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Miketz 5785: Joseph, the Loner, the Rebel

12/28/2024

The eminent scholar and rabbi, Joseph Soloveitchik, once reimagined the creation story of humans as two competing philosophies of human existence. In the first version of the creation story, God creates male and female at the same time, together, symbolizing a human that is completed by social relationships and a world in which God fulfills our need to connect with the divine by allowing us to connect with one another. In the second creation story, the one that begins in the second chapter of Genesis, Adam is created alone, and God notices man's loneliness and remarks

לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ אֶעֱשֶׂהּ־לּוֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ׃
“It is not good for the Human to be alone; I will make a fitting counterpart for him.”

Soloveitchik posits that this version of the story is an endorsement of existentialist philosophy; the idea that God made human beings alone, and that loneliness drives humans to make meaning in the universe; to make connections. In other words, Adam is an archetype - a symbol. Just like the bald eagle is a symbol of American freedom and a light bulb is a symbol of a sudden burst of inspiration, Adam is a symbol, at least to Rabbi Soloveitchik, of loneliness, or perhaps of the understanding of our loneliness.

Going back hundreds of years, our rabbis also tried to assign archetypal qualities to our patriarchs. Abraham is an easy one. He is חסד - lovingkindness - and אהבה - love - because of his care for the three strangers walking through the desert, and because of his compassion upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Isaac is יראה and פחד - fear and obedience, because of the story of the Akeidah when Abraham nearly sacrifices him. And in rabbinic theology, much of our relationship with God - our motivation for following commandments and attempting to draw close with God - is navigating the balance between love and fear. Jacob is the archetype of Truth, mostly because a verse in micah says תִּתֵּן אֱמֶת לְיַעֲקֹב חֶסֶד לְאַבְרָהָם - grant truth to Jacob and lovingkindness to Abraham. But also because he wrestles with God. He doesn’t simply believe blindly, or pretend to believe. When confronted with the divine, he confronts God honestly, by wrestling.

This week’s parsha, of course, is about Joseph, who is not a patriarch. In fact, the Jewish people are descended predominantly from the tribe of Judah, who gets one shameful story in last week’s parsha and then becomes a footnote, while Joseph is the star in four parshas in a row. Judah is why we are called Jews, and all of us in this room who are not named Levi or Cohen or Katz are descended from him - or to be precise, perhaps also the tribe of Benjamin, which was at some point absorbed into the tribe of Judah.

Joseph doesn’t get a tribe, and he’s not counted as a patriarch, and the rabbis don’t give him a line in the Amidah either. And they also don’t give him an archetype either. But I think to me, Joseph is a symbol of being alone, even more so than Adam. Adam is created alone - but ultimately he becomes united with Eve; and in the Jewish marriage ceremony, they are the archetype of marriage - that every jewish bride and groom are symbolized as adam and eve in the sheva brachot of the marriage ceremony.

Joseph is alone because he singles himself out constantly. In the beginning of his story, he gets a special coat, unlike his brothers, and that sets him apart. Then he proceeds to tell them his dreams in which he is unique, alone, and special - setting himself even further apart and alone from them. This all results in him being cast into the pit. He goes alone to Egypt, where he is the only Hebrew in a land of Egyptians. And then, in this week’s parsha, when he has the opportunity to reunite with his brothers, he pretends to be different and foreign from them. He stands alone, again and again and again. He wants to be alone.

In Chapter 43 verse 24, and again in 29 and 30 he cries. First when he sees them alive for the first time, and next when he asks if his father is still alive and well. And Joseph goes to be by himself in another room, where he cries alone. The traditional commentators Rashi and Sforno disagree about why he’s crying in the first instance. Rashi thinks Joseph cries because they express regret for their crime of selling him in verse 22. Sforno thinks he cries because he, the grand vizier of all of Egypt, a powerful successful man, sees his brothers, dirty, hungry, and poor, begging for a handout, and feels sad that they suffer. The second time he cries, Rashi thinks that they have missed him and he is moved. Sforno, on the other hand, says he was thinking of the anguish his father and his brothers had experienced all these years.’
In other words, Rashi generally thinks Joseph is crying because he is primarily thinking of himself, whether he ought to forgive his brothers, whether they were thinking about him. Sforno is primarily consumed with how they felt, how they were doing. Rashi is believes Josephs sadness is motivated by his own situation. Sforno thinks Josephs sadness is motivated by the situation of others.

