Parashat Va-yeishev
Written by Judith Rosen-Berry Friday, 30 November 2007
The Baal Shem Tov said: “There are two ways to serve God. One is to separate yourself from people and from the affairs of the world, and to devote yourself wholly to the study of religious books and prayer. This is the safe way. The other way is to mingle with people, to engage in the affairs of the world, and, at the same time, to try and be an example of godliness. This is the more difficult of the two.”
But what does it mean to be an example of godliness?
Although it is not immediately apparent from this week’s Torah portion, in fact Va-yeishev (the beginning of the Joseph narrative) does offer us a way into exploring this very question.
It is written in verse 2 of chapter 39 that after being sold into slavery in the household of Potiphar, וַיְהִי יְהוָה אֶת -יוסֵף , ‘the Lord was with Joseph’. Initially this verse seems straightforward enough, nothing confusing about its content: ‘the Lord was with Joseph’. But the rabbis were puzzled by this phrase. ‘Wouldn’t we just assume’, they asked, ‘that God would have been with Joseph? As the son of one of the Patriarchs, a hero of his own biblical story, Joseph is obviously one of God’s intimates. Why else would he play such a prominent role in the Torah?’ The rabbis concluded then that the phrase: ‘the Lord was with Joseph’ must mean something else.
According to Rabbi Huna (in Midrash B’reishit Rabbah), the phrase: ‘the Lord was with Joseph’, meant that: ‘Joseph whispered God’s name whenever he came in and whenever he went out.’ It is not then, as we may have thought, that Joseph received the special attention of God, but rather that Joseph quietly cultivated a consciousness of God’s presence in everything that he did, in all his comings and goings.
In the context of this particular rabbinic interpretation then, Joseph might well be the example of godliness that we are looking for. Joseph cultivated a ‘whispered’ and unassuming sense of the sacred in the everyday, an unobtrusive and quiet relationship to the divine in the mundane – a practice of godliness that drew no attention to itself. The everyday is its forum, there is nothing special about it, nothing that would immediately draw the eye or ear to it. There is no mention of performance, no reference to the creation of an aesthetic, or style, no language of calibre, merit or worth.. Joseph’s godliness cannot be judged because it consists of nothing more overt than the simple ‘whispering’ of God’s name.
Of course the rabbis don’t say it but I wonder whether there is an implicit recommendation here, that in the pursuit of godliness we should not be distracted by forms of religious life that are staged, that draw attention to themselves, that are concerned and perhaps overly preoccupied with their external performance, with how things might appear. There is of course something instructive here about spiritual and religious conceit and self-aggrandizement. But we might also infer from this that beautifully or exactly performed prayer and liturgy can have the unwanted effect of distracting, soothing and tranquilizing us against the everyday which is the real stage for godliness, not the synagogue or room of prayer.
Maybe then, in this rabbinic interpretation, there is a warning against the siren song of the aesthetic spiritual experience, and all that would lull us into that place where the bitter realities of existence dare not intrude.
Today one of those bitter realities is the pandemic of AIDS and HIV that continues to affect so many across the globe. We may well feel that it is appropriate to pray for a רְפואָה שְלֵמָה , a perfect healing for those with this disease. But AIDS and HIV are not spiritual problems. Death and disease are everyday problems, death and disease are political.
So if we are to pray, if we feel that it is appropriate to pray, our prayer at least needs to awaken us to the reality that death for countless numbers of people has this political dimension.
Our prayer needs to remind us that there is an unnatural and deeply wrong way in which so many die – through lack of care, nourishment and medication. Death from AIDS is a political problem, not just some overwhelming collection of individual tragedies that can somehow be ameliorated through beautiful prayer.
In this context I think that the rabbis’ reading of Joseph’s ‘godliness’ illustrates for us that although it is difficult, godliness – the quiet and unassuming practice of consciousness of God – cannot be separated from the everyday or political domain and that it is our responsibility to engage with the everyday and political. There is a warning here not to hide inaction behind the carefully crafted words of a sermon or retreat into the many aesthetic and religious practices of our tradition, but to physically accompany those communities and individuals who face the grief, fear and rage of lives robbed of a just and compassionate existence. This is indeed, as the Baal Shem Tov said, the difficult path towards ‘godliness’ – but I still think and hope that it is the Jewish path and the one that we must do our best to follow.
