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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