I think it's a good human question. Are you or I more moved by our own suffering, or the suffering of others? Are you more worried about how you are doing, or more concerned about how another person is doing? But more so than that, I find this scene and moment in the Bible deep on another level - Joseph wants to cry alone. Joseph is perpetually separating himself from others, and at this intense moment of reunion - perhaps the moment in his life to say ‘I’m one of you’ - the moment to stop being alone, he continues to pretend to be a stranger and goes off to cry alone. I guess maybe I disagree with both Rashi and Sforno then - he’s not focused on his pain. He’s not focused on their pain. Perhaps he simply feels torn about rejoining the pack. Jacob’s sons are many and they are often discussed as a unit - the twelve tribes of Israel. Joseph is the loner, the standout. Everyone else is dressed in standard issue nomadic shepherd garb. Joseph wears a striped robe, or perhaps if you like Andrew Lloyd Weber, a technicolor dreamcoat. He is individualistic to an offputting degree. His archetype, or perhaps his superpower, is aloofness.

A lesson here perhaps is in regards to some of the dominant messages our American culture produces for us, especially in TV commercials and teen dramas: that meaning is always found in a social gathering, that the cool kids are at the party or hanging out with all the other cool kids. But Joseph is this other, lesser discussed type in our culture. He’s James Dean, rebel; he’s John Muir, exploring the natural wonders of America alone. He’s Colin Kaepernack, doing the thing that gets him exiled from the NFL, then sparking a revolution of kneeling for the national anthem that eventually everybody emulates, just several years too early. He’s Gloria Steinem - speaking her truth about women’s rights without regard to how the majority will perceive it.

It’s not that Joseph is some social crusader like these other individuals I just mentioned. It’s just that Joseph embodies a core characteristic that these other folks also utilized, and that is the willingness to be alone - to even embrace aloneness as possibly beneficial or preferred. And I don’t think this characteristic is an either/or. I think it’s an oversimplification to describe ourselves as introverts or extroverts. Most people lean one way or another, but I think we mostly find ourselves in the middle. Sometimes I really want to hang out with loads of people, and other times I want to be on my own.

For ourselves, I think we as Jews practice this intentionally every day, three times a day. We pray one of our central prayers, the Amidah, individually, and then we pray it again together in song - or at least chunks of it along with the sheliach tzibbur, the prayer leader. God asks us to connect quietly, and alone. And then as if to say ‘maybe that doesn’t work for you’ we pray it together as a group. The Torah famously teaches in parshat terumah in the book of exodus

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם׃
And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.
And our rabbis teach that among them means that God is present wherever Jews gather in community. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov was like Joseph - a famously aloof Jewish leader. He invented a practice called hitboddedut - perhaps translated as self-alone-time, in which before he went to synagogue to pray in community, he spent 3 hours in the woods communing alone with God - with no script and no prayers.

There’s always a push and pull between competing desires to fit in and standout. Believe me, I’m raising two teenagers right now, I know this better than almost anyone. And I just wanted to give you some food for thought that sometimes it’s good to be alone, and sometimes the tendency to want to go solo is perhaps even lifted up in our tradition as a select and special path in the world, like Abraham’s lovingkindness and Isaac’s awe and fear. A lot of the time we wish we could be the coolest kid in the room, the life of the party. The lesson of Joseph is, perhaps, that sometimes the quiet walk in the forest all by yourself is better than Studio 54 in its heyday. Shabbat Shalom.

