This past week we studied Parashat Vayeshev, the Torah portion known as Vayeshev, which means “He [Jacob] dwelled.” The Torah portion begins with Jacob having settled down as the scene shifts to the lives of his twelve sons, most notably Joseph, to whom, as the eldest of his beloved wife Rachel, Jacob shows deep favoritism. Joseph doesn’t help matters by telling his brothers of his dreams that would suggest their eventually serving him. The strife intensifies, and before long, the brothers take hold of Joseph, and sell him to a wandering caravan of traders, who bring him down to Egypt to sell him into slavery. The brothers lead their father to believe that Joseph has been killed by wild animals, using the infamous, now-bloodied, multicolored coat Jacob had given Joseph as evidence. Joseph, meanwhile, ends up in the household of one of Pharaoh’s chief stewards in Egypt.
All of this points to a subtle force that is persistent in the Joseph story that we made explicit in our study session: the idea of God having a guiding hand in the flow of human events, and how we understand that concept, if at all, in our own lives.
The Joseph story seems to be suggestive of this idea because it is a tale filled with twists and turns that lead to an eventual signal moment in Jewish history: the descent of Jacob’s family, all of Jewish ancestry, down to Egypt. It appears that God subtly guides this, according to the Torah, each step of the way: from ensuring Joseph’s brother’s do not kill him (their initial idea), to ensuring he is sold to someone headed to Egypt, to having it be that he ends up in the house of someone connected to Pharaoh, to ending up in prison where he interprets more dreams, to ending up in Pharaoh’s palace interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams. At each step of the way, God seems to be directing the levers to lead to a particular result, with the Torah even saying that “Adonai was with Joseph” (Genesis 39:2).
The question we asked in our Torah discussion was how we make sense of the idea of God’s providence (and this idea of God having a guiding hand in individual affairs is sometimes labelled) in an era when we no longer take it for granted. So much of the world seems so troubled that we’re often inclined to ask, if God indeed does play such an active role, what exactly is God doing??
And yet the participants of our Torah discussion (held in the middle of services at approximately 10:30 every Saturday when there is no B’nei Mitzvah) took it in different directions. One ventured that the idea of God’s providence is a signal to us about the humility we should behold: not all is in our control. Some is beyond our capacity to influence. The “delta” between what we can control and what we can’t some might call “God.” In that sense, the idea of God’s providence says less about God and more about us: we have limits, and it is sacred to recognize them.
Other interpretations of the idea of God’s providence rested on the ways in which we as humans are able to manifest God’s providential aspirations in this world. Drawing on ideas from Rabbis Jacob Staub, Art Green, and Mordecai Kaplan, God serves as the source of inspiration, and we attune ourselves to that source, and make manifest those Divine causes and aims.
Regardless of whether God is directing events, I also hear in these comments a suggestion, perhaps, that God is calling us to respond to the events that unfold in this world. While we can’t know or definitively understand how God operates in the world, we can feel that we have a responsibility, when the chips have fallen, to respond in ways that reflect the idea of our having been created in the image of God.
