Parashat Vayigash | Rabbinic Fellow Iliana Brodsky | December 27, 2025

Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity

to participate in monthly spiritual direction sessions.

These serve as an aid in working out the complicated knots.

My Shama so often ties itself up in.

My spiritual director listens skillfully as I describe

these knots to her, and almost always, she waits until I'm done.

And then asks, so where is God in this?

Taking on spiritual direction has led me to think quite a lot

about how God reveals God's self to us.

Heschel writes in God in Search of Man

that the word revelation is like an exclamation.

It's an indicative rather than a descriptive term.

Like all terms that express the ultimate, he says,

it points to its meaning rather than fully rendering it.

For Heschel, there is something about revelation

that is intrinsically undefinable, something we don't quite have.

The capacity to put into words.

The best we can do is gesture towards it,

and there are many bold and obvious gestures

towards divine revelation demonstrated in our Torah.

They are our tools for understanding that God is with us.

We know we are hearing a true Word of God.

When we see smoke and lightning, hear blasting horns

or a booming voice disseminating from a mountaintop.

However, the three passes

which cover the story of Joseph contain none such gestures.

In fact, many are moved to ask upon reading them

the very question my spiritual director so often asks,

Where is God in this?

Scholars across disciplines note that in the Book of Genesis, while we often

find God presenting or speaking or acting miraculously to save God's people,

in the story of Joseph and his brothers, we never find such an appearance.

No miracles, nothing out of the ordinary.

I wonder, though, if instead of positing God's absent

partial view, gosh, our parsha for this week, in

the third installment of The Story of Joseph, is

encouraging us to engage different tools for locating God's presence.

If it's modeling alternative or perhaps more subtle gestures

towards divine revelation than the ones that we expect to see

are, there may be moments in our parsha that point to a complex,

grander of the divine, rather than fully rendering it.

The reunification of an alcove and partial doorway gush is emotionally rich.

The episode moves through a moment of shock and fear

into one of sheer relief and hope.

The brothers listen to Joseph as he explains

all that has happened to him was providential.

Joseph tells his brothers that he believes their sale of him

into custody of another tribe was only so that he could go ahead to Egypt

and create the circumstances that would take his family out of famine.

He instructs his brothers to go back and gather up their father's camp,

so that they can relocate to Egypt and benefit together

from their stockpiled resources.

The brothers realize that Joseph is not going to punish them

for their abusive acts they carried out towards him as children.

Instead, they now understand that

Joseph has been planning to nourish and protect them

without uttering a word.

Response Benjamin falls on the neck of Joseph

and the two brothers in front of all the others.

Embrace and weep.

It's not explicit from the plain meaning of this text

where or if God is acting in this scene.

However, the sheer range of heightened emotions expressed in these few verses

is enough to indicate that this moment is worth excavating for God's presence.

This passage reads just like an exclamation

mark, like the exclamation mark that Heschel describes.

Could Joseph's revelation of his own identity be a moment of divine revelation?

When looked at closely.

There are some striking gestural parallels between the scene from Genesis 45

and the revelation story told in Exodus, when Israel stood at the base of Har

Sinai to receive Torah or or paradigm for revelation

at the beginning of Genesis 45.

Joseph emits a cry heard across Pharaoh's kingdom,

and then tells his brothers to come closer as he reveals himself,

akin to the shofar blasts described in Exodus 19, verse 13,

Exodus 19:13

which signal to the people that God is ready to reveal God's self to them.

Then there's a paradigm shifting truth set forward in Exodus by way of covenant,

and then this week's parsha by way of fraternal reconciliation.

In verse three, we read that the brothers at first are terrified,

shocked by Joseph's dramatic self-disclosure.

Similarly, in the revelation of Exodus,

the children of Israel tremble and retreat.

Hearing the voice of God.

It's also worth noting that

the stakes in these two scenes are quite high.

As the wandering Israelites at the base

of the mountain, ill equipped for nomadic life and self-governance,

are given no real choice but to accept the covenant with God.

The brothers of Joseph in Pharaoh's kingdom are desperate,

rattled by famine and strife.