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Vayeshev 5785: The Healthcare Outrage

12/21/2024

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Pittsburgh is the home of the steelers , and US Steel , and Andy Warhol , and Mr Rogers and PPG , and Carnegie Mellon , and Wiz Khalifa , and UPMC.

Which one of those didn’t fit in the sentence?

(engages audience)

[The answer I had imagined is UPMC, although others are possible].

I bring up this thought experiment because Pittsburghers are fiercely proud of so many things about this city, including french fries on sandwiches and Mario Lemieux and August Wilson. Many Pittsburghers are also fiercely proud of being a Steel Town, and of being the city that makes stuff for the rest of America, with companies like US Steel and PPG. And in theory, we should also be proud of being the home of a large health care provider like UPMC. UPMC employs more than 92,000 people, making it the largest non-governmental employer in Western Pennsylvania. They do more than 600 organ transplants a year. UPMC hospitals deliver around 25,000 babies a year. So why did I know that many of you would find UPMC to be the odd duck out in this list of things we Pittsburghers are proud of?

Last week, the head of United Healthcare was murdered on a street in New York City by a man. Etched on the bullets he fired were the words Delay, Deny, Depose; those words are borrowed from a 2010 non fiction book, delay deny, defend, about the tactics of health insurance companies in trying to increase profits by denying claims for services. The same day Brian Thompson was killed, another health insurance company, Anthem, announced that they would pay only for anesthesia treatments for the length of time that a procedure or surgery is estimated to require; in other words, if your surgery runs long, either Anthem won’t pay the hospital to keep your anesthesia running, or in theory your doctors should just keep operating on you without anesthesia. Amid a public outcry, the decision was reversed a week later. However, the fact that health insurers get to decide whether or not you get anesthesia; whether or not to pick up the cost of lifesaving medicines like chemotherapy or instead decide that they would prefer another, cheaper treatment, is a fact of life in America. In this country, 100 million people hold some form of medical debt. Medical bills are among the top three reasons for personal bankruptcy in America. I imagine that almost everyone in this room has a scary story of a medical or hospital bill they were once presented with or a rejection letter for coverage they experienced.

Just two years ago our family had a brief but Kafka-esque experience with a specialized medical procedure for an implant that was initially priced at $42,000, but we were told there was a manufacturer's coupon that brought the price down to $17,000. This all occurred because our health insurance company denied that the procedure was essential. We appealed. They relented. But the sheer fact that such a massive bill is entirely up to the whims of some group of corporate managers and not simply a decision for doctors in the best interests of their patients is both maddening and scary.

Take a step back, though, and remember that what kicked off my entire screed against for-profit healthcare and its ills in America was a man being gunned down in the street. Murder is murder and it is wrong. However, I am following that sentence up with a sentence that starts ‘however’. That in itself is disturbing – that we have to take a moment to consider the context of a murder because it has mitigating circumstances.

There have been a myriad of memes, cartoons, and social media posts that have cut to the essence of our country’s sad ambivalence towards the death of a man who symbolizes an industry that is deeply disliked and vilified. One post noted that United Healthcare’s $10,000 reward for information leading to the killer was less than the Out of Pocket Maximum on one single health insurance policy. And some are painting the killer as a kind of vigilante folk hero.

There are two aspects to the killing of Brian Thompson – the first is internal - that this killing evokes complex feelings for me, and I imagine for each of you.

None of us would condone murder and yet we would all strongly react in the negative to the actions of the leader of an organization generating profits by causing people suffering and hardship. It is easy to be mad at a nameless, faceless corporation that has done harm to thousands of people - the Purdue Pharmas and the Monsantos and the Exxon/Mobils and the Phillip Morrises of the world. And if the proverbial head of an immoral company falls off his yacht and drowns, I suspect we each would feel different than if we heard an internationally acclaimed humanitarian or the winner of the nobel peace prize were to die. And that’s normal - it is normal to feel different about the death of someone morally questionable, or overtly evil, than someone we see as morally good. But it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good to me that I felt a brief moment of joy, of rebellious pride, in the death of another human, a husband and father, even if he and his company made choices every single day that caused suffering, financial ruin, and even death for thousands of Americans. He did bad things, but I don’t feel good in rejoicing momentarily in his downfall.

