself with a lot of room to maneuver.

However, starting with his admission in Chapter 38 and now with his effective carrot-and-stick approach with Yosef, Yehuda—having made his own mistakes—avoids the ones his ancestors made and not only succeeds in his mission but also catalyzes the first tribal reconciliation.

What mistakes did his forebears make?

Often in the interests of peace, they may have been too diplomatic; too much carrot, not enough stick.

Avraham and Yitzchak are criticized by Chazal for giving away too much in their dealings with the Avimelechs and the Philistines, who are portrayed as taking a lot more than they gave, even as both Avraham and Yitzchak recognized the extractive if not rapacious nature of the populations they were negotiating with.

Yaakov himself goes a step further before he meets his brother for the first time.  He prepares on three tracks: prayer, militarism, and diplomacy.  In fact his approach exemplifies almost the ideal response, even to the point that he is almost as worried that he will be forced to kill others as much as he or his over ones might be killed.  Yet—while the material flattery detailed in Chapter 32 isn’t criticized—Yaakov’s self-reference as “your servant Yaakov” to Esav is viewed as a positive, if only because the diplomatic balance is tipped ab initio: Yaakov is presenting self-effacement before he can show strength.  

[One wonders whether Shimon and Levi’s ostensible”overreaction” after Dina’s rape and the surreptitious manner in which they subdue the entire populace—even given the ultimate justification for the action—is to preempt a possible overture that might be deemed too diplomatic, which might be borne out by the exchange with Yaakov at the end of the Chapter after Shechem is wiped out.]

Even Yaakov’s sending Yosef to look after his brothers in the middle of Chapter 37 after having himself referred to the hostilities between the brothers [a possible angle to interpret “shamar es hadavar”?] indicate a somewhat misplaced faith in diplomacy.

It might no be accidental that Yehuda learns his most crucial diplomatic lesson and where to draw lines from his erstwhile daughter-in-law Tamar, who has seduced him in response to his essentially rendering her an agunah despite the fact that his sons were at fault for their demise.

When Tamar forgoes the explicit naming-and-shaming even at the possible cost of her life using material evidence and coded language that only Yehuda could and would understands, she actually exemplifies the best of diplomatic traditions even more than a knee-jerk adherence to pre-Sinaitic notional of halbanah: knowing that both she has taken advantage of Yehuda’s blind spots and on the cusp of fulfilling a messianic mission, she invites him to now consent to the mission he’s been avoiding.  What she DOES manage to by not making it personal is keeping said mission under wraps, even from him, until this very moment.  Making it personal by embarrassing him might save her life but would cancel the mission for both of them, and somehow she’s seen enough to count on her triggering an epiphany of his part.

[In fact—at the risk of violating a certain level of moreh halacha lifnei rabbanim—anyone who uses Tamar as the paradigmatic example of avoiding embarrassing someone even at the cost of ones own life—STOP IT.  There’s SO much more going on in the Yehuda-Tamar narrative; making the ostensible halbanah its sole locus and then generalizing it as a teachable moment for tinokos shel beis rabban ensures that understanding the maaseh never gets past that level.  It’s frankly….embarrassing.]

The sum total of all these lessons—his and his forebears—were not lost on Yehuda in crunch time.  And—like the texts that until now seems to scrutinize him more than the exegetes—this time, the textual narrative in Chapter 44 is very diplomatic/carrot, but the subtexts are very….stick.  [“I’ll kill you and your master.”]

And while the instant effect looks perplexing—Yehuda didn’t know who he was talking to—the ultimate effect almost mirrors the midi kneged mida in reverse that Yehuda experienced when Tamar subtly called him out and he admitted that she had the mission correct: this time, Yosef assuages Yehuda, telling him that there was a mission to complete that he was unaware of, but that this time he did everything he was supposed to.

And finally, Yosef, by revealing himself and letting his brothers know that this stage of the mission has been completed and even giving them credit for helping bring about the completion—also tells them that, in way, this was all pre-game: the real contest hasn’t even begun yet.

Which is why it’s Yehuda who gets sent to Goshen to lay the groundwork.

Vayigash: States of Emergency

All theocentric systems of thought have taken strong exception to any political philosophies that espouse strict command economies and major social engineering as prominent features of their programs. Witness, in the past century, major religions’ unbending opposition to Marxism. To be sure, the coummunist regimes’ avowed atheism played a major part; but even if they had been less militant in their godlessness, the opposition would have been nearly as unyielding.

