Parashat Vayehi | Rabbi Roly Matalon | January 3, 2026

The story of Ysef and his brothers

spans

four parot

and comes to an end in today's para vi.

Over these weeks

we have witnessed one of the most

remarkable transformations in the Torah.

Yousef begins as a favorite son,

gifted and self-absorbed,

a dreamer whose brilliance

is inseparable from his narcissism.

He's stripped of his coat,

thrown into a pit,

sold into slavery.

And yet again and again, he rises

from slave to overseer, from prisoner to

prince,

from exile to power.

Ysef is a self-made young man. He's

gifted,

wise,

handsome, and inspired.

Eliiselle wrote that Ysef is one of the

bibl one biblical figure who learns how

to transform exile into kingship, misery

into splendor, humiliation into mercy.

Ysef fascinates us because he makes the

impossible possible.

He outsmarts his enemies, resists

temptation,

survives betrayal, and always emerges

stronger than those who seek to destroy

him.

The tradition grants him the

extraordinary title

Yousef Sadik,

Yousef the righteous.

And Ysef's power extends well after his

death.

Even after his death, Yusef

righteousness

is said to perform miracles.

Explaining the verse we sing in

Halamanos,

the sea saw and fled.

The Midrash tells us that when the sea

of reeds saw the coffin of Yseph

descending into the water,

the Holy One said, "It is written of

Yseph." and he fled and went outside by

anos byuta when he resisted the advances

of Potifar's wife. Therefore,

the sea too will flee before him.

The tradition also tells us that

Israel's exile and suffering over the

centuries were set in motion by what the

brothers did to Ysef.

The consequences of this story ripple

forward into history.

After all its tribulations,

the story of Ysef has a good ending.

In last week's parasa by

Ysef reveals himself to his brothers,

draw them draws them close and reassures

them. Now do not be distressed or

reproach yourselves because you sold me

here. It was to save lives that God sent

me ahead of you. It was all God's plan.

He tells them there is no retaliation,

no revenge, no punishment.

Did Ysef forgive them? It's not clear.

Perhaps it was, as Marilyn Robinson

writes in reading Genesis, elevating

these events, bitter as they are in

themselves, to the level of divine

providence, lifts them beyond the

reciprocities

of injury and revenge, beyond the reach

of justice.

This is not a pardon, it is grace.

In any case,

Ysef refuses

to be imprisoned by grievance.

Ysef heals his broken family and allows

it to survive.

All went all's well that ends well,

right?

Not quite.

It doesn't all end that well.

There's another side

to the story of Ysef.

At the opening of this week's parasa,

the Torah tells us Yakov lived 17 years

in the land of Egypt.

And when the time approached for Israel

to die, he summoned his son Ysef and

said to him, "Please do not bury me in

Egypt. Swear to me,

and he swore to him. Then Israel bowed

at the head of the bed.

Yakov

bows down to his son Ysef.

Rashi quotes the Talmud,

"Though the lion is king,

when the fox

has its time,

bow to him."

For the lion is king when the fox has

his time bowed to him. It is a startling

image. Ysef is not called a lion.

Pharaoh is the lion. Ysef is the fox.

Clever, adaptive, shrewd.

Yakov bows not because it is fitting for

a father to bow before his son, but

because it is necessary.

Rashi explains why Yakov bows.

He doesn't explain why Yseph accepts it.

How does Ysef allow his father to buy

bow before him? The Midash teaches that

10 times Ysef hears his brothers refer

to Yakov as your servant, our father,

and Ysef remains silent.

Silence is consent.

And for failing to correct this

dishonor, Ysef's life is shortened by 10

years. He dies in this week's parasha at

the age of 110 instead of 120 as would

have been fitting for Atadik.

This opens the door to a very different

side of Ysef. One far less comforting

and far more disturbing.

The Ysef who fascinates us, who rises

against all odds, who is able to be

gracious toward his brothers, is the

same Ysef who designs Egypt's economic

system during the famine.

When the famine becomes severe,

Ysef does not distribute food freely or

as part of a humanistic

humanitarian relief effort.

He sells it. When the Egyptians money

runs out, he takes their livestock. When

the livestock is gone, he takes their

land. Finally, he takes their bodies.

In a few short verses, Ysef transfers

all wealth,

all land, and all labor into Pharaoh's

hands.

