Parshah Commentary

This week’s Torah portion, Vayechi, which concludes the Book of Breishit, begins with the deathbed blessings and admonishments that Jacob offers his children, then describes Jacob’s funeral, and ends with the death of his son Joseph. Though the parshah deals intimately with death, it finishes on a high note: Joseph lives to see his great-great-grandchildren, and by the end of the tale, the Israelites dwell securely in the land of Egypt. It seems as though the strife of the past has been forgotten. When Joseph’s brothers approach him after Jacob’s death, worried that their father’s passing means their brother will now take revenge on them for having sold him into servitude, Joseph placidly responds, “Although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people.”

As readers, though, we know that the appearance of serenity is illusory. The conditions that will lead to hundreds of years of brutal slavery are already in motion, and before long Joseph’s optimism will come to seem hopelessly naive. In fact, it was Joseph himself who used famine to centralize the Egyptian regime’s power—the same power that will soon be wielded against the Israelites. Other forces are also at work: In the background looms God’s long-ago promise to Abraham that his descendants “shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years.”

The rabbinic tradition heightens the sense that the Israelites are caught up in forces—historical, theological, metaphysical—far beyond their control. The Zohar claims that though Joseph has forgiven his brothers for selling him into slavery, God hasn’t, and the Jewish people will be punished more than a thousand years later with the violent martyrdom of ten great sages by Roman officials—one for each of Joseph’s traitorous brothers. Another midrash states that God also hasn’t forgiven Jacob’s theft of Esau’s birthright, and that the punishment for this offense will be deferred until the evil Haman of the Purim story carries it out generations later. Another midrash, based on linguistic associations with other biblical verses, understands the second sentence of Breishit (“the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep”) as foreshadowing Jewish oppression suffered under Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome—as if persecution itself were woven into the fabric of creation. Marx could have been citing the rabbis when he declared that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

I’ve been thinking about these texts since I returned to working as a community organizer six months ago. Even if I don’t accept the particular theological premises of these midrashim—divine punishment visited upon each generation for its ancestors’ sins, or a God who closely watches the unfolding of historical processes—the sense of being at the mercy of vast forces set in motion long ago resonates. How do we fight for affordable housing against the cumulative weight of ecological devastation, decades of racist and discriminatory housing policies, and unrestrained corporate power? How do we fight for immigrant rights in the face of a militarized federal government, rampant xenophobia, and armed ICE officers raiding at will?

A few months ago, I stumbled across Jeremy Brecher’s Banded Together, which documents the history of the little-known Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP), a local coalition of faith communities, unions, and community organizations founded in Connecticut in the late 1980s in response to the neoliberal economic policies that were tearing apart the area’s industrial infrastructure. The book was alternately inspiring, humbling, and devastating. NVP’s many victories—winning collective ownership of factories, building worker-owned cooperatives and tenant-owned affordable housing, forging a durable coalition across different groups—pushed me to rethink my assumptions about what sort of victories might be possible. But there’s also something melancholic about looking back on these historic wins: Not only did unrelenting capitalist competition wipe out many of the economically democratic organizations that NVP built, but the very conditions that allowed the group to succeed in the first place—including high union density and strong religious institutions—no longer exist across much of the US.

Brecher himself notes this tragic dimension, describing the book as the record of “a road not taken.” And yet he still argues for the story’s enduring relevance: “People everywhere are threatened by forces they do not control and have to decide whether to accept or resist them. People everywhere have to decide whether to pursue their interests alone or band together with others around mutual concerns,” he writes. “The tragedy of defeat by heartless forces is universal, but so is the struggle to make ‘a better place to live’ in the face of those forces.” Over the past months, these words have given me strength again and again. They remind me that we fight for our communities not because we’re guaranteed victory over oppressive forces but simply because our communities are worth fighting for. We fight because we know that to surrender in advance the possibility of a better future is to foreclose it forever.

In a midrash on next week’s parshah, the Rabbis imagine God instructing Moses to tell the Israelites that not only will God be with them in this oppression, but God will also be with them in future times of oppression. “Their current suffering is enough,” Moses responds, and God agrees that Moses should only tell the Israelites that God is with them now. The plain meaning of the midrash is that Moses is worried that if the Israelites learn that their upcoming redemption will be followed by another round of servitude, they’ll lose heart. But perhaps Moses is offering a deeper message: It doesn’t matter whether, one day, the Israelites’ liberation from Egypt will be rolled back by some future defeat. What matters is that they’re suffering now—and so now is when the fight must be waged. For better or worse, we have no divine voice promising us the inevitable defeat of our foes or the far-off triumph of our cause. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton writes, “However desolate the future may prove, it might always have been different.”

Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.