And they told him all of Joseph's words that he had said to them,

and he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him,

 and the spirit of their father Jacob was revived.

(Bereishit 45:27)

 

all of Joseph’s words: He (Joseph) gave them a sign, viz., in what topic he was engaged when he (Joseph) separated from him (Jacob). [That was] the section dealing with the heifer [egla, spelled similarly to "wagon" agala] that was to be beheaded (Devarim. 21), and this is what [Scripture] says, and he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent, and it (Scripture) does not say, "that Pharaoh had sent."

and the spirit of... Jacob was revived: The Shekhinah, which had separated from him [because of his grief], rested upon him [once again].

(Rashi ad loc, Judaica Press translation)

 

He (Joseph) gave them a sign. That is why it is written, and he saw the wagons, etc.; he did not send Jacob this sign explicitly, but through allusion, hinting that "I was engaged in this matter when I left you." He did not send Jacob this sign explicitly by way of his brothers, because that would imply that if Jacob did not accompany him his brothers would kill him, and that would upset his brothers, causing them to think that he took them for murderers. That is why he did not send this to Jacob explicitly, but rather hinted at it by sending the wagons. And he [Rashi] says, "He (Joseph) gave them a sign" [meaning] he would not reveal it to them explicitly, but rather told them, "He was studying this matter with me when I left him" and they did not know what it was meant to convey.

(MaHaRaL MiPrague ad loc)

 

Where Did the Sacrifices Disappear to?

Shafer Stollman

And Israel and all that was his set out and came to Beersheva, and he slaughtered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac.(Bereishit 46:1)

The book of Bereishit is concerned with sacrifices from beginning to end, starting with Cain and Abel and concluding with Jacob. While Noah's sacrifices are described in detail, And Noah built an altar to the Lord, and he took of all the clean animals and of all the clean fowl and brought up burnt offerings on the altar, the Torah says little about the sacrifices offered by the Patriarchs. We hear about the Patriarchs building altars, but not about them offering sacrifices. Regarding Abraham, it is written: And the Lord appeared to Abram, and He said, "To your seed I will give this land," and there he built an altar to the Lord, Who had appeared to him (Bereishit 12:7). And later: And Abram pitched his tents, and he came, and he dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord (13:18). The only altar built by Abraham upon which he offered a sacrifice was the altar he prepared for his son Isaac.

No mention is made of sacrifices being offered on the altars built by Isaac and Jacob. Regarding Isaac, we read: And he built an altar there, and he called in the name of the Lord (Bereishit 26:25). Jacob also built altars and set up monuments: And Jacob arose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had placed at his head, and he set it up as a monument, and he poured oil on top of it (28:18). And while fleeing Laban: And Jacob slaughtered a slaughtering on the mountain, and he invited his friends to eat a meal, and they ate bread and lodged on the mountain (31:54); but the commentators explain that Jacob did not offer a sacrifice, rather, "He slaughtered animals for the feast" (Rashi ad loc).

The move from merely building altars to the offering of sacrifices occurs in our parasha, before Jacob's descent to Egypt: And Israel and all that was his set out and came to Beersheva, and he slaughtered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac (46:1). The commentators, led by Rashi, find it difficult to understand why Jacob chose to offer sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac rather than to the God of Abraham. RaMBaN comments:

"To the God of his father Isaac: One is required to honor his father more than he is required to honor his grandfather. Therefore, the sacrifices are associated with Isaac and not with Abraham" - so writes Rashi. This is insufficient, since it would have been appropriate for him to have said "to the God of my fathers" without mentioning one specific person, as he said [later] the God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked (48:15), and in his prayer he said: the God of my father Abraham and the God of my father Isaac (32:10)...

However, neither Rashi nor RaMBaN find reason to comment on the fact that this is the very first mention of sacrifice since the Akedah - binding - of Isaac. This neglect seems to stem from the assumption that each time one of the Patriarchs built an altar he also offered sacrifices on it.

As I pointed out above, the Torah never mentions that the Patriarchs offered sacrifices on the altars they built - perhaps because such sacrifices were never actually made. I submit that the Patriarchs found the sacrifice of animals to be completely insignificant after "The Sacrifice" in which Abraham was prepared to offer up his son Isaac. That is why they were satisfied to merely consecrate the altars they made to God. For them, those altars marked holy places, just as the holy ark lends importance to the synagogue in our own day. What, then, changed when Jacob took off on his journey to see Joseph and why did he offer sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac?

