Va'yechi: Hazak, Hazak, v'Nit'hazek - Parashat Va-Yehi 5769

Parashat Va-Yehi 5769 – January 10, 2009

Hazak, Hazak, v’Nit’hazek

May we be strong and may we also know that our actions have consequences that our out of our control.

One of our congregants recently engaged me in a lively discussion of the Biblical figure of Joseph. He told me that he didn’t like Joseph because the economic policy that Joseph instituted in Egypt resulted in the coercive nationalization of the economy. He wrote to me in an email “Historically, too much economic power in the hands of government has never worked out well for anyone, and particularly for Jews.” Well, I agree and so I took a closer look at the passage to which he was referring.

If you we look back to the very end of last week’s parsha we see that, after two years of drought, the people had no money with which to purchase the food that Joseph had stockpiled. Apparently, the original economic policy was changed. Back in Parshat Miketz, when Joseph proposes the plan to Pharaoh, he says that he will collect up crops during the 7 years of plenty and store them for the 7 years of famine. The implication is that the crops that the people themselves grew will be redistributed throughout the land. Instead, Joseph sold the people the very food they had grown. When the Egyptian people had spent every last penny they had (47:15), they pleaded with Joseph to release the food lest they all die. Instead of giving it out, Joseph took the people’s livestock as payment. When that ran out, Joseph took the Egyptians’ land in exchange for food. But not only that, he relocated the entire Egyptian population, moving people from the countryside to the cities and from one city to another. And he went a step further; he placed the Egyptian population in a kind of perpetual indentured servitude by imposing on them a 20% tax on any future crops they should grow. In the meantime, Joseph settled his family in the choice region of Goshen. While the Egyptian population was having their land expropriated, the Torah says that Jacob’s sons acquired holdings in the land and they were fertile and increased greatly (47:27). Our friend is right, this goes well beyond the nationalization of the economy; this is really the subjugation of an entire people! He’s right to point out that the state’s power has its dangers. Power can get out of control; and, once extended, power can be difficult to draw back. It is a truism that the exercise of power has unintended consequences.

Now, I want to come to the defense of our patriarch Joseph. I think it is clear in the text that Joseph’s social policies were not for his own personal gain (indeed we never hear that he acquires any of the wealth for himself, only for Pharaoh). And I think it is clear that what Joseph did – while maybe an unprecedented exercise of state power – was (at least to his mind) a necessary response to an intolerable crisis. His motives were pure; his actions were just and moral. After all, he took these measures to save lives! And, indeed, Joseph was revered during his lifetime as the savior of Egypt.

But, one cannot help wonder what the unintended consequences were of Joseph’s policies. One cannot help wonder if Joseph had an exit strategy. That is to say, what did he plan do to when the famine was over? Would he roll back his economic policies? Would the people return to their homes? Would their property be restored? How did the Egyptians feel having their land and livelihood taken away? How did they feel being relocated – essentially becoming refugees within their own country? What did Pharaoh do with all that wealth? The text is silent. But, you and I, having read ahead, know what happens several generations down the road.

Next week we begin the book of Shemot. In the first verses of Exodus we read, “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us.’” Over these intervening years, the Israelites had grown from a tiny clan into a nation. The Egyptians felt threatened and having either forgotten or ignored the debt they owed Joseph for saving Egypt, the Egyptians persecuted and enslaved the Jewish population in an effort to destroy us. They took their vengeance on us and it resulted in generations of torture, murder, and slavery.

This was the unintended consequence of Joseph’s policies. But, please don’t misunderstand me; and I want to make this crystal clear. To say that Egyptian hatred was a consequence is neither to justify it nor to draw a moral equivalence. Was the Egyptian response justified? No! It is never justified to enslave and murder innocent people. Was their a moral equivalence in the Egyptian response? No! There is no moral equivalence between Joseph’s extraordinary steps to save lives and protect his brethren and the genocidal plan of the Egyptians to destroy the entire Israelite nation. Nonetheless, sometimes there are unintended consequences to our actions, especially when we don’t think through their implications. And, whether justified or not, we have to live with the consequences. By subjugating the Egyptian population and radically altering the social and economic order of Egyptian society (even if morally justified at the time) Joseph may very well have planted the seeds of Egyptian hatred.

This week’s Torah portion also has much to teach us about our capacity for shortsightedness. Parashat Vayigash has the distinction of being the only portion in the Torah that begins without a visible break in the text. If you’ve seen the Torah scroll up close, you’ll notice that the text is divided into paragraph-like passages by the use of blank spaces. In the case of Vayehi, however, there are no breaks. Rashi’s very first question about this parsha is “Lamah parsha zo stumah?” “Why is this portion “closed”? And then he offers two explanations based on a play on the word closed (stumah). First, he says, that “after the death of Jacob, the eyes and hearts of Israel were closed to the suffering of enslavement, which the Egyptians were beginning to contemplate.” That is to say that they were blind to the hatred beginning to grow in the hearts of the Egyptians. Alternatively, Rashi says, “the passage is closed because Jacob had wished to reveal the future to his sons, but it was closed off to him.” What Rashi is referring to comes in chapter 49 where we read that Jacob, lying on his deathbed, called his sons together in order to reveal to them their future. However, instead of imparting this information, Jacob proceeds to bless his sons. We never hear Jacob’s premonition. Based on an ancient midrash, the commentators explain that, at that moment, the power of prophesy had departed from Jacob and he was not able to tell them the future.

The future is never certain. We don’t have the advantage of prophesy to know what the outcome will be. But we do have the capacity for discernment and the wisdom to learn from our past. Therefore, in all the difficult decisions in life – when the costs are high – we must be careful to think through the potential consequences of our actions. We must consider the probability for harm, we must take into account the limits of our power, we must have regard for the feelings and reactions of those people who are impacted by our decisions, and we must bear in mind that our actions may have negative consequences that we will have to contend with – even when they feel morally justified at the time. This holds true for individuals, for relationships, for our careers, as well as for organizations, and politics, and even in foreign relations.

When we reach the end of a book in the Chumash, as we did this morning, we have a tradition of rising and declaring “Hazak, Hazak, n’nit’hazek.” The phrase actually derives from the biblical account of a battle (2 Sam 10) in which King David’s entire army found itself surrounded by two enemy forces. His general, Yoav, aware of the deadly situation, lays out the plan for a two-front attack and turns to his lieutenant and says “Hazak v’nit’hazak” – [the entire verse in English is] “be strong! And may we strengthen one another for the sake of our people and the cities of our God; but the Lord will do what He deems right.” (2 Sam 10:12). I think General Yoav sums it up: faced with challenges, we must be strong and resolute; but we must also be prudent and remember that the outcome is not entirely in our control. Hazak, Hazak, V’nithazek - Let us be strong… and let us also pray that we will indeed be strengthened.