Forgotten in the Dark

This week's Torah portion, Vayeshev, features the story of Joseph, whose ability to correctly interpret the dreams of those around helps him gain tremendous power, with a few spectacular falls from grace along the way. Joseph's story spans more than one parsha, and this week, the Torah cuts the story short on an emotional cliffhanger, with Joseph left alone and forgotten in a dark cell.

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This week, my wife and I drove just over a thousand miles, to Chattanooga, TN, where we’re holed up for the next two weeks, spending time with my family, whom we haven’t seen since the pandemic first hit.

Their house overlooks the Tennessee River Valley, with a long, south-facing deck that runs the length of the house, providing dramatic views of the morning sunrise, especially in the winter when it slowly creeps up over the mountain ridgelines across the river.

This morning, as I’m writing this, the sky is pink, gold, and red, a thousand hues of warm color filling the air as the sun begins its daily journey across the sky. It’s the type of sight that leads people, as Abraham Joshua Heschel might have said, to feel a deep sense of awe at the natural beauty of our world, of radical amazement that a world this beautiful could ever be created, and of wonder at the power of whatever force created this sunrise.

Power is a funny thing. It’s hard to gain, and easy to lose, in a heartbeat even, something this week’s Torah portion teaches us first hand, with the experience of Joseph, whose power comes from his ability to absorb and interpret the world around him, and whose downfall comes at the hands of those who resent Joseph and fear the power his interpretations of the dream world have on others.

Joseph’s many rises and falls through the remainder Genesis provide a wealth of material to examine, too much for a single podcast episode, but it’s the final line of the entire parsha that really sticks with me.

Genesis 40, Verse 37

Yet the chief cupbearer did not think of Joseph; he forgot him.

Joseph, up to this point, has been quite memorable, walking around in his amazing technicolor coat. His dream interpretations quickly become legendary in his community, and his brothers disliked him so much they flung him into a pit and sold him into slavery.

In Egypt, his master sees that everything Joseph does is blessed by G-d, and quickly makes Joseph his personal assistant, only to later throw Joseph in prison after his wife accused Joseph of sexual assault when Joseph wouldn’t return her advances.

But even in prison, Joseph gathers power and prestige. The chief jailer put him in charge of all the other prisoners, and Joseph continues to correctly interprets the dreams of those around him, including members of the royal court, one of whom is impaled by Pharaoh, and one of whom, the chief cupbearer, is released, before promptly forgetting all about the nebbishy Israelite rotting in the dungeon who had correctly interpreted his dream.

Next week we’ll see Joseph’s triumphant return, his ascension on the hero’s journey that, in context, makes this week Joseph’s somewhat rough growth period, the necessary period of stumbling before he rise the the heights of true greatness and lasting power.

But that’s next week. This week, we leave Joseph in a small dark cell, alone.

Chizkuni says, “This verse also informs us that the chief butler subsequently forgot Joseph completely, he erased the incident from his heart. The Torah indicates that once one has decided not to remember something or somebody such a memory can be blocked out completely. Unless the chief butler had made a conscious effort to blot Joseph from his mind he would have remembered the incident from time to time. Perhaps the Torah wrote, he forgot him, in order to hint that this was a deliberate act of forgetting.”

Traditionally, the rabbis use Joseph’s plight as a case example of why righteous people place their faith not in in other humans, but only in G-d.

Rashi comments on this verse that, “Because Joseph had placed his trust in [the cupbearer] that he should remember him he was doomed to remain in prison for two years. So it is said, ‘Happy is the man who maketh the Lord his trust and turneth not to the arrogant’ — meaning do not trust in the Egyptians who are called arrogant.

I read an interview earlier this week with the director of a regional bank in the United States. The article was about the widespread fraud associated with the Paycheck Protection Program, a COVID-19 relief program designed to help support small and struggling businesses maintain their payroll and keep the lights on through the pandemic, but which too often supported large corporations with few employees, and more than enough resources to strategically weather the meltdown we’ve all been experiencing.

In the article, the bank executive commented that while a program of this size, moving as quickly as it did, with purposefully low barriers to participation, was bound to attract more than its fair share of grifters, he and his team were particularly surprised to see the blatant tactics scammers were using, falsifying reports, threatening to have report the bank to Congress unless their loans were approved, and even following up weeks later to taunt the bank after being approved somewhere else.

All told, the bank executive said, seriously challenged his faith in humanity, which, if we follow the rabbis advise this week, isn’t where we should be placing our faith at all, which to me, is a losing proposition for making the world a better place, and at odds with that eternal Jewish mantra of tikkun olam—our obligation not to sit by and put our faith in G-d, but to actively place our faith in our neighbors, by working alongside them to correct injustice where we see it, with faith that our efforts will be seen by others and, hopefully, eventually, emulated, at least to some degree.

Joseph spent two more years in his cell after the cupbearer, in his arrogance at regaining his freedom, his privileged position, and his social status, forgot Joseph. It was his insistence that the cupbearer would soon be exonerated that helped the cupbearer survive prison, but no one is left to help Joseph survive by himself, and it’s easy to imagine Joseph losing faith in humanity through his final two years in prison.

Yet, with the benefit of being able to flip a few pages forward, we know that Joseph not only maintains his faith in the potential of people to work together and solve massive problems, creating a better world along the way, he actively leads the charge in Egypt, collecting grain and rationing it out for over a decade, so that everyone can live through a multi-year famine that Joseph alone can see coming.

But again, that’s next week, and the week after. This week, we’ve just got lonely Joseph, who doesn’t know what’s coming next, and at this point, doesn’t have any particular reason to keep his faith in others, much less G-d.

Traveling across the United States this week certainly tested my faith in humanity. I saw countless people not wearing masks, going about their daily business, drivers were overly aggressive on the interstate as police focus less on ticketing speeders and more on supporting other emergency response teams, one driver in Pennsylvania actually tried to run us off the road as we drove through the mountains.

So this week, I feel a lot like Joseph, sitting in a cell wondering when the people he helped will remember him, and his help, and come to repay the favor. I’ll take my comfort in two facts. First, Joseph’s faith is ultimately repaid, and in a big way. Second, tonight is the first night of Chanukah 2020, and there’s never been a better year to bring a little more light into the world than 2020, and perhaps more than any other moment in this dumpster fire of a year, we need that light right now.

Eat a latke, then eat a donut. Then maybe another latke.

Happy Hanukah, and Shabbat shalom.