I believe that the Akedah came to guarantee God's intervention on the behalf of Abraham's descendants when they would find themselves endangered by those closest to them. This idea finds support in RaMBaN's comments on the promise made to Abraham after the Akedah: And he said, "By Myself have I sworn, says the Lord, that because you have done this thing and you did not withhold your son, your only one, that I will surely bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand that is on the seashore, and your descendants will inherit the cities of their enemies (22:16-17). RaMBaN writes:

because you have done this thing. In the beginning He promised him that he would increase his descendants as the stars of heaven and the dust of the earth, but now He gave him the additional assurance that because you have done this great deed, He swore by His Great Name [that He would increase his descendants as the stars of the heavens and as the sand that is on the seashore], and that his seed will possess the gate of its enemies. Thus Abraham was assured that no sin whatever would cause the destruction of his descendants, nor would they fall into the hand of their enemies and not rise again. Thus this constitutes a perfect Divine assurance of the redemption which is destined to come to us. (Chavel translation)

RaMBaN does not name those enemies, but through the course of the book of Bereishit, the existence of Abraham's descendants is endangered by the brothers of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.

The first threat is that posed by Ishmael against Isaac. "From Sarah’s reply, For the son of this handmaid shall not inherit with my son, you learn that he would quarrel with Isaac regarding the inheritance and say, 'I am the firstborn and should take two portions,' and they would go out to the field, and he would take his bow and shoot arrows at him, as it is said: Like one who wearies himself shooting firebrands, etc. and says: Am I not joking? (Proverbs. 26:18-19)" (Rashi Bereishit 21:10). The second threat is posed by Esau against Jacob after having sold him his birthright and losing the blessings: And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing that his father had blessed him, and Esau said to himself, "Let the days of mourning for my father draw near, I will then kill my brother Jacob" (27:41). Joseph's brothers posed the third threat: And they saw him from afar, and when he had not yet drawn near to them, they plotted against him to put him to death (37:18).

Up until the Akedah, the Matriarchs secured their children's safety. Sarah needed no guidance to understand Ishmael's danger to her son Isaac; she took the initiative and had Ishmael removed from Isaac's vicinity. Similarly, in the next generation Rebecca sent Jacob off to Laban's house, removing him from Esau's clutches after the latter had sworn to kill him. Rashi states that the actions of both of these matriarchs were guided by the holy spirit that rested upon them.

If matters had been left in the hands of the Patriarchs, the brothers never would have been separated, not Isaac from Ishmael, Jacob from Esau, or Joseph from his brothers. The Matriarchs insisted upon these separations. Proof for this is that Joseph = the only son who lacked maternal protection - was sent by his father to meet his brothers in Shechem, where they almost killed him. Since Rachel died while giving birth to Benjamin, it was Joseph of all Abraham's progeny who required the most divine protection in order to survive and oversee the process of the decent to Egypt. There is no need to describe what would have happened if his brothers had succeeded in their plot.

Joseph was the greatest unknown. Jacob saw his coat soiled with blood and thought he had died. As far as Jacob was concerned, the promise made by God at the Akedah was no longer in effect. Despite his having been personally saved from both Laban and Esau, the promise that no ill would befall Abraham's progeny could no longer be trusted. It was this despair that led him to object to the idea of Benjamin going down with his brothers to Egypt: But he (Jacob) said, "My son shall not go down with you, because his brother is dead, and he alone is left, and if misfortune befalls him on the way you are going, you will bring down my gray head in sorrow to the grave" (42:38).

And then, after so many years, Jacob heard that his son Joseph still lived: And they told him, saying, "Joseph is still alive," and [they told him] that he ruled over the entire land of Egypt, and his heart changed, for he did not believe them. And they told him all of Joseph's words that he had said to them, and he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, and the spirit of their father Jacob was revived (45:26-7). At that moment Jacob understood that the promise made by God at the Akedah had been kept. Now, on his way to seeing his son in Egypt, he chooses to renew the offering of sacrifices which he had abstained from all those years. He offers sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac, a phrase which puzzled biblical exegetes. Given the above explanations, the matter becomes clear: Isaac's name is mentioned in order to express acknowledgement that the promise made by God at the binding of Isaac had been fulfilled with regards to Joseph. From there on in it becomes known that the Patriarchs and their progeny - to the very last of them - will be protected thanks to the binding of Isaac, and so it became possible to renew the sacrifices.

