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