From: JoshHoff@aol.com
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 4:14 AM
To: JoshHoff@aol.com
Subject: Netvort:parshas Vayigash, 5768 (2nd version,with additions to one
sentence)
Adam Two
By Rabbi Joshua (covenentally known as The Hoffer) Hoffman
Over twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to buy some
interesting books from the library of a long-time Jewish educator who was
making aliyah and was not able to take his entire library with him. Recently,
looking through a forgotten closet for some heavy books to balance on top of a
leaky faucet in my apartment, I came across one of the volumes I purchased at
that time. What I found was the jubilee volume of the Hebrew journal
Sinai, published in Israel. The volume contains many interesting articles by
famed Jewish scholars of yesteryear, but the one that particularly caught
my eye was written by Dr. Moshe Zeidel, a disciple of Rav Kook whose
correspondence with him on a number of modern challenges to Torah was published
in Igros Reiyah, the collected letters of Rav Kook (English readers can find a
selection of this correspondence in Tzvi Feldman's work Rav A.Y.Kook : selected
letters, where he refers to him as Moshe Seidle). The article is entitled
" Adam - Zeh Yosef," and explores a little-noticed midrash (Shemos
Rabbah, end of chapter 20) which explains various Biblical references to Adam (among
them Bamidbar 9:6 and Tehillim 78:60) as actually referring to Yosef. Dr.
Zeidel conjectures that the idea behind this identification can be found in
another midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 2:8) which says that the word Adam is an
expression of love, brotherhood and friendship. Who, asks Dr. Zeidel, did more
than Yosef to promote all three of these traits when he reconciled with his
brothers in Egypt after the bitter conflict they had been embroiled in? I would
like to suggest a different approach to understanding this midrash, based on an
understanding of the word adam first suggested by Rabbi Ephraim Lunshitz,
author of the Keli Yakar, in his Olelos Ephraim.
The Talmud (Bava Kama 38) tells us that the name 'adam' applies only to
a Jew, and not to a non-Jew. Rabbi Ephraim of Lunshitz explains that there are
four words in the Hebrew language that are used for 'man' - gever, enosh, ish,
and adam. In three of these four words, the plural form is different from the
singular. Thus, the plural of gever is gevorim, the plural of enosh is anoshim,
and the plural of ish is ishim. The plural for adam, however, is adam, and that
is why it applies only to a Jew. The idea being expressed here is that a Jew's
individual identity is intrinsically connected to his collective
identity, so that the word used to describe the individual Jew is the same word
that is used to describe the collective of the Jewish people. Based on this
analysis of the word adam, we can understand why it is particularly applied to
Yosef. He set the stage for the Jewish people to endure their years of exile in
Egypt and still maintain their group identity. That is why he arranged for them
to dwell in Goshen, away from Egypt proper, setting up, as Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
recently wrote, a Jewish ghetto, in the good sense of the term, designed to
shield his family from the negative influences of Egyptian culture.
Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlop, who was a very close student/colleague of Rav
Kook, elaborates, in his Mei Meirom to parshas Vayechi, on the methods Yosef
used to preserve Jewish national identity for his family while they were in
Egypt. On the one hand, he set the stage for them to resist the cultural
influence of the country while they were there, thereby revealing and
preserving the holiness of the Jewish people,or kedushas Yisroel. By
personally seeing to it that his father be buried in Eretz Yisroel, he helped
maintain the nation's connection to their land, to kedushas Eretz Yisroel, the
holiness of Eretz Yisroel, and by personally seeing to it that his father
be buried in Eretz Yisroel, he helped maintain the nation's connection to their
land, which is an integral part of their national identity. Yosef was, in this
way, acting both as a patriarch, in the sense of preserving the connection with
Eretz Yisroel that God established through His covenants with the partriarchs,
and as a son, preserving the national identity of his people by easing their
way to live in Egypt and still maintain their national identity.
Interestingly, Rav Yitzchok Hutner, another disciple of Rav Kook, also advanced
the notion, albeit in a different way, that Yosef constituted a transition
stage in the history of the Jewish people, acting as both a father and a son.
Based on our explanation of the term adam in regard to Yosef as
referring to his efforts to preserve Jewish identity in Egypt, perhaps we can
expand the meaning of the term, based on a notion presented by Rav Naphtoli
Tzvi Yehudoh Berlin, the Netziv, in his introduction to his commentary
Ha'amek Davar to the book of Shemos. The Netziv mentions that the book of
Shemos is referred to by the author of the Halachos Gedolos as the second book
and explains that this is because the book of Shemos describes the second phase
in the process of the creation of the world. While the book of Bereishis
describes the creation of the physical world, the book of Shemos describes the
spiritual completion of the world. This came about with the formation of the
Jewish nation and its acceptance of the Torah at Sinai, since, as the rabbis
tell us, the world was created for the sake of the nation of Israel and for the
sake of the Torah. In this sense, then, we can view Yosef as a kind of second
Adam, serving as the person who set the stage for the spiritual completion of
the process of creation.
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