44 | DECEMBER 19 • 2024

W

e live life looking for-
ward but we understand
it only looking back.
As we live from day to day, our
life can seem like a meaningless
sequence of random events, a series
of accidents and happenstances
that have no shape or inner logic.
A traffic jam makes
us late for an import-
ant meeting. A stray
remark we make
offends someone in a
way we never intend-
ed. By a hair’s-breadth
we fail to get the job
we so sought. Life as
we experience it can sometimes
feel like Joseph Heller’s definition
of history: “a trashbag of random
coincidences blown open in a
wind.”
Yet looking back, it begins to
make sense. The opportunity we
missed here led to an even better
one there. The shame we felt at our
unintentionally offensive remark
makes us more careful about what

we say in the future. Our failures,
seen in retrospect many years later,
turn out to have been our deepest
learning experiences. Our hindsight
is always more perceptive than our
foresight. We live life facing the
future, but we understand life only
when it has become our past.
Nowhere is this set out more
clearly than in the story of Joseph in
this week’s parshah. It begins on a
high note: “Now Israel loved Joseph
more than all his sons, because he
was a son of his old age, and he
made a richly embroidered robe.”
But with dramatic speed, that love
and that gift turn out to be Joseph’s
undoing. His brothers began hating
him. When he told them his dream,
they hated him even more. His sec-
ond dream offended even his father.
Later, when he went to see his
brothers tending their flocks, they
first plotted to kill him, and eventu-
ally sold him as a slave.
At first, in Potiphar’s house, he
seemed to be favored by fortune.
But then his master’s wife tried to

seduce him and when he refused
her advances she accused him of
attempted rape and he was sent
to prison with no way of prov-
ing his innocence. He seemed to
have reached his nadir. There was
nowhere lower for him to fall.
Then came an unexpected ray of
hope. Interpreting the dream of a
fellow prisoner, who had once been
Pharaoh’s cupbearer, he predicted
his release and return to his former
elevated role. And so it happened.
Joseph asked only one thing in
return: “Remember me when it goes
well with you, and please show me
kindness: mention me to Pharaoh,
and get me out of this place. For I
was forcibly taken from the land of
the Hebrews, and here also I have
done nothing to deserve being put
in this pit.”
The last line of the parshah is one
of the cruelest blows of fate in the
Torah: “The chief cupbearer did not
remember Joseph; he forgot him.”
Seemingly his one chance of escape
to freedom is now lost. Joseph, the

beloved son in his magnificent robe
has become Joseph, the prisoner
bereft of hope. This is as near the
Torah gets to Greek tragedy. It is a
tale of Joseph’s hubris leading, step
after step, to his nemesis. Every
good thing that happens to him
turns out to be only the prelude to
some new and unforeseen misfor-
tune.

ZERO TO HERO
Yet a mere two years later, at the
beginning of next week’s parshah,
we discover that all this has been
leading to Joseph’s supreme eleva-
tion. Pharaoh makes him Viceroy
over Egypt, the greatest empire of
the ancient world. He gives him his
own signet ring, has him dressed in
royal robes and a gold chain, and
has him paraded in a chariot to the
acclaim of the crowds. A mere 30
years old, he has become the second
most powerful man in the world.
From the lowest pit he has risen to
dizzying heights. He has gone from
zero to hero overnight.
What is stunning about the way
this story is told in the Torah is that
it is constructed to lead us, as read-
ers, in precisely the wrong direc-
tion. Parshat Vayeshev has the form
of a Greek tragedy. Mikketz then
comes and shows us that the Torah
embodies another worldview alto-
gether. Judaism is not Athens. The
Torah is not Sophocles. The human
condition is not inherently tragic.
Heroes are not fated to fall.

The reason is fundamental.
Ancient Israel and the Greece of
antiquity — the two great influenc-
es on Western civilization — had
profoundly different understand-
ings of time and circumstance.
The Greeks believed in moira or
ananke, blind fate. They thought
that the gods were hostile or at best
indifferent to humankind, so there
was no way of avoiding tragedy if
that is what fate had decreed. Jews
believed, and still believe, that God
is with us as we travel through time.
Sometimes we feel as if we are lost,
but then we discover, as Joseph did,

Improbable Endings
and the Defeat
of Despair

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH