The Joseph cycle - the only novella in the Torah - begins this week. Unlike the patriarchal stories that precede it, the Joseph story doesn't begin with his conception or birth. The spotlight shines on him, starting at age 17. There are other differences too.
While this extended story echoes many of the themes of the stories that preceded it – sibling rivalry, deception, exile, now these themes are brought to an intensity we haven’t seen before. Here we do not only have a pair of rival brothers here, vying for a blessing and a birthright. In this set of stories, we have a whole band of brothers who sell Joseph into slavery as an alternative to their initial impulse – to kill him in cold blood. The deception this time isn’t about who gets to receive a blessing. This time, the brothers trick their father into believing that Joseph has been torn apart by a wild beast. The protagonist in this story does not only leave home to sojourn with relatives out of fear of his brother. This time, Joseph is sold into captivity down to Egypt, the most foreign of foreign lands. Whereas in previous stories, love has been prominent, here, hate takes center stage.
Another difference from the stories that have preceded this is the role of God. Here God recedes from a "character" directly acting and speaking into more of a power operating in the background. Instead of God coming to Joseph in a dream to make a covenantal promise, Joseph has a series of dreams that contain a message about his destiny. Instead of God making a pact with Joseph, as God does with Jacob, we learn that "God was with Joseph" in Egypt and that God blesses him with success in the house of Potiphar, and again when he is imprisoned. God doesn't speak to Joseph, as far as we know, but God is the power to whom Joseph attributes his ability to interpret dreams.
We also are not only following the story of just one future patriarch in this parasha. Joseph is clearly at the center of the story. But this cycle is not only about Joseph - we see the political identities of the 12 tribes starting to take form as well, as we get snippets of narrative about Reuben and Judah as well. In fact, a a whole chapter is devoted to Judah, who develops from a person whose idea it is to sell his own brother into slavery, to a man whose own sons are dying and who is deceived by his daughter-in-law Tamar, to a man who by the end of the cycle ultimately takes responsibility for his own brother and father.
These differences all seem to point us in the direction of the next book, Exodus. We begin to zoom the camera out from individual stories of a family to the view of a nation in relationship with God. This novella provides an important and dramatic bridge from the mom and pop and God stories of the first part of Genesis to the sweeping story of peoplehood that is to come.
Shabbat Shalom!
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