L

isten to these words that are
among the most fateful and
reverberating in all of Jewish
history:
Joseph recognized his brothers, but
they did not recognize
him. (Gen. 42:8)
The Torah is a deep
book. We make a great
mistake if we think it
can be understood on
one superficial level.
On the surface, the
story is simple. Envious
of him, Joseph’s brothers initially
planned to kill him. Eventually they
sell him into slavery. He is taken to
Egypt. There, through a series of
vicissitudes, he rises to become Prime
Minister, second only, in rank and
power, to Pharaoh.
It is now many years later. His
brothers have come to Egypt to buy
food. They come before Joseph, but
he no longer looks like the man they
knew many years before. Then, he
was a 17-year-old called Joseph. Now
he is 39, an Egyptian ruler called
Tzofenat Paneach, dressed in offi-
cial robes with a gold chain around
his neck, who speaks Egyptian and
uses an interpreter to communicate
with these visitors from the land of
Canaan. No wonder they did not

recognize him, though he recognized
them.
But that is only the surface mean-
ing. Deep down, the book of Bereishit
is exploring the most profound
source of conflict in history. Freud
thought the great symbol of conflict
was Laius and Oedipus, the tension
between fathers and sons. Bereishit
thinks otherwise. The root of human
conflict is sibling rivalry: Cain and
Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and
Esau, and now Joseph and his broth-
ers.
Joseph has the misfortune of being
the youngest. He symbolizes the
Jewish condition. His brothers are
older and stronger than he is. They
resent his presence. They see him as
a troublemaker. The fact that their
father loves him only makes them
angrier and more resentful. They
want to kill him. In the end, they get
rid of him in a way that allows them
to feel a little less guilty. They concoct
a story that they tell their father, and
they settle down to life again. They
can relax. There is no Joseph to dis-
turb their peace anymore.
And now they are facing a stranger
in a strange land and it simply does
not occur to them that this man may
be Joseph. As far as they are con-
cerned, there is no Joseph. They don’t

recognize him now. They never did.
They never recognized him as one of
them, as their father’s child, as their
brother with an identity of his own
and a right to be himself.
Joseph is the Jewish people
throughout history.
Joseph recognized his brothers, but
they did not recognize him.

A BROADER ‘SIBLING RIVALRY’
Judaism was the world’s first mono-
theism but not the last. Two others
emerged claiming descent, literal
or metaphorical, from Abraham,
Christianity and Islam. It would be
fair to call the relationship between
the three Abrahamic monotheisms,
one of sibling rivalry. Far from being
of mere antiquarian interest, the
theme of Bereishit has been the leit-
motif of the better part of the last
2,000 years, with the Jewish people
cast in the role of Joseph.
There were times — early medieval
Spain was one — when Joseph and
his brothers lived together in relative
harmony, convivencia as they called
it. But there were also times — the
blood libels, the accusations of
poisoning wells or spreading the
plague — when they sought to kill
him. And others — the expulsions
that took place throughout Europe

between the English in 1290 and the
Spanish in 1492 — when they simply
wanted to get rid of him. Let him go
and be a slave somewhere else, far
from here.
Then came the Holocaust.
Then came the State of Israel, the
destination of the Jewish journey
since the days of Abraham, the
homeland of the Jewish people since
the days of Joshua. No nation on
earth, with the possible exception
of the Chinese, has had such a long
association with a land.
The day the State was born, May
14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, its
Prime Minister, sought peace with its
neighbors, and Israel has not ceased
seeking peace from then until now.

But this is no ordinary conflict.
Israel’s opponents — Hamas in Gaza,
Hezbollah in Lebanon — are not
engaged in a border dispute, these
boundaries or those. They deny, as
a matter of non-negotiable religious
— not just political — principle,
Israel’s right to exist within any
boundaries whatsoever. There are
today 56 Islamic states. But for Israel’s
neighbors a single Jewish state the
size of Wales is one too many.
Joseph recognized his brothers, but
they did not recognize him.
There is no state among the 192
member nations of the United
Nations whose very existence is called
into question this way. And while
we as Jews argue among ourselves
as to this policy or that, as if this
were remotely relevant to the issue
of peace, we fail to focus on the real
issue, which is, so long as Joseph’s
brothers do not recognize his right to
be, there can be no peace, merely a
series of staging posts on the way to a
war that will not end until there is no
Jewish state at all.
Until the sibling rivalry is over,
until the Jewish people win the right
to be, until people — including we
ourselves — realize that the threat
Israel faces is ultimate and total, until
Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah agree that
Jews have a right to their land within
any boundaries whatsoever, all other
debate is mere distraction.

Sibling Rivalry

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

50 | DECEMBER 26 • 2024