The second complex aspect is external - about how the Jewish tradition, the source of our collective moral compass - regards a complicated case such as this. The punishment of the wicked for wrongdoing is not in doubt. Psalm 94, which we recite every Wednesday, makes it clear:
“God of retribution, LORD, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts! How long shall the wicked, O LORD, how long shall the wicked exult.

Happy is the man whom You discipline, O LORD,
to give him tranquillity in times of misfortune,
until a pit be dug for the wicked.

Judgment shall again accord with justice
and all the upright shall rally to it. Who will take my part against evil men?
Who will stand up for me against wrongdoers?”
- Until a pit be dug for the wicked - I don’t think that’s a subtle line, or a soft line, about what the Jewish tradition thinks happens to those who are unjust or evil. The psalmist here is also treading a very thin line between saying ‘I’m not sorry that guy perished’ and the psalmist implying a much more active role in the demise of the evildoer. And I have to say, I’ve also often wondered why, when the rabbis had 150 choices of psalms to assign to each of the days of the week, they chose that we should say this one. Every. (pause). Wednesday.

We rabbis often promote the rabbinic tradition in teshuvah - repentance, change - is always possible. A favorite Talmudic story I use regularly is the story of Rebbe Meir and Beruria from Berachot 10a.
“There were these hooligans in Rabbi Meir’s neighborhood who caused him a great deal of anguish. Rabbi Meir prayed that they should die. Rabbi Meir’s wife, Berurya, said to him: What are you thinking? The Torah says “Let sins cease from the land” (Psalms 104:35), It does not say “let sinners cease from the land.”

Rather, pray for God to have mercy on them, that they should repent. Rabbi Meir saw that Berurya was correct and he prayed for God to have mercy on them, and they repented.”

But that tradition flies in the face of what I read in Psalm 94. And of course, it flies in the face of the God we Jews often have to defend ourselves to Christians about, the old testament God of wrath and retribution found in some of Numbers and all of Deuteronomy, as well as the prophetic books of Isaiah and Ezekial and Jeremiah and Micah and Amos. That God believed in individual punishment for individual sin and national punishment for national sin - that when a whole people errs, particularly the Israelites, that there would be a price to pay. On the small scale, when Aaron and Miriam speak ill of Moses’ wife Tzipporah, they are afflicted with a terrible head to toe skin infection. On the large scale, a national perversion of justice results in the destruction of the Temple and exile.
In Isaiah 5 we read first the warning, then the punishment:
For the vineyard of GOD of Hosts
Is the House of Israel,
And the seedlings he lovingly tended
Is the citizenry of Judah.
And [God] hoped for justice,
But behold, injustice;
For equity,
But behold, iniquity!

Three lines later we get this:

Assuredly,
My people will suffer exile
For not giving heed,
Its multitude victims of hunger
And its masses parched with thirst.

In other words, cruelty and injustice will be met by consequences. I will note, importantly, that those consequences will be meted out by God and not by vigilante justice. But I will also note that in the mindset of the prophets, only Israel and Israelites had free will; all other nations could become tools of our God in our national punishment. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans are understood to have done violence and destruction by Gods hand because of our sins.