Shafer Stollman is an ordained rabbi and has an MA in education.

 

And they took their livestock and their possessions that they had acquired in the land of Canaan, and they came to Egypt, Jacob and all his descendants with him.

(Bereishit 46:6)

 

that they had acquired in the land of Canaan: But of what he had acquired in Padan-Aram he gave everything to Esau [in payment] for his share in the Cave of Machpelah. He said, "Possessions [acquired] outside the Land (of Israel) are inappropriate for me." This is the meaning of which I acquired for myself with heaps (Bereishit 50:5). He placed before him stacks of gold and silver like a heap [of grain] and said to him, "Take these."

(Rashi Bereishit 46:6)

 

...I am the one who told your father do not go down to Egypt and I am the one who now tells you do not be afraid of going down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there. If the sons remained here they would marry local people and assimilate among them, but that will not happen in Egypt, because the Egyptians could not eat food with the Hebrews, because it is an abomination to the Egyptians. And so, the will become a great nation, as they [the Sages] of blessed memory said, "will become a nation there - this teaches that they stood out there."

(Seforno 46:3)

 

The Tenth of Tevet - The General Day for Kaddish

Rabbi Shmuel Reiner, Rosh Yeshiva of Maale Gilboa, sent us this article.

The Mystery of the Hidden Book

Once a few years ago, someone wrote a short book that is crucial for believers. Its title is Lo Ira Ra - I Shall Not Fear Evil and its subtitle is: 33 Explanations for Believers of Europe's Years of Wrath. Its table of contents is even more revealing: 14 explanations of where God was during the years 5700 to 5705, and six explanations of the suffering of the righteous and of school children in this world. Three chapters deal with question "Is there suffering in this world?" The book concludes with a number of letters from important rabbis expressing the need for faith to be strengthened in our times.

After writing the book, preparing its indices of citations from Scripture, the Sages, and so on, and after the title page was ready for printing, the author remembered that when he was a young religious school child he once arrived late to school and when the teacher asked why he was tardy, the child answered, smiling victoriously, "I have two excuses... " Glaring at him with a look full of truth and terror, R. Elimelekh Rabinowitz (Zorkin) answered him: "When someone has two excuses, apparently neither of them is correct."

And ever since recalling that incident, whenever people began discussing that war in the House of Study, he would close up into himself and remain silent.

 

Readers respond

In his article, "Thoughts on Current Events" (Vayishlah issue), Pinchas Leiser lists a umber of things that undermine the foundations of our existence as a democratic society. He was justified in the examples he cited. However, I wonder why he failed to mention other serious deeds that undermined - to a decisive extent - the faith of a large Israeli public in the "democratic" functioning of the State of Israel. I will mention three of these:

The hiring of Yigal Raviv as a government agent who was supposed to discredit right wing circles through his shocking provocations (such as dressing up the image of Rabin in an S.S. uniform in Zion Square).

The "purchase" of the votes of Knesset members belonging to the right-wing Tzomet party in preparation for the important vote on "Oslo II," which passed by a majority of one vote. Is this what mean by "democratic government"?

The execution of the "disengagement" that involved several serious deviations from acceptable democratic procedures.

To these may be added the inability of broad sectors in our country to express their views properly due to the proven and intolerable bias of the entire state media favoring the representatives of the political left and their views.

Indeed, we must all protect the democratic foundations of the State of Israel, but people who make light of those foundations should not preach about them to others.

Blessings,

Gavriel H. Kohen

 

Pinchas Leiser, editor of Shabbat Shalom, responds:

I thank Dr. Gavriel Kohen for his comments.

I certainly agree with him that all of Israel's governments have suffered from various faults.

I did not relate to them because I came to warn of one particular area of serious damage to democracy. I did not write because a prime minister of the "Left" had been murdered; I would have written the same things if a prime minister of the "Right" had been murdered in the wake of red lines having been crossed in protests. This murder and the atmosphere of delegitimization and incitement (yes, perhaps Avishai Raviv's role and involvement should be investigated) preceding it, constitute a genuine danger, since they undermine the limits of discourse and protest. That is why they constitute an entirely different story. I think that there is a difference between the examples brought by Dr. Kohen and the issue dealt with in my article.

 

 

 

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