Vayigash: Doing More Than Just Dreaming, To Ensure Plenty and Not Famine

Our Torah portion is missing something. In fact, all four Torah portions that focus on Joseph and his story are all missing the same thing. A major character in the plot, no less. 

But first, I give you the quickest recap of the Joseph story EVER: Father favors him; brothers hate him; sell him into slavery; Joseph interprets dreams; predicts REALLY bad weather; Pharaoh's impressed; Joseph runs Egypt (basically); family hit hard by famine; Joseph saves the day; moves everyone to Egypt. Sound good? So who are players in this story? Joseph, Pharaoh, God, Jacob, the other brothers. What's missing?

I'll give you a clue. This is what Joseph says to his brothers when he finally reveals his identity: "Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me to this place; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you. It is now two years that there has been famine 

in the land, and there are still five years to come in which there shall be no yield from tilling. God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance" (Genesis, 45:5-7). Did you catch it? Did you see Joseph name the additional character who's in cahoots with him and with God to orchestrate this entire scenario? It's the very land itself. And indeed, throughout the Torah, the land is an ACTIVE player in the drama. In Leviticus, 18:28, the text says: "If you defile the land, it will spew (some translations even say 'vomit'!) you out, as it spewed out the nations that came before you." God and the earth are working together, in partnership, and you - we all - must recognize that the land is very much a participant in God's plan.

We read the story of Joseph, and we praise him for his dream-interpretation prowess, and then later for his ability to govern Egypt for Pharaoh, and keep the people fed during a devastating famine. But we fail to recognize how involved the land itself is in this story. Without the years of plenty, there would be nothing to store up, nothing to protect the people in the face of starvation. 

Right? If they'd only had seven years of pretty-decent-harvesting, there wouldn't be enough to squirrel away. And without the famine, we would have no story. Joseph's family wouldn't have had to come to him in desperation, utterly at the mercy of Egypt's grand vizier Tzafenat-Paneach (a.k.a. Joseph) (p.s. I really love his Egyptian alter-ego. More people should give their kids names like that...). The famine itself is ESSENTIAL to our story. The story of our people, the foundation of what it means to be Jewish, begins with us living in Egypt as slaves... and all that begins because there was a food shortage that forced our ancestors to move down to Egypt.

This weekend, at Ohev Shalom, is GreenFaith Shabbat. We are talking about the environment, we are learning about sustainability, and we are going to introduce a new Prayer for Our World into our service. Why? Because the planet is an active player in all our stories. We forget it all the time, and we instead focus on the human characters and maybe even on God. But we neglect the ground we walk on, and we surely neglect how crucial it is 'to ensure our survival on earth,' as Joseph put it. 

By working the land too hard, by pumping it full of chemicals, by fracking it for natural gas, and by ignoring the warning signals that it sends back to us; we are risking our survival on this earth. We keep assuming we're going to have years of plenty to cover us, should we happen to have a completely-accidental-totally-fluky-no-one-could-ever-have-predicted-it famine. But what if we CAN'T count on those years of plenty? Who will interpret dreams for us then, to help us discern what lies ahead? We don't have the luxury of a Joseph, to make plans for us and help avert natural disasters. We have to change course NOW, and start becoming the master of our own dreams and our own future. 

If you're in the area, please join us this weekend to learn how.