Yet this weeks parsha, continuing from last weeks, details how Yosef, by now the almost sole source of law in Egypt (Pharaoh seemingly playing a W. role to Yosef’s Cheney), institutes an absolutely draconian command economy whereby first the money, then "moveables", and then the real estate of the Egyptian population come under the exclusive ownership of the Pharaonic regime. (All Egyptians were circumsized; all were reduced to some version of vassalage--while their offer to become actual slaves was not effected, there was a wholesale population transfer to diminish any feeling of land ownership.) Ostensibly, as I mentioned last week, this attempt to force equality on the entire population was intended to make life easier for Bnei Yisrael when these laws were to become applicable only to them. Alas.)

From the text, we can’t directly ascertain the Torah’s attitude toward this political system. In fact, it stands to reason that, in theory, the Torah might not find Yosef’s dictatorship particularly problematic, especially as it strongly favors monarchical governments, and furthermore, holds up unquestioning obeisance to a monarch as a paradigm of Avodas Hashem.

Moreover, there are other parshiyot that better lend themselves to discussions of whether Judaism favors a free market over a command economy (Behar and Bechukosai, especially) and the perils of social engineering (the story of Migdal Bavel in Noach).

I offer that, similar to what I said last week about taking advantage of ethno-political tensions for Jewish benefit, that sometimes what may not be the “best” solution may be the only solution. At the time of Yosef’s ascendance, the world was about to be plunged into its greatest economic and agricultural crisis. The Torah presents all of Yosef’s executive orders as specific responses to the increasing state of emergency.

Moreover, the fact that the Torah details how Yosef’s policy only became more incrementally draconian as the situation got worse, indicating that the socio-economic systems being implemented were far from the optimum.

My interpretation is that, on occasion, there might be something even less praiseworthy than exploiting socio-political tension. It’s the introduction of a “state of emergency” and its attendant decrees in cases where there may be none.

Anyone who has been the beneficiary of a Orthodox Torah education and is familiar with its interaction with the contemporary world at large is all too familiar with the incessant kol korei from pulpits and classrooms about the various spiritual state[s] of emergency that exist[s]. “Things have never been worse.” One wonders whether to apply Rambam’s dictum regarding the mitzvah d’oraisa of prayer applying only in crisis, but since everyday life is ipso facto a crisis, the mitzvah applies daily; or, whether one applies Reb Nachman Breslover’s adage that if you say “things can’t get any worse”, they do. (Murphy had nothing on Reb Nachman.) Alan Dershowitz’ "Tsures Theory of Jewish Survival”—that Judaism can only thrive in perpetual crisis, and that it finds itself in a worse crisis when there is less of a crisis, such as in contemporary Ameriocan society—further illustrates this dilemma.

I am not going to dispute the degree of crisis that does or does not exist ona hashkafic level. There is certainly enough of a crisis on a purely existential level (although whether that is actually any worse now than previously is also arguable). I will instead provide a few examples of why using a Crisis Hashkafa as an educational tool, if not a paradigm, can ultimately be destructive. One is Biblical, the other is more current.

The Gemara in Chelek relates how King Hezekiah instituted possibly the most compulsory system of education in Jewish, if not all recorded, history: he stuck a sword in the doorway of the beis medrash, saying “Anyone who doesn’t learn Torah will be run through with the sword.” The results, in his day, were immediately beneficial: everybody—including and especially children—knew halacha backwards and forwards. However, when his son Menashe ascended to the throne twelve years later, thirty-three years of the most widespread debauchery and bloodshed yet in Jewish history commenced. One can discern a correlation between the two when one remembers that Chizkiyahu’s policy was in response to an immediate and grave crisis: the imminent Assyrian invasion. Whether the policy was continued following Sancheriv’s defeat is not recorded; what is evident from the historical progression is that the continuation of a policy designed from crisis mode is unsustainable, and even its proper application can have unwanted effects later.

The second involves a speech I heard from prominent frum attorney Ban Brafman, famous for representing hip-hop artists and chareidim in legal difficulties. (I had to mention both; they both wear black hats.) He addressed the discomfiting phenomenon of very public criminal cases then pending against visibly fervently Orthodox Jews, some of whom he had been called to represent. Musing aloud at what their motivation might be, he offered that, in the “old country” where the authorities—both local and national—were usually openly anti-semitic, there existed a “sate of war” whereby a degree of subterfuge in dealings with the world outside the shtetl was condoned if not outright encouraged. Unfortunately, he offered, this attitude did not change when the setting changed, despite Rav Moshe Feinstein’s explicit characterization of the US as a “malchus shel chesed”. The very public chillulei Hashem that have resulted do not have be elaborated further, the secular media’s ostensible anti-chareidi bias notwithstanding.

To paraphrase Reb Nachman, if you keep saying it’s an emergency, then you’ll get an emergency.