Their only hope for survival

is to accept Joseph's offer.

The gestures here towards revelation are striking,

but what are they pointing to exactly?

The embrace between Joseph and Benjamin

is particularly interesting to our commentators.

That is, Kunti offers what we might read as the more obvious meaning of this text,

saying that after two decades of estrangement, Joseph and Benjamin fall

upon each other's necks and cry in an unrestrained outpouring of love.

Rashi, however,

along with actually many, many other commentators,

relies on a midrash from Sheet Rabbah,

which promotes an entirely different reading to explain this verse.

Rashid Rabbah teaches

that Joseph and Benjamin embrace,

and as they do, they each have a vision of the future destruction of the holy sites

in what will be their respective territories of the promised Land.

As he leans upon the neck of his brother,

Benjamin sees the Temple in Jerusalem fall.

Jerusalem, being in Benjamin's future territory, and Joseph

the Tabernacle in Shiloh, which will be in

Joseph's future territory.

According to the Midrash, it is due to these visions,

these premonitions of destruction yet to come,

that the brothers then weep.

This midrash explanation of the moment may feel far fetched.

Still, its wide adoption by our commentators, including Rashi,

who purports to offer the most plain meaning of our text, indicates

something worth paying attention to in the brothers embrace.

In an interpersonal moment, the tradition teaches that the brothers

feel simultaneously relief in their change of circumstances

and grief in understanding that their good fortune might not persist.

In this emotionally intense exchange.

The brothers see that God's world contains both redemption and destruction,

that their search for home and safety expands far beyond

their particular moment, and echoes through time and space,

through generations and generations to come.

The theologian Franz Rosenzweig says that revelation

is a glimpse of the unique eternality of God.

The brothers Joseph and Benjamin

get a glimpse from a vantage point only God has.

Only God can offer.

Pray sheet robber reads Joseph and Benjamin to have had a fleeting

but impactful vision into God's way of being in the world,

one that supersedes our mortal sense of time and place.

What is that, if not divine revelation?

The only time God's voice presents in shot

by God comes much later in the portion when God speaks to our forefather Jacob.

God says to Jacob, and he already Mohammed's rhymer,

I will go down with you to Egypt.

Jacob follows his sons down to Egypt.

Now because Joseph is there, alive and well,

nor for the promise of food security for his family.

Jacob only goes when God affirms God's partnership with him.

This brief exchange with God gives Jacob

the assurance he needs to know that God is there with him in Egypt,

and will continue to participate in the lives of Jacob's descendants.

We learn from this parsha that divine presence will manifest

differently in the foreign land and in a new generation.

As the story of our people progresses,

so will our relationship with God.

And still God is active and detectable

to us through revelation.

Ultimately, this assurance is what bolsters

the family of Jacob to make a difficult move to leave their land

and protect their future.

In our time,

it's not always easy to detect where God is in our lives.

I don't know about you, but I have yet to hear God's booming

voice from a mountaintop, or anywhere else for that matter.

But parsha, by God, teaches us that God

reveals God's self in a plethora of ways and in a heightened

and precarious times, like the ones Jacob's children faced in famine.

Knowing that God is with us can help us make the next best steps forwards

towards safety and towards honoring life.

You may say

that we like Joseph and his family,

his brothers, Jacob's sons

are all living in a heightened and precarious time.

In the last few years, our community has been rattled by war and disease.

Acts of hatred and violence have been committed against us here and abroad,

and we have carried out unthinkable acts of destruction

against others.

It behooves us, for the sake of our future,

to not only ask, Where is God in this, but to then also do the hard work

of finding God, a figuring out God's modes of self-expression,

no matter how explicit or implicit

they might seem to us.

Next, Sabbath will be in the year 2026.

Believe it or not,

as we enter a new year,

I invite you to ask yourself often,

Where is God in this?

And to use all your powers and tools for detection in pursuit of the answer,

in attuning ourselves to God's many ways of being with us.

May we live out the New Year in safety and joy and in abundance.

Shabbat shalom.