vayigash: why should we die while you look on
sholem aleichem,
Chanukah is over, but hopefully some of the light remains. Personally, I spent my Chanukah inventing the 13-branched menorah and finishing off a truly delightful class on Chanukah halacha through yeshiva Shel Maala.
In Torah this week, Yosef brings his family to Egypt during the famine, feeds his family, and institutes serfdom. So there's a lot to talk about. Let's read:
ויכלכל יוסף את-אביו ואת-אחיו ואת כל-בית אביו לחם לפי הטף
Yosef sustained his father and his brothers and all his father's house including the children
ולחם אין בכל-הארץ
and there was no bread in all the land
Oy, already, we have such a difficulty. If there is bread for Yosef to sustain his family, how can we say ולחם אין בכל-הארץ?
Rashi explains that this is a shift in time. The Torah is now recounting the early years of the famine, when there was no bread. When Yaakov arrives in Egypt, he brings a blessing with his arrival and the famine ends. This certainly seems like a reasonable reading to me. But I do think there is another possible reading. Or haChaim (our transfem isaac commentator from yitzchak imeinu) reads this as a commentary on the בובד הרעב, the heaviness of hunger. He says that they were eating דבר מופלא, a concealed or extraordinary thing, and so they finished all the bread and more. In other words, there's no bread because, well, Yosef's family ate it all. Or haChaim finishes with a story from his own life:
שהיה אדם אחד אוכל שיעור מאכל י' בני אדם ועודנו רעב בבטנו רחמנא ליצלן
there was a man: he ate a portion of food ten times what men eat and he is still hungry in his belly, the merciful one save us
Rakhmana litslan, truly.
I have not, thank god, ever lived in a famine or in this extreme kind of hunger, so I don't want to speak to the particularity of this experience. In Vermont, as I'm sure in many places, COVID has caused huge increases in food insecurity. These data are often followed by calls to donate to food banks, which is a good thing to do (but please give them money, not canned goods.) But what we really need are changes to our society, not simply better funded nonprofits. In Vermont, estimates are that it would cost at most $29 million dollars to provide universal school meals to children. That's a lot of money to you or me, but our country is spending $116 million dollars each year to fly failed war machines over Vermont towns several times each day. In comparison, what a small price to pay to ensure that every child gets to eat breakfast and lunch. (To indulge in cliche: Jeff Bezos alone could fund universal school meals in Vermont for the next 3,000 years and still have 100 billion left over).
But anyway, back to the story. What does Yosef, one of the most powerful people in Egypt, do when faced with this famine? He takes everything. As we learn:
וילקט יוסף את כל הכסף
yosef gleaned all the money [Or HaChaim: there was absolutely no money left anywhere]
With all the money gone, the Egyptians come to Yosef to beg for bread and say:
ולמה נמות נגדך כי אפס כסף
and why should we die right in front of you -- just because there's no money?
Yosef does not give them bread. Having already collected all the money in the land, he offers to trade bread for livestock. There's a very telling moment here, where Yosef says:
ואתנה לכם ... אם-אפס כסף
and i will sell [bread] to you [in exchange for your livestock]....if the money is gone
אם אפס כסף? If the money is gone, Yosef? If??? You took it yourself! You know it is gone! I wish I was more articulate here, but this attitude is too familiar: the rich of our world take all our resources, and act like we have misplaced them when we have nothing left.
So Yosef takes all their livestock, and gives them bread. After eating the bread, they return again to beg from Yosef, saying:
למה נמות לעיניך ... קנה-אתנו ואת-אדמתנו בלחם
why should we die while you look on [lit: before your eyes]...take us and our land for bread
This is the game the rich play with us now. Hoard the money and the means of production, so that when desperate people are willing to sell themselves simply to survive you can claim their consent. Commentaries often argue in favor of Yosef here, saying that the centralization of food was necessary to ensure proper rationing, that without Yosef forcing this new economic system on Egypt they would not have survived the famine. That while we know this ends in slavery, Yosef was (somehow) doing the right thing.
This reminds me of the myth of public panic: that in a disaster, ordinary people cannot be trusted to care for each other. We will loot and waste and hoard. "Don't give your money to poor people on the street," we are told. They don't know how to use it! Give it to food banks and shelters who will distribute it properly. This idea is, thank god, a myth. In fact, the truth appears to be the opposite. Research shows time and time again that when disaster strikes, the elite hoard and loot and panic, while ordinary people reach out and help each other.
But this myth is in some ways self-sustaining and self-producing. Because of this myth, in disasters the elite lie to prevent public panic, thereby producing behavior they use to justify their fears:
Too often, the need to “avoid panic” serves as a retroactive justification for all manner of official missteps. In late March, as the coronavirus pandemic was climbing toward its crest in New York City, Mayor Bill De Blasio appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to defend his record. Host Jake Tapper pressed the mayor on his many statements—as recently as two weeks earlier—urging New Yorkers to “go about their lives.” Tapper asked whether those statements were “at least in part to blame for how the virus has spread across the city.” De Blasio didn’t give an inch. “Everybody was working with the information we had,” he explained, “and trying, of course, to avoid panic.” How advising people to avoid bars and Broadway shows would have been tantamount to panic was left unexplained.
Moreover, because of this myth, the elite disrupt the good things people are actually doing for each other:
Elite panic frequently brings out another unsavory quirk on the part of some authorities: a tendency to believe the worst about their own citizens. In the midst of the Hurricane Katrina crisis in 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin found time to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show and lament “hooligans killing people, raping people” in the Superdome. Public officials and the media credulously repeated rumors about street violence, snipers shooting at helicopters, and hundreds of bodies piled in the Superdome. These all turned out to be wild exaggerations or falsehoods (arguably tinged by racism). But the stories had an impact: Away from the media’s cameras, a massive rescue effort—made up of freelance volunteers, Coast Guard helicopters, and other first responders—was underway across the city. But city officials, fearing attacks on the rescuers, frequently delayed these operations. They ordered that precious space in boats and helicopters be reserved for armed escorts.
We've seen this in the COVID pandemic. Early failures in communication came from elite fear that the public would use up the mask supply, and the mistrust generated by that has mutated in horrific ways. And while it is true that some people did hoard, it was nowhere near the scale of the hoarding done by the US government and by the rich. And much of the hoarding narrative turned out to be false: toilet paper disruptions, for example, were in large part a supply chain issue, not the result of your neighbor buying 200 rolls. While companies were hoarding ventilators, while the US government was stealing shipments from other countries, while the rich were getting richer and richer, we were told to mistrust our neighbors and we were blamed for shortages beyond our control. I use the word "we" here, but need to acknowledge that, in the global picture, I am the elite. I am part of a country that is hoarding vaccines, panicking at what the global public might do, taking all the riches of the world and then disbursing them back to our advantage.
The only solution is emunah. The only way forward is trust. Because the truth is, whatever the commentators say, we don't know what the ordinary Egyptians would have done, because Yosef took all the money and all the livestock and all the land. He used his position of power to feed his family, and there was no bread in all the world.
What would have happened otherwise? Where would a little trust have brought us?
למה נמות בעיניהם? Why should people die while the rich and powerful look on?
in solidarity,
and gut shabes,
ada