(Delivered on December 20, 2024)

This week’s Torah portion, Vayeshev, kicks off the cycle of stories about Josef. The favored son whose youthful arrogance alienates his brothers. The hapless youth who is so loathed that he gets thrown into a pit by those same brothers, and later sold into slavery in Egypt. The survivor of sexual harassment who is falsely imprisoned. We love our Josef—he’s an endlessly intriguing character—but he has a lot of tsuris.

Yet, as my friend Rav Hazzan Ken Richmond points out, three times in our parsha Josef is described as מצליח—successful. And each of those times, it’s in the context of his being in a situation of peril and compromise, the kind of situation that most of us would not regard as fertile ground for success. The first two times he’s called successful—in chapter 39, verses 2 and 3—Josef has been purchased as a slave by an Egyptian nobleman called Potifar. Yet even in this state of degradation, a human being, bought and sold, the Torah says he is מצליח. 

Because of his unique personal qualities, Josef attains a high position in Potifar’s household. He is put in charge of more and more things, until he is essentially second in command. Still he is a slave and has no actual power, so when Potifar’s wife makes persistent moves on him, he has no recourse. Eventually, having refused her advances once too often, Josef is falsely accused of assaulting her. On the strength of Eshet Potifar’s position of power and her proximity to the Pharaoh, Josef is imprisoned. And there in the prison, he is again called מצליח. 

For the Torah to make a repeated point of describing a person—a person who is first enslaved and then imprisoned—as successful, makes me wonder how the Torah is thinking about success. 

Looking more closely at the verses, though, the connection is clear and surprising—downright radical in our culture that so equates success with wealth and power. Chapter 39 verse 2 reads:

וַיְהִי יי אֶת־יוֹסֵף וַיְהִי אִישׁ מַצְלִיחַ וַיְהִי בְּבֵית אֲדֹנָיו הַמִּצְרִי׃

And God was with Joseph, and he was a successful man, 
and he was in the house of his Egyptian master.

The text does not whitewash his enslaved status as it calls him successful; the tension between his economic reality as a slave and his so-called success is unresolved. Therefore the Torah seems not to care about financial position when it considers the matter of success. Rather, as Rav Hazzan Richmond writes, it’s Josef’s experience of the presence of God that differentiates him and makes him successful. The Italian commentator Yitzhak Abarbanel writes about this verse:

והנה יוסף עִם היותו עבד מושלים 
תמיד היתה יִרְאָת אֶלֹהים לנגד עֵינָיו ובכל מעשיו

For though Josef was enslaved to the ruling class,
the reverence of God was always with him—before his eyes and in his doings

Josef kept his mind on his relationship with God through all the hardships he faced. By Abarbanel’s lights, through his religious faith, Josef’s dignity remained intact even in the most undignified settings. Josef kept his eyes on the horizon, such that his divine companionship lent him the glow of success even through the debasement of slavery and imprisonment. 

If the chill in the air, the early darkness and the full moon didn’t remind us, our calendars would: it’s almost the 25th… of Kislev. In other words, it’s nearly Chanukah. The origin story of Chanukah deals in part with the desecration of the Temple and the Maccabees’ subsequent recovery. It centers around the well-known (if probably untrue) legend of the lamp oil that was only meant to last one night but somehow lasted for eight nights. As the Maccabees regrouped from experiences of antisemitism, violence, and humiliation, their faith inspired them to light the one bit of oil they had in their possession, even though it seemed like it could never suffice to the task of rebuilding. In fact, some say that the miracle was not the eight nights, but the courage to kindle the light that first night. Similarly to Josef, the Maccabees located their sense of confidence in something other than the promise of material wealth and comfort. To me, the miracle is that what they had, turned out to be enough. Their success was in their belief in the presence of God to carry them through. 

As the dark days of winter approach, we prepare to fill our homes with light, festivity, and especially, with beloved family and friends. Our tradition invites us into the practice of פרסומי ניסא—of publicizing the miracle, through placing our chanukiyot where others can see them. By adorning our windows and doorways with light—a little more each night—we remind our neighbors—and ourselves—that what truly fills us is not material plenty but the success that Josef models, the contentment of divine accompaniment. 

Shabbat shalom!