The people say to him, "You have saved

our lives. Let us be servants to

Pharaoh."

Ysef hears gratitude,

but we hear something else.

Remarkably, the Torah and the

commentaries are largely silent about

Ysef's ruthlessness.

Rabbi Shai held notes the terrible

irony.

Ysef brought to Egypt as a slave becomes

Egypt's enslaver.

Rabbi writes,

"Yeseph displays remarkable

administrative prowess, but he unleashes

forces that eventually end up oppressing

and degrading his own people."

It is hard to imagine that the Torah

makes no moral judgment at all on Ysef's

setting this destructive process in

motion.

When the Torah imagines Israel's life in

the land, it prohibits the permanent

selling of land and limits slavery to a

limit of six years.

Permanent enslavement is unthinkable.

In other words, the Torah passionately

prohibits the Israelites from doing to

one another what Ysef does to the

Egyptian people as a whole.

Yes, Yousef saves lives, but he also

builds the system of bondage. And the

system he designs

will one day enslave his own people.

Ysef the dreamer and dream interpreter

can read economic cycles with prophetic

clarity, but he cannot imagine a social

order beyond an oppressive empire.

And here

a deeper pattern comes into focus.

Ysef's life is a hard and painful

education in powerlessness.

Betrayed by his brothers, sold,

imprisoned, forgotten. His trauma

teaches him one lesson. Survival depends

on mastering the system. He masters it,

but he doesn't challenge it.

So when power finally comes to him, Ysef

uses it brilliantly

and ruthlessly.

He is magnanimous when he's face to face

with his brothers, with his family.

there. He feels, he weeps, he remembers

he's capable of forgiveness or grace

and of seeing God's providential life

saving plan. But as a public figure,

Ysef has internalized the structures of

power so completely that he no longer

knows how to step aside it outside it.

To refuse his father's bowing down to

him would have meant taking the risk of

disrupting the structure of power. His

trauma taught him not to take those

risks. So Ysef is a sadik

but a tragic one. He saves lives and

harms an entire society. He's capable of

forgiveness and grace and at the same

time he's blind to the destructive

effects of his own power.

Yakov bows down to him. But he asks you

for one thing. Do not bury me here.

Egypt is not the final destination.

Egypt must not have the last word.

The fox's hour is real, but it is not

eternal.

Paradi ends with survival, a family

reunited,

and the prelude to Israel's enslavement

by the very system Ysef created.

This is where the Torah leaves us at the

end of the book of Beresid.

Living with both sides of Ysef,

the Sadik

and the enslaver,

means refusing to simplify ourselves or

our world

into heroes or victims.

The tradition idealizes Ysef, calling

him a sadik, and is largely silent about

his darker side. Ysef's brilliance, his

skill, even his grace with his brothers

did not come for free.

They are inseparable from the suffering

he endured and from the parts of himself

he had to deny in order to survive. To

survive and to acquire power, he had to

suppress his vulnerability and his moral

imagination.

The cost of that survival is that he

cannot fully inhabit every part of

himself.

His tears before his brothers are just a

glimpse of what he had to suppress.

We too have idealized ourselves as a

people. Chosen, clever, creative,

resilient.

That is what we needed in order to

survive. And yet dwelling in our

idealization

or in the memory of our suffering can

blind us to the consequences of our

power.

We risk justifying what we do even when

it harms others even when we participate

in systems that oppress.

Embracing the complexity and

acknowledging both sides of Ysef

means being willing to see the impact of

our actions

and to ask again and again how we act

with justice, restraint and moral

courage.

Silence, especially in the face of harm

or injustice, is never neutral.

We live in a moment that mirrors Ysef's

contradiction.

A time in which we are both vulnerable

and powerful, both threatened and

influential, both capable of grace and

capable of harm. We know

about pits,

betrayal, exile, suffering, and

survival. We know that anti-semitism is

alive and on the rise. And we also know

what Jewish power and rage can do. We

know what it means to be part of systems

that determines

who lives and who suffers.

Yakov's final request,

do not bury me in Egypt, is a reminder.

Power may be necessary,

but it must never become home. Never an

end in itself.

The book of Berishes ends with survival.

But survival is not enough. We must not

settle for being clever or resilient at

the cost of our moral vision.

Compassion, kindness, human solidarity

and the pursuit of righteousness are

also our legacy.

And next week