Here in this new week of the new year, this moment full of limitless possibility, I want to talk briefly about fate. I don't know why. I guess it was meant to be.
No wait, I remember now. Because it arises out of this week's Torah portion, called Vayigash, which is the climax of the many-week-long story of Joseph.
As you know, I love this story and have a special interest in it. I've written and taught many times about Joseph's suspicious gender. But there are other angles of interest too – there's trauma, there's reconciliation, and there's something very interesting about prophecy and its inevitable fulfillment.
I'll refresh your memory on the story so we can be on the same page. Joseph is the son of Jacob and his beloved wife Rachel. When Joseph is still young, Rachel dies giving birth to his brother Benjamin. Joseph is beautiful, says Torah, using the same words it uses to describe Rachel, suggesting that perhaps he is beautiful in just the way she was. In any event, Joseph becomes his father's favorite, perhaps because he is a reminder of his mother, the beloved wife.
Joseph's whole life is marked by dreams. He has vivid and prophetic dreams, and he is also able to interpret the dreams of others. When he is still a teenager, he dreams of his brothers bowing down to him. And he is either confident enough or naïve enough to tell them that.
The older brothers hate Joseph with such a venom that they plot to kill him. Only the intervention of Reuben saves his life. They cast Joseph into a pit, and when a caravan passes by and Reuben wanders off, the others sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt.
There, Joseph has a series of adventures and misadventures but, as Torah puts it, "God was with him" and he manages to pull himself out of slavery, interpreting Pharaoh's dreams and becoming Pharaoh's chief operative. His task is to manage the collection and distribution of food during the 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine that Pharaoh's dreams predicted.
Meanwhile the famine is overtaking life back home as well. Rumors spread that there is food in Egypt, and the older brothers are dispatched to go there and procure. There, they come face to face with Joseph – without recognizing him. After all, many years have passed, and Joseph looks and dresses and speaks Egyptian. And he is not just any Egyptian, but one of great importance. They bow low before him, just as Joseph had dreamt so long ago. Prophecy fulfilled.
Joseph begins playing out a kind of game with them. He treats them generously, but also threatens them if they do not return with the youngest brother, Benjamin. Once they do, Joseph frames Benjamin for theft, telling the other brothers to go home to their father while Benjamin stays on as his slave.
Who knows what Joseph intended? Who knows how the old trauma stirred in him? What anger or fear arose when he saw his abusers walk into the room. Perhaps he was just trying to get Benjamin away from them, for fear that Benjamin had become the new Joseph in the family system – hated and abused. Perhaps Joseph was trying to reveal his brothers' dark hearts to their father or to punish them with a new helping of guilt.
Whatever his specific intention, Joseph set up, in effect, a test. Would they repeat what they did with Joseph, abandoning a brother into slavery and burdening their father with another terrible loss, or would they choose another path? Could they break free from who they once were? Or was the future fated to be as the past had been?
And that's where this week's Torah begins.
Joseph's older brother Judah steps forward (or he will tomorrow morning in synagogues around the world) and makes an impassioned plea for Benjamin's freedom. Judah was the brother who first said, "Let's kill Joseph" lo so many years ago. But now he refuses to leave without Benjamin and offers himself up to be Joseph's slave in Benjamin's place.
His words are terse and emotional. Midrash goes wild here, giving many versions of additional exchanges between Judah and Joseph.
But whatever Judah says, Joseph can't hold back any longer, can't stick with whatever his plan had been. He sees the tikkun here – that this time the brothers are making a different choice. He empties the room of servants, and unmasks himself to the brothers, who stand there, blinking, bewildered.
Before they can catch their breath, Joseph says, "Do not reproach yourselves because you sold me into Egypt. It was God who brought me here so that I could save your lives and ensure your survival on earth."
So it is this turn that I want to spend a few moments with. Joseph repeats three times in as many verses that his ending up in Egypt was God's doing. Which is a very generous thing to say to the people who threw you in a pit and abandoned you to slave merchants.
In her book, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, scholar Aviva Zornberg suggests that in part Joseph was giving his brothers a line to say to their father, to help defuse the shame when they tell him that Joseph is alive and that they'd lied to him about his death so many years ago.
But, Zornberg goes on to point out, it isn't just to give them a line. Joseph is "talking about his personal perspective on his own life." However Joseph felt in the pit, in the caravan, in Egyptian servitude, in a dungeon, and anywhere else in his past, now he looks back and sees how the circle was drawn and closed. How it all brought him to this time and this place; and being in this time and place has purpose. He can save his family.
"Everything happens for a reason," people often say. But we don't ever know on the front end if that's true. We want our actions to have purpose, but we can't clearly see where the chains of cause and effect that we launch will land. When Joseph predicted his brothers' bowing down to him, there was no way to tell if that would happen, and if it would, what actions would bring it about. Because in any moment, anything can happen. And this makes any particular outcome so unlikely.
Because face it, everything is unlikely. We are unlikely. You are here because of the decisions your parents made, and your grandparents, and all your ancestors in an unbroken line back to the first living organism. Not just big decisions. What to have for dinner or when to take a walk all played a role. Any different decision of almost any sort and you wouldn't be here.
Physician and dating guru Ali Binazir calculates that the odds against any of us being here are something like 102,685,000 to 1. That is 10 with almost 3 million zeros after it to one. And those are just the roughest possible odds since the beginning of life on earth. Back up from there to the Big Bang and add in the odds of this planet forming at all! Every single condition had to be just right.
As Dr. Binazir puts it, the odds of our being here are basically zero.
And so we are completely unlikely. Each of us in this room. Completely unlikely.
And yet that same calculus works in the inverse when we look back. Given everything that did in fact happen – choices and accidents and migrations and mutations and weather events – our being here right now was the inexorable outcome.
And so we are also completely inevitable. Each of us in this room. Completely inevitable.
And that paradox, that each of us is unlikely and also inevitable, is huge and magical.
So it was for Joseph, and Joseph knew it. Yes, his survival was unlikely. His rise to power unlikely. The fact of the brothers' ever seeing each other again unlikely. But looking back from the moment of their reunion, Joseph could see that everything had to have lined up perfectly in order for this to happen, and in order for them all to be saved. This is the kind of destiny that Joseph is inspired to call God.
The facts are the same for us. The odds against any of us are immeasurable. When we look forward, all is unlikely. And looking backward, all is inevitable.
So I leave it to each of us to do with this what we will. Because likely or not, here we are in this world, in this life. Each of us balancing on that knife edge between unlikelihood and inevitability.
So maybe we are here for a reason. Just like Joseph. But it is up to us to determine what that reason is. What does the extreme privilege of being here inspire us to do? How do we make these lives ones filled with purpose, with joy, with an effusion of meaning? How do we use this improbable moment to up our game and this world's game? To set in motion acts of kindness, alongside dreams of a healed world, without knowing where they will land.
We are unlikely and inevitable beings. And that encourages me. I don't know if I am meant to be here. But my being here defies the odds, and the whole history of Creation led to it. So if that doesn't give me some hope that my being here has meaning, what does?
So I will try to take this accident of physics as an opportunity, as an invitation. And so might we all as we enter this new year. As poet Mary Oliver says:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I was inspired this week by, and am grateful to, the participants, stewards and faculty of the 2019 Taproot Gathering.