44 | DECEMBER 21 • 2023 
J
N

I

n our parshah, Joseph 
does something unusual. 
Revealing himself to his 
brothers, fully aware that they 
will suffer shock and then guilt 
as they remem-
ber how it is that 
their brother is in 
Egypt, he reinter-
prets the past:
 “I am your 
brother Joseph, 
the one you sold 
into Egypt! And 
now, do not be distressed and 
do not be angry with yourselves 
for selling me here, because it 
was to save lives that God sent 
me ahead of you. For two years 
now there has been famine in 
the land, and for the next five 
years there will be no ploughing 
and reaping. But God sent me 
ahead of you to preserve for you 
a remnant on earth and to save 
your lives by a great deliverance. 
So then, it was not you who sent 
me here, but God. He made me 
father to Pharaoh, lord of his 
entire household and ruler of all 
Egypt.
” Gen. 45:4-8
This is markedly different 
to the way Joseph described 
these events when he spoke to 

the chief butler in prison: “I 
was forcibly carried off from 
the land of the Hebrews, and 
even here I have done nothing 
to deserve being put in a dun-
geon” (Gen. 40:15). Then, it was 
a story of kidnap and injustice.
Now, it has become a story of 
Divine Providence and redemp-
tion. It wasn’t you, he tells his 
brothers, it was God. You didn’t 
realize that you were part of a 
larger plan. And though it began 
badly, it has ended well. So don’t 
hold yourselves guilty. And do 
not be afraid of any desire for 
revenge on my part. There is 
no such desire. I realize that we 
were all being directed by a force 
greater than ourselves, greater 
than we can fully understand.
Joseph does the same in 
next week’s parshah, when the 
brothers fear that he may take 
revenge after their father’s death: 
“Don’t be afraid. Am I in the 
place of God? You intended to 
harm me, but God intended it for 
good to accomplish what is now 
being done, the saving of many 
lives. Gen. 50:19-20
Joseph is helping his broth-
ers to revise their memory 
of the past. In doing so, he is 

challenging one of our most 
fundamental assumptions about 
time, namely its asymmetry. 
We can change the future. We 
cannot change the past. But is 
that entirely true? What Joseph 
is doing for his brothers is what 
he has clearly done for himself: 
events have changed his and 
their understanding of the past.

BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT
We cannot fully understand 
what is happening to us now 
until we can look back in retro-
spect and see how it all turned 
out. This means that we are not 
held captive by the past. Things 
can happen to us, not as dra-
matically as to Joseph perhaps, 
but nonetheless benign, that can 
completely alter the way we look 
back and remember. By action 
in the future, we can redeem the 
past.
A classic example of this is 
the late Steve Jobs’ 2005 com-
mencement address at Stanford 
University, that has now been 
seen by more than 40 million 
people on YouTube. In it, he 
described three crushing blows 
in his life: dropping out of col-
lege, being fired by the company 

he had founded — Apple — and 
being diagnosed with cancer. 
Each one, he said, had led to 
something important and pos-
itive.
Dropping out of college, Jobs 
was able to audit any course he 
wished. He attended one on cal-
ligraphy and this inspired him 
to build into his first computers 
a range of proportionally spaced 
fonts, thus giving computer 
scripts an elegance that had 
previously been available only to 
professional printers. 
Getting fired from Apple led 
him to start a new computer 
company, NeXT, that developed 
capabilities he would eventually 
bring back to Apple, as well as 
acquiring Pixar Animation, the 
most creative of computer-ani-
mated film studios. 
The diagnosis of cancer led 
him to a new focus in life. It 
made him realize: “Your time is 
limited, so don’t waste it living 
someone else’s life.
”
Jobs’ ability to construct these 
stories — what he called “con-
necting the dots” — was surely 
not unrelated to his ability to 
survive the blows he suffered 
in life. Few could have recov-
ered from the setback of being 
dismissed from his own com-
pany, and fewer still could have 
achieved the transformation he 
did at Apple when he returned, 
creating the iPod, iPhone and 
iPad. He did not believe in tragic 
inevitabilities. Though he would 
not have put it in these terms, he 
knew that by action in the future 
we can redeem the past.
Professor Mordechai 
Rotenberg of the Hebrew 
University has argued that this 
kind of technique, of reinter-
preting the past, could be used 
as a therapeutic technique in 
rehabilitating patients suffering 
from a crippling sense of guilt. If 
we cannot change the past, then 
it is always there holding us back 
like a ball and chain around 
our legs. We cannot change the 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

The
Future 
of the Past

