2012: A New You (Kosher Sutra)

When being told a dramatic story, we all love the surprise ‘reveal’ at the end. Darth Vader removes his mask with “Luke, I am your father”. Russell Crowe spins around to say “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North…”*. In this week’s Kosher Sutra the prophet Joseph reveals to his brothers that he isn’t only the leader of Egypt, but says “I am Joseph”. Today’s Sutra is about revealing our true selves and our own potential in the coming year.

One reason why humans love being told stories is because they reflect how our minds work. We go to sleep and we use internal movies to process our deepest thoughts and desires, using a technique called dreaming. Psychologist Carl Jung identified that we dream in a three-act structure with a beginning, middle and end, which explains why the majority of films and plays follow this idea. David Mamet’s excellent book Three Uses of the Knife explores the difficulty of constructing the perfect story, and the need to keep on building the tension with a well-crafted Act II.

The middle of Joseph’s story, his ‘Act II’, is a complete mess. We are all familiar with his Act I – he is the favourite son, he has some dreams and he gets given a coat, and then everything goes wrong. He was then sold into slavery, stuck in a jail and falsely accused of rape by his master’s wife. Nonetheless he managed to stay on track and rather than getting beaten by depression and giving up, kept his self-belief and belief in a Higher Power and eventually achieved immense success by the end of his drama.

The world we live in appears to be experiencing difficult challenges and it often seems that things aren’t getting better. We are told that Joseph had an overwhelming Bitachon – Trust in the Divine – and if we are able to echo this quality then we too can ride out the dark times and create space for light to follow. The rabbis teach that Joseph had a brief loss of faith when he was in jail, asking the Butler to do him a favour rather than praying to God, and he was subsequently punished with an extra two years in jail because he had a brief lapse of focus (Rashi, Gen 40:23).