Miketz 5775:               Memories

By Rabbi Joshua (forgetfully known as The Hoffer) Hoffman

Pharaoh appoints Yosef as viceroy, second in command, over Egypt, and gives him Osnas, the daughter of Potiphar as a wife. She bears him two children before the years of famine begin. Yosef names his first son Menashe, meaning to forget, and explains that he did so to indicate that God caused him to forget all his hardship and his father’s house (Bereishis 41:11). Rabbi Mordechai Katz questions if it is really true that Yosef forgot his fathers’ household. After all, in Parshas Vayigash, Rashi brings a midrash which says that when Yosef sent for Yaakov to come down to Egypt, he sent agalos, wagons, as an allusion to the last thing that he had learned with Yaakov, the laws of “eglah arufah,” dealing with the discovery of a corpse on the road (see Bereishis 45:27 and Rashi there). Moreover, asks Rabbi Katz, why would Yosef want to commemorate his forgetting of his fathers’ household to the point of alluding to it in his son’s name?

Rabbi Katz answers that, of course, Yosef remembered his father’s teachings, and tried very hard to maintain his spirituality in Egypt. However, because of his surroundings and his circumstances, he was not able to maintain the same level of spirituality that he had in his father’s household. Yosef’s spiritual life was so important to him that even a slight diminution of its intensity felt as if he had lost everything, and this is what he wanted to convey by alluding in Menashe’s name to his forgetting of his father’s household.

Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, in his Pirkei Torah, makes an interesting comment about Yosef that sheds further light on the name that he gave to Menashe, in light of Rabbi Katz’s questions. The Torah tells us that once Yosef recognized his brothers when they came down to Egypt and were presented to him, he remembered his dreams (Bereishis 42:9). This implies that until that point, he had forgotten them. In his righteousness, says Rav Gifter, Yosef had forgotten what his brothers had done to him, and did not harbor any bad feelings towards them. Only their reappearance sparked his memory and aroused him to the possibility that his dream may be actualized. Although Rav Gifter later modifies his comment, if we follow this initial observation, then, it seems, Yosef engaged in selective forgetting. He forgot the troubles he had experienced in his father’s house, but not the teachings that he had received there. Thomas Mann, in his Joseph and His Brothers, writes that the reason Yosef did not try to inform his father of his whereabouts once he was viceroy, is that he had been so traumatized by being sold to Egypt that he had driven his suffering from his mind. Otherwise, he could not have gone on. Avivah Zornberg has pointed out many Holocaust survivors took this approach as well. According to Rav Gifter, Yosef forgot, not for his own mental stability but out of righteousness and love for his brothers. He did not, then drive his previous life completely out of his thoughts, as Thomas Mann argued, but retained the teachings he received from Yaakov. There is a well-known comment to the effect that Jews are blessed with two good gifts, the ability to remember and the ability to forget. Yosef, while in Egypt, employed both gifts, and names his son accordingly.

Best wishes for a joyous Chanukah from the entire, extended Netvort staff.