Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Vayeshev, contains some of the Torah’s most morally fraught and emotionally wrenching narratives: Joseph’s brothers, in response to the favoritism bestowed upon him by their father Jacob and the arrogance with which Joseph treats them, sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt, where he is falsely accused of sexual assault and incarcerated in Pharoah’s prison. But the parshah’s first verse, from which its name is taken, gives no indication of the tumult to come, offering only a small piece of geographic exposition: “Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had sojourned, the land of Canaan.” The medieval commentator Rashi, noting the disjunction between the ease conveyed by this opening sentence and the chaos in store for Jacob’s family, reads this statement not as a neutral description, but rather as aspirational. The phrase “Jacob was settled,” Rashi suggests, actually signifies Jacob’s wish to be at ease, to live without upheaval or anxiety. As contemporary commentator Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg paraphrases Rashi, “Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquillity after all his troubles.”

It is easy to empathize with this desire: Who doesn’t want to find freedom from turmoil? But rather than validating Jacob’s yearning, Rashi tells us that God rebukes him for it, citing a classical midrash to insist that virtuous people have no right to expect ease in this world. The midrash expresses this rebuke in stark terms: “When the righteous seek to live in tranquility, Satan comes and testifies against them.” Righteousness, in other words, precludes attempts to escape society’s turbulence, and instead demands an engagement with the world in all its chaos and misery. In a sermon delivered in 1939 in the Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) cited Rashi’s interpretation of this verse to speak to the obligation of moral conduct that is incumbent upon us even in the face of grave adversity. Righteous people, he explains, may want to choose comfort and complacency, “accustoming themselves to the state of exile we are in, and to its suffering.” God, however, insists that “the righteous must do more than care for their own survival. They must work to increase compassion.” A moral obligation to face the pain of others, and to work toward easing it, is more important than fulfilling a desire to live in tranquility.

Avoiding anxiety in the midst of a broken world can take many forms, the most obvious of which may be the cultivation of complacent ignorance toward the problems others face. But the first Izhbitzer Rebbe—Mordechai Leiner, a 19th-century mystical commentator—also sees this passage as a corrective for those maintaining an inverse form of complacency: anyone who wants to respond to the world, but insists on doing so only from a place of fanatical purity and self-certainty. The verse “Jacob wanted to dwell in peace,” the Izhbitzer Rebbe asserts, refers to “the particular kind of peace that occurs when a person acts in a way removed from all doubt.” This teaching urges us to guard against the uncritical conviction that is one of the common, and dangerous, pitfalls of religious belief, and which also plagues forms of secular faith. The Izhbitzer Rebbe explains that it is impossible to jettison doubt entirely or to act in a way that one can be certain is absolutely morally upright. Nevertheless, he insists that, even though we can never have total confidence in the righteousness of our behavior, “God desires human actions, and in this world one must act with love, which means to act in ways that are not in the highest state of purity.”

When read through these commentaries, the seemingly mundane verse with which our parshah opens becomes a guide to engaging with a suffering world. We can neither ignore the misery around us in an attempt to protect our own peace, nor can we rush to respond to that misery while eschewing any doubts about the absolute rightness of our actions. Instead, these interpretations demand that we challenge ourselves to behave with compassion even at the expense of our own tranquility, while embracing the anxiety that inevitably arises from attempting to act morally in a world fraught with ambivalence. In the midst of today’s narcissistic cultural and political life, which often tries to force us into either complicit complacency or self-certain righteousness, these commentaries demand something genuinely radical: that we deprioritize our own psychological comfort as we strive to alleviate the pain around us.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.