Our haftarah for this week happens to include my favorite prophet, Amos. He was also one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jrs favorite prophets too. King like to use Amos’ line from chapter 5 verse 22 - that justice should roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. In hebrew the verse is Yigal k’mayim tzedek, mishpat k’nachal eitan, and thats why we named our eldest child Yigal. But in the selection we read today, the text begins at chapter 2 verse 6 with this:
Thus said GOD:
For three transgressions of Israel,
For four, I will not revoke the decree:
Because they have sold for silver
Those whose cause was just,
And the needy for a pair of sandals.
[Ah,] you who trample the heads of the poor
Into the dust of the ground,
And make the humble walk a twisted course!

Interestingly, before Amos begins to prophecize doom against Israel for injustice, he begins by pronouncing doom against any of the other regional powers if they and their leaders engage in injustice. Amos forecasts the downfall of Damascus and the Philistines, at the hands of Edom, and Edom at the hands of an unnamed aggressor, and the Ammonites, and the Moabites, and Judah. All for being militant and violent, or practicing harlotry, or valuing money over justice, or having unjust laws and courts, or for exploiting the poor. If you were a congressional lobbyist or a top executive for big oil or big pharma or the tobacco companies, this weeks haftarah makes for exceedingly uncomfortable reading.

And aye, theres the rub. A lot of Americans rejoiced at the killing of the CEO of United Healthcare, and a lot of other Americans recoiled at the rejoicing. And oddly, both were wrong, and both were right. There’s something wrong in America when the price of insulin or the cost of a life-saving surgery requires a second job or third mortgage. Every day in this country we sell for silver those whose cause is just. Many of you know my wife is a physical therapist, and every week she sees patients whose best course of treatment would be ten visits with her over ten weeks. But their insurance will only pay for four. So she does what she can and gives them exercises to do at home and hopes for the best.

All of these complaints about the health care industry, by the way, ignore a lot of the strides we’ve made as a society and the improvements that have come over time. A hundred years ago, everyone paid out of pocket to see a doctor, or they were poor and they didn’t see a doctor at all. Then came medicare for the elderly, and then medicaid for the poor, and health insurance from your employer, and then very rapidly in this country the majority of persons was covered. In 2000, 86% of Americans had health insurance. But after the great recession from 2008 to 2011, the number of uninsured Americans ballooned to over 40 million. And so we had healthcare reforms, and now the number of uninsured Americans is at its lowest level in history - a reported 8.1%. And yet. And yet we are still talking about this system, because the system itself has huge flaws and gaps, and still means that many people have to work longer hours to cover medical procedures, or start a go fund me campaign to cover their out of pocket maximums, or have to ration certain expensive medications because of the price. I’ll also add that making UPMC the villain in this story at the outset was a touch disingenuous - UPMC lost almost $300 million in fiscal year 2023. Something is profoundly broken in our national healthcare system, and there’s no one simple answer or easy victim here. But you and I both know that other countries than ours, with fewer resources, have done a better job than the United States.

This sermon is not meant to analyze the problems in the healthcare marketplace and give solutions. Lord knows I’m not qualified to do that, and lord knows there are literally thousands of people who have the right answer that could get us closer to an equitable and fair system. A classic end to a rabbis sermon is to either tell you what you can do - get up and call your congressman, yada yada yada, or to cut to the quick and say ‘so my prayer for us all today’ yada yada yada and then kind of proclaim some hope. I’m saying something different today. I’m saying this: You should feel uncomfortable, like I did on December 4th when Brian Thompson was killed. You should feel angry at United Healthcare and our entire healthcare system, and that anger for me manifested as righteous indignation at a man who earned a salary of $10 million a year working for a company with an infamous reputation for systematically denying health care claims to generate profit. And you should feel shame, like I felt shame for laughing at internet jokes about a murder.
In our parsha today there is a moment that I’d never fully considered. Joseph’s brothers throw him in a pit and then begin plotting his murder. Reuben comes along and says ‘don’t murder him!’ and everyone ignores him. Judah comes along and says ‘let’s sell him instead.’ Until this year, I had always read Judah’s actions as the actions of a man seeking a moral compromise to spare Joseph’s life: with his brothers baying for blood, he was thinking on his feet and came up with a quick solution to spare his life. But a commentary our hassidut class learned on Wednesday from the Mei HaShiloach, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Ishbitz, went in a totally different direction. It suggested that Judah exclaimed ‘lets sell Joseph into slavery’ not to spare his life, but because Judah saw an opportunity to turn a profit. The Mei HaShiloach, based on a line in the Talmud, suggests that Judah was applying relative morality to the situation - a sort of moral version of ‘in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.’ The Mei HaShiloach suggests to us that this degree of moral compromise is a cop out. What Judah probably should have done is stand up and say to his younger siblings ‘what you are doing is wrong. If you want to kill Joseph, or sell him, you’ll have to do it over my dead body.’

