Originally delivered at Kehillath Israel in Brookline, Mass., on December 26, 1998. © 1998. All rights reserved.

It's Christmas time again—the time when Christians feel, in the words on one carol, "joyful and triumphant." And when Jews are never more aware of being outsiders in America. There is a loveliness about the season, holly and mistletoe, a stirring of religious hope in even the most cynical breast, that is all the more painful because Christmas is such a communal celebration, a red-letter day on the calendar of American civic religion. And this assumption that Christmas is for everyone, regardless of religious differences, is implicit in the ecumenical greeting of those Christians who are sensitive to Jewish feelings: "Happy holidays to all!" But these are not our holidays. When we use the term, we mean Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot—the crowded season of beginning again, in the fall. But most of all, we Jews feel like outsiders at this season of the year—we cannot partake of the Christmas feast—because we just do not share in the Christmas message. "God and sinner [are] reconciled," as another carol puts it, in "Christ the king." Humanity receives an extraordinary deliverance through no merit of its own, but through the grace of Jesus, who is born that he might die; and dies that sinners might live.

Nothing could be further from the Jewish truth. And yet, while Christians are singing of joy and triumph, the reconciliation of God and sinner, here we sit in shul reading parashat Vayigash. I'm not confident that the comparison brings us any credit. True enough, our parashah also tells the story of a reconciliation. But sinner is not reconciled with God; Joseph is reconciled with his brothers, who had sold him into slavery. And what is the consequence of this reconciliation? Not the extraordinary deliverance of humanity through grace, but merely Israel's going into exile and Joseph's rise to power. Let's be plain: parashat Vayigash tells the story of how Joseph saves the people Israel by trading his political services for the protection of the Egyptian state. And how does he do this? As our parashah says, by "gain[ing] possession of all the farm land of Egypt for Pharaoh" (47.20). Or, in other words, a Jewish minister secures the future of his own people by consolidating wealth and resources in the hands of a totalitarian government. This may be a familiar chapter in Jewish history; trading service for state protection may, as Benjamin Ginsberg argues in The Fatal Embrace (1993), be the lesson of Jewish politics; but in comparison with the message of Christmas, our parashah seems practical-minded, absorbed with policy questions, uninspired, tied to earth. It's hard to imagine a Christian wandering into our shul, reading our Torah portion, and sighing, "The Jews may not celebrate Christmas, but they have something of their own which is almost as good!"

Yet I am convinced that our parashah does contain a powerful message to counterpose to the message of Christmas. And there is much more to it than that. Why Genesis devotes thirteen of its last fourteen chapters to the story of Joseph—over twenty-five percent of the whole book—is revealed at last by our parashah. Finally, it justifies Joseph's reputation as a righteous man, a religious leader of our people, because it exhibits Joseph as a servant of God. And it does all this by answering, simply, straightforwardly, a question that has long bedeviled religious men and women, especially since the Holocaust. This is the question of tzaddik ve-ra lo: why do the righteous suffer?

When we turn to the text, though, we are not likely to find much that seems promising. Joseph has all sorts of characteristics that put in question whether he deserves his reputation for righteousness. For one thing, he is an assimilationist. When Pharaoh appoints him vizier—the equivalent of lord chancellor or prime minister—he promptly sets about to master the Egyptian language like a native; he takes a new Egyptian name; he marries an Egyptian girl. And not just any Egyptian girl. His bride is the daughter of the high priest of the sun god Ra (41.45). Her yiches, her family connections, are those of idolatry. Indeed, Joseph so thoroughly adopts Egyptian customs and manners that it might be asked whether his assimilation does not create the conditions of later slavery. You will remember how the book of Exodus opens, after all: the very fact that the Jews are flourishing and increasing is what arouses Egyptian resentment (Exod 1.9).

