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 

