Torah portion: Their brother’s keeper

It is hard to know what is going through the minds of Joseph’s brothers when Jacob commands them to descend to Egypt to purchase food, in the midst of the Canaanite famine. Does it occur to them that they might encounter their brother, who was sold so long ago? Might they have been dreading that possibility in their hearts? Or perhaps hoping for it? 

The sages of the Midrash had a strong hunch about this, and they sought and found a textual clue to support it. As Reuben, Simeon and company are departing for Egypt, the Torah chooses to describe them not as “the sons of Jacob,” but rather as “the brothers of Joseph” (Genesis 42:3). The Midrash asserts that this is a peculiar choice, as the objective of their journey — that of securing food — has everything to do with their relationship with Jacob, their father, and nothing whatsoever to do with their relationship with their long-lost brother. 

From this textual peculiarity, the Midrash deduces that the brothers had grown to regret what they had done, and that for several years now had been saying to themselves, “When it should happen that we travel to Egypt, we will retrieve Joseph and return him to his father.” Thus, on the day Jacob requested that they go there in search of sustenance, the brothers knew that the time for the retrieval mission was upon them, and they departed the next morning for Egypt as “the brothers of Joseph,” men on a fraternal odyssey. 

But before we get too impressed with Joseph’s brothers, we should ask ourselves the obvious question: If, in fact, the brothers had grown to regret their actions and had become determined to remedy their sin, why were they sitting around and waiting for an occasion to go to Egypt? Why had they not gone before? Why had their feelings of regret not led them to say, “We cannot allow our brother to toil in servitude even one more day!”? 

I’ll propose that the sages of the Midrash, too, considered this question, and incorporated it into their teaching. As keen observers of human behavior, they were all too familiar with an uncomfortable little secret about regret: Even that noble and righteous emotion can sometimes be self-serving, even self-indulgent. 

Regret can often be cathartic and cleansing, affording the transgressor the ability to say, “I am not callous and without conscience. I am someone whose heart recognizes what is evil and wrong.” The regretting itself serves as partial exoneration, relieving the sinner of the worst of his pangs. And when regret functions in this way, the need to remedy the actual sin, to relieve the suffering of the actual victim, lacks in urgency. “When it should happen” that the opportunity arises to do the fixing — at that point it will be done. 

When regret comes in this self-serving version, the wrong that is ultimately at the bottom of it can remain unrighted for a long time, until the moment of the transgressor’s convenience. It is a phenomenon that underscores just how difficult it can sometimes be for us human beings to see beyond our own noses. 

But the Midrash continues, and teaches that, in time, Joseph’s brothers were indeed able to refocus their feelings of regret onto the “other,” onto the brother who (they still believed) was suffering as a result of their deeds. Creatively, the Midrash tells the story of brothers who — once actually in Egypt, beholding its dizzying vastness, feeling its frightening foreignness, smelling the inhumanity of its ubiquitous slave markets — become determined and single-focused in their efforts to rescue poor Joseph. 

The continuation of the Midrash has the brothers searching Egypt frantically for three days, ultimately looking for Joseph in the shuk shel zonot, the marketplace of prostitution. (“Joseph our brother was beautiful to look upon. Maybe he was brought here as a slave of the sex trade.”) It is there that they are seized and brought before Joseph, who had been tipped off about their presence in the country. As part of his interrogation, Joseph asks them, “If you indeed came here seeking food, what were you doing in the shuk shel zonot …? Were you not concerned about your own reputations?” 

The most noteworthy feature of the Midrash here is not the brothers’ response (“We were looking for something that we had lost”), rather the fact that finally the brothers’ regret and remorse had graduated from being self-centered to being other-centered. They were no longer concerned about themselves or their reputations. Their focus was exclusively on alleviating the suffering of Joseph, the other.

It’s a turning point in what had been the very troubling and sad story of 10 brothers. Everything begins to change for them the moment they take themselves out of the equation, dismiss the whining demands of self-interest, and enter a new world that  doesn’t revolve around their own egos, desires and needs, but around something higher, something nobler. 

Rav Yosef Kanefsky is rabbi at B’nai David-Judea, a Modern Orthodox congregation.