What is more, Joseph comes close to being a sorcerer. Pharaoh puts him in the same category with the other "magicians and wise men" of Egypt, because Joseph owes his success to the interpretation of dreams—a traditional method of sorcery. Later, in order to see whether his brothers will abandon young Benjamin as they had abandoned him years earlier to Midianite slavetraders, Joseph places a divination goblet in Benjamin's bag. When the brothers are hauled before him for theft of the goblet, he says, "Do you not know that a man like me practices divination?" (44.15). Joseph comes uncomfortably close to sorcery—an abomination associated with idolatry in Jewish law.

Now it is true that Joseph consistently gives God credit for his dream interpretations. And the Torah attests repeatedly that God is behind Joseph's success. At a crucial moment, moreover—in the episode with Potiphar's wife—he demonstrates his obedience by refusing to commit what he calls "a sin before God" (39.9). So perhaps Joseph is not blowing smoke when he describes himself as a God-fearing man (42.18). But really. Do these things—success owing to God, a one-time refusal to commit a sin before God—do these add up to righteousness? Remember that God never addresses Joseph directly. Consider the names that Joseph gives to his sons: Manasseh, meaning "God has made me forget completely my hardship"; and Ephraim, meaning "God has made me fertile in the land of my affliction" (41.51-2). God has made me: the phrase is repeated twice, as if for emphasis. Although he gives credit to God, and though this is quite touching in its humility, the phrase God made me hints at the reality: Joseph is the object of God's action. Instead of serving God, he receives from God.

At this point, then, the Joseph story seems far closer to the message of Christmas than to any theology which Judaism might counterpose to Christianity's theology of grace. After all, Joseph is the passive recipient of God's favor. He is joyful and triumphant. God's grace comes into his life at unexpected moments, delivering him from slavery and prison, and apparently without his having to do anything to merit the extraordinary deliverance. The relationship between God and Joseph is not reciprocal, but one-sided—favor on God's side, success on Joseph's. And in this light, the Christmas message would seem to be an improvement upon the Joseph story. In the Torah, God so loves Joseph that he gives him success. In the Christian Gospels, this love is broadened and universalized: God so loves the world that he gives, not worldly success, but the promise of eternal redemption.

But then—in a single speech—Joseph turns everything around. He proves why he is a righteous man, despite his tendencies to assimilation and sorcery. In two short sentences he answers the question why the righteous suffer. And though he might seem to speak the language of Christmas, invoking "extraordinary deliverance," Joseph does not wait passively and expectantly for this miracle of God's grace; he commits himself to a reciprocal relationship to God, which demands positive action in return.

You remember the story. When his brothers are hauled back to the Egyptian court, after the divination goblet has been discovered in Benjamin's bag, they fear the worst. And how his emotions must have been at war within Joseph! An innocent comes face to face with those who caused his suffering. But those who caused his suffering are also his brothers, whom he has not seen in thirteen years. Anger and the desire for revenge collide with love and the desire for reconciliation. Overcome, Joseph reveals who he is. His brothers are shocked and dismayed. But Joseph speaks to them kindly: "[D]o not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me here," he tells them; "it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you. . . . God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance" (45.5, 7).

In two short sentences, Joseph answers the question why the righteous suffer. He does not blame nor accuse his brothers, as he would have been fully justified in doing. He does not take revenge, not even by verbally abusing those who had betrayed him. Instead, Joseph quietly attributes his experience to the miraculous agency of God. "God sent me here"—that very sending was an "extraordinary deliverance." Now you and I talk this way all the time without really thinking about what we are saying. When two of us meet and fall in love, we feel as if God has brought us together. When a tragedy occurs, we say that there must be a reason—meaning that God must have a reason. In a moving little story that I read recently in the New York Times, a thirtysomething woman who had been much bruised by romantic disappointment told of finally meeting a man who wanted a home, family, commitment. After only a few dates, after offering a tantalizing glimpse of romantic fulfillment, the man suddenly died. And yet the thirtysomething did not feel crushed by yet another romantic disappointment. "[H]e was given to me," she wrote, "to show me the kind of life in which I'd stopped believing." Although the author studiously avoids the name of God, who else could have "given" this man to her? Who else?—especially since the reason was to renew her faith. God’s hand is visible in the writing of our lives. Our very desire to make sense of experience in this way testifies to a belief in him, in his extraordinary deliverances.