It is an understanding that Judaism is not a religion of lesser evils or of inconvenient compromises. We aren’t the people who are supposed to say ‘a little poverty, a little homelessness, an 8% uninsured rate, and the occasional medical bankruptcy, oh well, close enough.’ We feel uncomfortable feeling momentarily joyous that Brian Thompson was killed because we know the system that he operates under is unjust and we ought to do better. The feeling of internal conflict we have is because we know we are a little like Judah here - murder is wrong, the healthcare system is deeply flawed, and we’re supposed to pick a side. But it can be both. We know violence in this case, and really in any case, is not an effective agent of change. So my prayer for us I guess is: be uncomfortable. Don’t lose your humanity, but don’t remain complacent in the face of injustice. Shabbat Shalom.

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Toldot 5785 - Journeys, Treasures, Thanksgiving

12/1/2024

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There is a story in Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Souls on Fire’ attributed both to Rebbe Nachman and to Simcha Bunim of Pshisecha, but since I’m a fan of Simcha Bunim, we’re gonna go with the story belonging to him.

There once was a man in Krakow, Itzik son of Yekel, a poor Jew, with a wife and kids. Every day he would pray that God would ease his families suffering and make him not so poor. He would go to shul morning and evening and pray, and he would pray in between just as hard. It went on this way for months, and then years.

And then one night he had a dream. In the dream, he was in a far away place. A voice told him: this is Prague. This is the Vltava River. Here is the castle. And here is the stone bridge over the river. Dig under this bridge, and there is a treasure. It is yours. Your problems are resolved. He awoke from his dream, and he did the same thing we all do when we awake from a dream. He said ‘what a silly dream.’ And he went about his day, praying, and worrying, and scratching to get by for him and his family. And that night, he had the dream again. This time the voice added ‘would you rather be rich? Or would you rather be worried?’
Itzik again ignored the dream, because it would be sheer madness to travel from Krakow to Prague, a 400 mile trip, because a dream told him to. Moreover, Itzik had no money, and what little he had he would need to leave with his wife and kids so that they could get by while he was gone. Nope, he would not go. But the dream persisted, night after night, taunting him. The voice would say ‘what? You haven’t left yet?’ What is stopping you?’ Finally, he made up his mind. He would go, if only to get the dream out of his head.
Itzik set off on foot with not a penny in his pocket and only the clothes on his back. He walked for days, eating what he could forage or begging for bread, sleeping by the road side. Finally, after two weeks, he arrived, filthy, exhausted and starving, in Prague. He went to the town center near the castle, and there he saw the great stone bridge. He saw the exact spot from his dream where the voice told him to dig, and even though he felt silly doing it, he began to dig. But no sooner did he put his head down for a minute to put his effort into digging, but a soldier, the captain of the watch, saw him from the bridge, and came down to detain him. This captain accused Itzik of spying and began to batter him with questions. Who are you? Why are you here? Why are you digging under the kings bridge? So of course, Itzik told his story, about being poor, and the praying, and the dream, and the voice, and the bridge, and the journey, and the treasure.

