Spread Your Blanket
A Message for Parashat VaYehi 2017
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Following
the death of Yaakov, a somewhat familiar scene unfolded between Yosef and his
brothers. It harkened back to the events surrounding Yosef’s self-revelation to
them seventeen years earlier (44:14-34). The brothers again felt guilt and fear
for their past treatment of Yosef, they again prostrated themselves before him,
and yet again offered themselves as slaves:
“And they charged Yosef,
saying: “…And so now, forgive, pray, the crime of the servants of your father’s
God” … And his brothers then came and flung themselves before him and said,
“Here we are, your slaves.” (50:15-18)
Yosef’s response echoed his past reply, as well:
And Yosef said: “Fear not,
for am I instead of God? While you meant evil toward me, God meant it for good…” (19-20)
He
assured his brothers once more that he would not exact revenge, and attributed
all that had transpired to a grand providential plan.
There
is, however, a significant difference between the two scenarios. Whereas Yehudah
had singularly set forth the offer of self-slavery in the past (44:16, 33),
that suggestion now came from all of the brothers. In contrast to
Yehudah’s past performance as a “lone leader” of the group, he was now joined
by all of his brothers in an approach of Yosef.
* * * *
Difficult
situations challenge a community to decide between the opposite reactions of
“dispersal” and “cohesion.” Dispersal refers to individual, self-centered
thinking and action. Faced with adversity, members retreat from the collective
whole in search of individual safety. Cohesion, however, is when a community
comes together to find a solution. Realizing that no individual can singularly
handle the situation, members of the community tackle the dilemma with the
input and support of a larger group.
* * * *
Howard
Shultz, CEO of Starbucks, once described his first encounter with my rosh yeshivah,
Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel zt”l, of Yeshivat Mir. He and a group of
prominent American businessmen had the opportunity to briefly meet with Rabbi
Finkel, whereupon the rabbi asked them, “Who can tell me what the lesson of the
Holocaust is?” Rabbi Finkel dismissed the various answers suggested by the men,
and then proposed his own:
“As you know, during the
Holocaust, the people were transported in the worst possible, inhumane way – by
railcar...After hours and hours in this inhumane corral with no light, no
bathroom, cold, they arrived at the camps…They went off to the bunkers to
sleep. As they went into the area to sleep, only one person was given a blanket
for every six. The person who received the blanket when he went to bed had to
decide: “Am I going to push the blanket to the five other people who did not
get one, or am I going to pull it toward myself to stay warm?”
Reaching
the climax of his description, Rabbi Finkel concluded the lesson:
“It was during this
defining moment that we learned the power of the human spirit, because we
pushed the blanket to the five others.”[1]
* * * *
Confronted
by the fear of revenge upon their earlier encounter with Yosef, the brothers
stood back as a disparate group of individuals with only one vocal leader. They
“clutched their blankets tightly” and shared them with no one. Reexperiencing
the same emotions seventeen years later, however, the brothers now “pushed
their blankets” to one another and stepped forward as a unified unit before Yosef.
Difficult
times present us with the decision of “dispersal” – when we keep our blanket to
ourselves, or “cohesion” – when we push it to others. Find your blanket and
push it to others.
[1] Yehuda Heimowitz, Rav Nosson Tzvi (Brooklyn, NY, 2012), pg. 380-81. It should be noted that this
message was based, in part, upon his uncle R. Hayim Shmuelevitz’s well-known
explanation of a passage in Sanhedrin 20a. See Sihot Mussar (Jerusalem,
IS, 2004), pg. 153.