How close do you get? Vayigash
Can you continue to reach out with love toward someone whose flaws have hurt you? Can you continue to love yourself despite your awareness of your flaws?
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How close do you get? Vayigash
Overwhelming Love Heals
Ed Yisroel Susskind
January, 2016
Can you continue to reach out with love toward someone whose flaws have hurt you? Can you continue to love yourself despite your awareness of your flaws? In parshas Vayigash (Gen.44:18-47:27) Yehuda does both.
When have you felt so filled with love for someone that you lost sight of your own needs and focused solely on taking care of others? When have you been on the receiving end of such devotion? Vayigash, the parsha's name, means "and he drew close".
We have all heard inspiring anecdotes where a person spontaneously shields their spouse with their own body during a terrorist attack.
But what if the terrorist is their spouse? Can you "rescue" someone whose own fear and panic causes them to act hurtfully toward you? Or, what if the person terrorizing you is you?
"A longtime ago in a galaxyfar, far away," I learned an answer to those questions, when I was a lifeguard. We were warned: If you attempt to save a drowning person, their panic may cause them to drown you with them.
Thus the warning by our wise King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 4:9):
טובעים השנים מן-האחד
Nonetheless, as lifeguards, we were taught how to save a drowning victim, while also protecting ourselves. Do you know how to "swim"?
To heal the family breach and to heal himself, Yehuda opens himself to ecstatic, ego-freeing, love: Yehuda offers to become a slave in order to protect his brother Biyamin.
Yehudah essentially begs, "my father loves this boy more than any of his other sons." He rhaps poetic, "Their souls are intertwined." Yehudah is free of the self-absorption that previously dominated his catastrophic actions towards Yoseph.
Have you experienced that intense an intoxication, while receiving or bestowing love? Have you been able to totally love someone, more than yourself, even if they had wronged you? How do these issues relate to your relationship with both Hashem and your family?
To understand the impact of Yehuda's actions, we must first address two puzzling issues in the
parsha.
Question 1: The beginning and the very name of the parsha focus on the fact that Yehudah moved in to close, intimate, physical proximity, apparently toward Yosef. A paradox: How could it be that a foreign commoner such as Yehudah would have been allowed such close personal access to the Viceroy Yosef
Question 2: Yehudah offerred to take Binyamin's place as a slave. Why was Yosef then moved to tears?
In contrast, in the previous parsha , Yosef was not moved when the band of brothers, feeling great guilt, had offered themselves as slaves (Gen. 44:16).
An answer is that Yehudah's close, intimate approach was not to Yosef, but to his father. From a grammatical point of view, in the phrase "And Yehudah grew close to him" (Gen. 44:18) the "him" refers to Ya'acov. A pronoun, such as "him", normally refers to the nearest preceding noun. That noun is "your father" ( Miketz, Gen.44:17)
It is a general principal that to understand the actions of Biblical individuals we need to examine the metaphoric symbolism in the story. Yet, it is also a principle in Torah that the simple meaning of a story must also teach a true lesson. And at a simple level, we have a story in which a father has shown a destructive favoritism toward two of his sons . Nonetheless, Yehudah is overwhelmed by his love for Ya'acov. That love overrides "who is right or wrong."
And it is Yehudah's expression of that love which in turn overwhelms Yosef. Here, Yehuda is not acting out of guilt but out of love. He has "come close" to his father.
Can you enjoy being a Yehudah? Can you gloriously lose yourself in serving someone else who at the moment has wronged you?
I see people who are afraid to love someone who has wronged them. They are afraid to be a "
shmateh", i.e., a rag.
But the truth is: When I give in to you out of powerful generosity, not out of pusillanimous fear, I am not a "shmateh"; rather, I am a magnificent carpet. I give to you because, at other times, you have shown me your sincere love and good will. I believe you will show that love again. But right now, you are caught up in some irrationality, and you are being a total jerk. But you are my jerk and I still embrace my connection to you. On the one hand, I am careful not to do things for you that are destructive to my self-respect; and, at times, I may resist you in action. But, nonetheless, I can still love you.
When I am loving towards you, despite the fact that , at the moment you are being an offensive jerk, I powerfully convey the depth of my love.
But what about dealing with my own flaws? Yehudah had been emotionally crushed by his guilt after the selling of Yosef (
וַיֵּרֶד יְהוּדָה, Gen. 38:1). If I can love myself, despite my flaws, while I am also committed to rectifying those flaws, I achieve "radical self acceptance". My energies are then freed to serve others.
May we give to others, despite their flaws; and may it be that, despite our flaws, Hashem gives us the Ultimate Gift, with the coming of Moshiach, immediately.
 Dr. Yisroel Susskind is a clinical psychologist who practices locally (in Monsey, New York) and internationally (over the telephone and computer). He lectures worldwide on topics involving Torah, psychology, marriage and interpersonal relationships. He can be reached via email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or by phone (845-304-5481). |
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| Subject: | How close do you get? Vayigash |
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