And when he came to the end, the captain began laughing and laughing. He said ‘See here, you dumb Jew. You came all this way because a dream told you? How ridiculous! It just so happens that I too have been having a dream. In the dream, a voice tells me to go to Krakow. Every night the voice tells me and shows me the house of Itzik, son of Yekel. And it tells me to go there, and dig under the stove, and there I will find a treasure. Can you imagine such a thing? Why would I travel to Krakow for a non-existent treasure? And even if I did, I’m sure half the city is made up of Jews named Itzik and the other half made of Jews named Yekel.’ The captain laughed some more, and then released Itzik, who hurried on his way.

Itzik returned home, walking twice as fast as he had on the first leg of his journey. He arrived home, moved the stove, and there underneath was the treasure. He paid his debts and could provide for his wife and his children, for their schooling and that they could eat lavishly for the rest of their lives. He dedicated the rest to build a synagogue in his name, and he lived out the rest of his days a pious man, even though he no longer needed to pray that God take away his poverty.
…
A quick disclaimer before I can continue: the point of this story is not for all of you to dig underneath your stove at home. Seeing as this is Pittsburgh, odds are the only thing under your stove is your basement, and the only notable feature in your basement is likely a toilet that sits in the middle of the room with no walls or bathroom around it.

Our story I think has several meanings, and I think it is important to resist any one of them as the real meaning, because if that were so, the story would be too simple. The first meaning, of course, is the mashal, the moral, and that is that we often go searching far and wide for a thing that exists right back at home. This is a hassidic parable version of the concept ‘the grass is always greener’ - that we constantly think there is something better out there when what we need was right here all along.
The second lesson in the story, though, is about the value of the journey. Itzik would never have found the treasure at home unless he had gone on the perilous journey to Prague – and at the end of the journey, we find another man who refuses to take the journey; who refuses to take the risk and therefore he receives no reward. So of course, the journey is essential, even though it is possible by the conclusion of the story that it might have ultimately been unnecessary, since the treasure was under the stove all along.
The third lesson, though, is in the piety, and the suffering, and in the belief in the voice. This part of the story I might not have fully recognized were it not for the fact that there is a feature length film with essentially the same message - Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams - which is a great movie that you should all watch even though it isn’t baseball season right now. The movie has, oddly, all the elements of the Simcha Bunim story - a disembodied voice that whispers a crazy idea, ‘if you build it , he will come’ a long journey to retrieve first a famous writer, played by James Earl Jones, and then an old former minor leaguer, played by Burt Lancaster. In Field of Dreams though, the financial struggle and the doubt and the pathos of the movie is what makes the payoff at the end so rewarding.
All of this reminded me somewhat of this weeks Torah portion, in a weird way. Parshat Toldot is the origin story of Yakov and Esav, twin boys that battled from the moment of conception in their mothers belly. They emerge from the womb as polar opposites - Yakov a man of the tent, and Esav a man of the field, a hunter. Yakov then lies and cheats his brother Esav out of his birthright, and his blessing. This cheating becomes a leitmotif - a recurring theme, in Yakov’s life, as his father in law Laban will cheat him in work and in marriage and his sons will cheat him out of Joseph.

This weeks parsha has the beginning of the journey for both of our characters, Yakov and Esav, and they originate from this funny dramatic moment of the cheating of the patriarchal blessing. When we join the third triennial reading for this week, we see Yakov getting his blessing from his father, who thinks he is Esav, the elder. And then he leaves, and Esav comes in with a prepared dish for the old man. And Esav says “Bless me too, Father!” And Yitzhak the father replies, “Your brother came with guile and took away your blessing.” But Esav pleads, and Yitzhak provides another blessing:
“See, your abode shall enjoy the fat of the earth
And the dew of heaven above.
Yet by your sword you shall live,
And you shall serve your brother;
But when you grow restive,
You shall break his yoke from your neck.”
Esav is still incensed - he plans to kill Yaakov. Rivkah tells Yakov to run, he runs, and his life now has kind of a motivating backstory of both deception and the need to go on the run. And Esav also departs, and he also has a motivating backstory of being deceived and wanting to kill.

