From: Netvort@aol.com
Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006
4:57 AM
To: JoshHoff@aol.com
Subject: Netvort : parshas
Vayigash, 5767
On the
Road
By Rabbi Joshua (agitatedly known as The Hoffer) Hoffman
The Torah tells us that just before Yosef sent his brothers back to Cana’an to
bring their father and the rest of their families down to Egypt, he told them, "
Do not become agitated on the road (Bereishis 45:24). Rashi, in his second
explanation, cites the Talmud (Ta'anis 10b), which says that Yosef told them not
to take large steps, and to make sure to enter the city while it is still day.
The commentators to Rashi explain that taking large steps can impair one's
health, and remaining on the road after sunset can leave one open to robbers and
the like. Yosef was thus telling his brothers that, even though he was
instructing them to hurry back to their home in order to make arrangements for
bringing the family down to Egypt, they should be careful in the way they
travel, so as not to endanger themselves. Maharsha, in his commentary to that
Talmudic passage, explains that someone who is agitated or angry when he travels
will not be careful about such things. Perhaps then Yosef was telling his
brothers that they should go back in confidence that what they were doing was
correct, and that the entire episode was working out as it was supposed to.
R. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, known as the Kotzker Rebbe, goes
a step further, and explains that Yosef was telling the brothers not to take
large steps in an effort to speed up the process. Everything was going according
to schedule, he assured them, and nothing they could do would either expedite it
or slow it down. While this explanation may be in consonance with the general
Chassidic approach to divine providence, I believe that it does not conform to
the flow of the verses preceding ours, and, moreover, that it is in sharp
disagreement with the approach of the Ramban to this verse in particular, and to
the entire saga of Yosef and his brothers, in general.
In
Yosef's instructions to his brothers, he continually tells them to hurry back to
Cana'an to bring their father, as pointed out by Rav Ovadiah Seforno in his
commentary. Ramban himself explains our verse to mean that Yosef told his
brothers not to be worried about traveling with so much grain, bread, and the
like in a time of famine, because they were under his protection, and they would
not be attacked on the road. Therefore, he continued, they should travel swiftly
and hurry to return, as he had told them, "Hurry, go up to my father" (Bereishis
45:8). I believe that this approach conforms with Ramban's general approach to
Yosef's comportment towards his brothers. As we have mentioned in the past,
Ramban understood that Yosef took his dreams as divine visions, and that he was
shown these visions so that he would do what he could do to bring them to
realization. That is why he incarcerated Shimon as a means of getting Binyomin,
and eventually Yaakov, as well, to come down to Egypt and bow down to him. That
is also why he did not inform his father all those years that he was safe in
Egypt, since doing do would have interfered with the fulfillment of the dreams.
I believe that for this reason, now that he saw the dreams being fulfilled, he
saw no further justification for hiding his whereabouts from his father, and,
therefore, he told his brothers to hurry home and tell him that he was still
alive and well in Egypt. However, we still need to understand why Yosef not only
told his brothers to hurry back to their father to inform him of this fact, but
also to hurry and bring him down to Egypt, together with his family. I believe
that another passage in the Ramban, in parshas Beshalach, can provide us with an
explanation.
The Torah tells us, in parshas Bo (Shemos 12:40), that
the Jewish people’s stay in Egypt lasted four hundred thirty years. This verse
has bothered many commentators, since, at the covenant between the pieces, God
told Avrohom that his people would be in exile for four hundred years. Many
explanations have been given to reconcile these two statements, and the Ramban
himself offers several. Perhaps the most intriguing of his explanations is that
originally, the Jews were supposed to be in exile for four hundred years, but
because of their sins, that period was lengthened by another thirty years. Rav
Dovid Feinstein explained that according to the Ramban, we can view the sentence
of exile as akin to the kind of sentence a judge may pass on a criminal, giving
him, for example, a ten to fifty year sentence. The amount of years that this
person stays in prison can be either longer or shorter depending on how he
behaves himself while there. In a similar way, the Jews were sentenced to exile
for a certain period of time, but that period was a range of years which could
be lengthened or shortened depending on how they acted. They could have been
redeemed after four hundred years had they merited it, or even earlier, or they
could have stayed even longer than four hundred thirty years. As it turned out
they were in exile, of one form or another, for four hundred thirty years, but
that sentence could have been longer or shorter had they acted differently. In
this context, we can understand why Yosef told his brothers to expedite the
process of the family's descent to Egypt, because as Yosef saw it, the faster
they got there, the faster they would be able to leave. This approach conforms
with Ramban's general approach that although there was a process of divine
providence involved in the entire episode of Yosef and his brothers, and the
descent of the Jewish people to Egypt, there was still room for human effort and
a consequent adjustment of the exact terms of the exile, unlike the approach
advanced by the Kotzker Rebbe.
Please address all
correspondence to the author (Rabbi Hoffman) with the following address -
JoshHoff @ AOL.com.
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