We talk this way a lot, but what do we really mean by it? If we mean something like unmerited Christian grace—the miracle of Jesus, who was born only yesterday to die for man’s sins—then we are giving voice to a lovely faith. I am very far from feeling any contempt for Christianity. But if we believe in the sufficiency of grace we are also confessing ourselves to be powerless to do anything to improve our lives, to repair the world which has been damaged by disappointment and lack of commitment. The doctrine of grace reduces us to pawns, destroying our humanity. It eliminates our autonomy, our freedom to do otherwise than to accept God’s grace when it arrives, and to trust in quiet faith until then. Despite the words from the Zohar that we just recited before the open ark, we are not "the servants of the Holy One, blessed be He" (Vayakhel 369a); we are the mere objects of his favor. We are mere things. Our will is an illusion; it means just nothing. The secret of the religious life is to wait patiently and to accept gratefully.

This is nothing at all like what Joseph is saying. He is talking about trust and acceptance, but not in any passive sense. Nor is this the acceptance which is popularly said to be the last stage of grief. Joseph actively embraces his suffering. Instead of blaming his brothers, instead of focusing upon how others have treated him, Joseph assumes responsibility for his own suffering by reinterpreting it as a response to God. And this reversal of ethical direction, this self-accusation, is the central insight of our parashah. It is the answer to the question of tzaddik ve-ra lo. In a word, Joseph surrenders his bitterness of recrimination, and trustingly accepts what he is and what he has become.

This idea of surrender is not usually stressed in thinking about the Jewishly engaged life. But the reason it is not is that too often it implies passivity, quietism, waiting. And by contrast Judaism encourages an active, even public engagement with life, a willing embrace of one’s responsibility. But if you were asked to sum up Judaism while standing on one foot, you could do worse than to say that the message of Judaism is contained in those two words: active surrender.

Etty Hillesum

Perhaps no writer has stated this principle more movingly than the Holocaust diarist Etty Hillesum. A 28-year-old assimilated Jew in Amsterdam who chose voluntarily to be transported to Westerbork in order to ease the suffering of her fellow Jews, Hillesum died in Auschwitz. Her diary has become a classic of modern Jewish religious literature. On July 7, 1942, four days after she had recorded her "certainty" that the Germans "are after our total destruction" and just three short weeks before she was voluntarily transported to Westerbork (she died at Auschwitz in November 1943), Hillesum wrote:

Offering what little assistance I can wherever it has pleased God to place me. These words state the theme of our parashah. Joseph foregoes blame and accusation, surrendering to God instead. How? By his very willingness to offer assistance to his people in Egypt. "[I]t was to save life that God sent me ahead of you," he tells his brothers. In these words Joseph is not affirming a naive predestination. He is not saying that he and his brothers were unwitting pawns in the hands of God. Although there is a providential design in human experience—although God has a plan—this design, this plan, is completed by the participation of man. Surrender does not mean the passive acceptance of God’s grace. It does not imply a one-sided relationship in which God is the giver and man the grateful but unworthy recipient. What Joseph is showing is that surrender to God, the acceptance of his grace, takes on meaning only in the context of a fully reciprocal relationship between God and Israel.

And this is not only the theme of our parashah. It is also the theme—the central message—of the book of Genesis. Genesis establishes the covenantal relationship between God and Israel, and Joseph is a tzaddik, a religious leader of his people, because he names the secret for conducting this relationship in exile, in the absence of direct instruction from God. Perhaps it is not very surprising that Joseph’s secret is also the answer to why the innocent suffer. For the suffering of the innocent is a cry from God. By responding to it, we renew our ancient covenant with him. Only someone like Joseph, only someone who has suffered, will understand this answer. The suffering of the innocent leads to the faith that God has sent me ahead of you to relieve suffering. The extraordinary deliverance I await is the extraordinary deliverance I bring about—by offering what little assistance I can wherever it has pleased God to place me.

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