OK but here’s the thing. When we rejoin the brothers two torah portions from now, in Parshat Vayishlach, both Yakov and Esav are prosperous and successful. Esav has an entourage of 400 men and women.Yaakov is wealthy enough that he can send him 200 she-goats and 20 he-goats; 200 ewes and 20 rams; 30 milch camels with their colts; 40 cows and 10 bulls; 20 female-donkeys and 10 male-donkeys. The elder does not really serve the younger. Both turn out fine. And of course, the first thing they do when they see each other is make up.

And also - both brothers are forced at the end of the parsha to leave home. This is, famously, an essential plot element in all of the most successful movies - that the young main character is forced to fend for themselves, without parental protection, and that they must go out into the world. It is why Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia are both orphaned at the beginning of Star Wars, and why Disney movies almost always start with our hero or heroine becoming an orphan.

In other words, the big motivating concept we talk about in this weeks Torah portion, the stealing of blessing, is kind of irrelevant, since both brothers seem to do fine regardless of the blessing. It’s actually, in the broader sweep of the Torah’s narrative, a macguffin - a plot device employed by the story in order to get our two characters out in order to see the world and go on a journey.

For those of you not familiar with a macguffin, its a term in film that originated with Alfred Hitchcock. It is a physical object that the characters need to find or retrieve that drives the plot and the characters forward. But of course, we the audience are more interested in the characters and the plot than we are with the object. Famous macguffins in movies include the maltese falcon in the movie the maltese falcon, and r2-d2 in the first star wars movie, since he has the plans for how to blow up the death star, and of course my favorite movie macguffin, Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction - which is the perfect movie macguffin because we actually never find out what’s in it, making it extra double irrelevant except as a plot device.

In the story of poor pious Itzik, the treasure is a macguffin. In the story of Yakov and Esav, the blessing and the birthright are macguffins. The real value is in the journey. But to simplify and summarize all this into ‘it’s not the destination that matters but rather the journey’ is to reduce torah into a fortune cookie - a pithy cute bit of wisdom. I mean, you could sum up this dvar torah at the shabbos table later for your guests by saying ‘the rabbi talked about the importance of the destination and not the journey’ and you wouldn’t be wrong, but you’d also miss some of the point.

This is, of course, the week of journeys in America. Every year at this time, except of course during the pandemic, the newspapers do a story saying ‘this is expected to be the busiest travel weekend ever’, because of course it is, there are more Americans this year than last year, and more of them take to the roads and rails and skies to visit their family. And some years the travel is easy, and some years it is hard. And some years we are the ones that hit the road, and some years the family comes to us. And some years there are reasons why we cannot be together - someone is sick or too old to travel, or someone has to work, or the family is divided by some disagreement, and maybe next year is the year we can all be together. Even when we are together, we sometimes go through a personal journey at thanksgiving of reestablishing who we are at the dinner table in familial pecking order or in the eyes of our parents or our children. In this respect, our journeys are not actual journeys, but personal journeys about longing or absence or loneliness that must be overcome. The turkey is a macguffin too, and we travel to it, or maybe we spend the day in the kitchen roasting it, as part of a heroes journey that we all take through life.

In our personal journeys, we all take the heroes journey at thanksgiving into learning about ourselves and overcoming difficulties. Maybe our journeys are like Yakov and Esavs journey - beginning with our own flaws and errors and requiring us to learn and grow from them. Maybe they are like Itzik son of Yekels - a journey to discover that what is valuable was at home all along.

Maybe the journey was the important thing. Maybe the valuable thing was following the dream in the first place, or fulfilling your dream and remaining essentially the same person afterwards. Maybe the treasure was behind the stove all along. Shabbat Shalom.

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Miketz 5785: Joseph, the Loner, the Rebel

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Toldot 5785 - Journeys, Treasures, Thanksgiving

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