(Delivered December 13, 2025)

The Torah is at it again with a nice bait and switch. At the opening of Parshat Vayeshev, Jacob settles in בארץ מגורי אביו in the land where his father had been a foreigner. With Jacob settling in, surely things will begin to fall into a groove, as he completes the journey begun by his grandfather. By birds-eye view, the progression seems smooth: God tells Abraham to begin the journey; Isaac becomes the placeholder in Canaan, there but not quite, still a stranger; and then Jacob settles there in the first word we read from the scroll this week. So we might expect that the Torah is setting us up for something like a cozy bedtime story. אלה תולדות יעקב This is the story of Jacob. 

What follows is no more smooth and serene than what came before: Jacob, the grieving husband, deals with his children in ways that are clumsy at best, turning brother against brother and studiously avoiding any kind of reckoning with the dynamics of conflict within the family, dynamics that pick up steam with each verse. Meanwhile, Josef, the favored son, wears his elevated status both literally and figuratively, and shows no regard for how it might be affecting his brothers. Inevitably the brothers, already known in the episode of Dinah’s rape to be capable of real violence, live up to (or down to) their reputation and gang up on Josef with seeming callousness. Sitting down to a meal after ditching their brother is not their finest hour. Furthermore their lack of consideration for what it would do to Jacob to lose Josef means they go right ahead and enact the ruse. There are so many moments when they could have made less harmful choices. Instead, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

Studying the Parsha this week, I have been struck by how distasteful I’ve found all of the characters. Even Josef comes across as vain, spoiled, gossipy, and clueless. It’s very telling that, after his brothers respond so angrily after hearing about his first dream, he still goes ahead and shares the second one. He is, it seems, incapable of reading the room. 

And the way that Jacob’s other sons behave is equally disturbing. Indeed their vendetta is as much against their father as against their brother. Plucking Josef out of the way serves their immediate interests, but they can’t seem to see that causing their father grievous pain will not make him love them more. But within this family system, it’s impossible to talk about the dynamics in play, impossible to articulate the ways emotional distress is inflicted over and over and over. A culture of silence prevails. There are no words, only hurtful behaviors.

Interestingly, though, some of our sages are at great pains to preserve the reputations of the brothers. Ovadia Sforno, the sixteenth-century rabbi and physician who lived and worked in Bologna, neatly defines the problem before them in his comment on verse 18. The verse reads:

וַיִּרְאוּ אֹתוֹ מֵרָחֹק וּבְטֶרֶם יִקְרַב אֲלֵיהֶם וַיִּתְנַכְּלוּ אֹתוֹ לַהֲמִיתוֹ
They saw him from afar, and before he approached them,
they conspired to kill him. 

Sforno notes that in future parts of the Torah it’s drilled into us that the names of all twelve of Jacob’s sons are inscribed on the ephod and memorialized as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Given that after all these episodes of genuine cruelty they become somewhat exalted figures meant to inspire us, Sforno searches for the humanity in their hateful actions.

He writes: We must try to understand the collective feelings of the brothers as being that they actually felt themselves threatened by Joseph’s aspirations, and they were convinced that when one feels threatened, one is entitled or even obliged to take measures to neutralize the source of the danger. Thus, by Sforno’s lights, Josef’s approach felt to his brothers like a threat, and therefore their impulse to conspire to kill him was valid within their world view.

Later, Sforno posits that when the brothers sit down to eat after throwing Josef in the pit—even though they are doing something fairly heartless toward Josef, their actions make sense in their own minds. Sforno writes: If the brothers sat down to eat immediately after throwing Joseph into the pit, this is clear evidence that in their minds they had certainly not committed any wrong. WE, who were not part of Jacob’s household, and who know that these brothers were unanimously elevated to become the founding fathers of the Jewish nation, must therefore accept the premise underlying their actions as being that they had truly felt themselves personally threatened by Joseph. 

Other commentators try to redeem the brothers’ pausing for a meal in different ways. In Breishit Rabbah 84:17 Rabbi Achvah bar Zeira reads it as metaphor and foreshadowing: that this seemingly cavalier deed is meant to allude to the fact that Josef would eventually (in the coming chapters) be in the position to feed the world precisely because he ends up in Egypt. And the Midrash Sechel Tov says that even as the brothers were dining, they still invited passersby to join them in their meal. 

These explanations are not intuitive to me, but I see why Sforno and the midrashists are working with the story in this way. Indeed, for me, their efforts resonate as I reflect on the current-day divisions within the Jewish community: it makes me think of the ways that Jews with strong opinions (which is, possibly, all of us!) are tending more and more to assume the worst of those with whom they profoundly disagree. It is easier and easier to say to ourselves or to like-minded people, “I can’t believe a Jew would say such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would think such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would vote that way!” Which leads to, “I can’t even talk to that person, we disagree too profoundly.”

Yet Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: “When words fail, violence begins.” Ultimately, our commentators who search for a reasonable explanation for Josef’s brothers’ worst acts are teaching us from centuries ago that we can never fully know another person’s mind, but that it’s worth trying to discover what we can. We can never fully grasp what makes people do what they do, but if we start with the assumption of their humanity, if we approach with gentle curiosity, we might begin to untangle the roots of enmity.

Those of us who have read ahead or remember the coming parshiot from previous years know that eventually Josef will forgive his brothers and move forward in peace with them. In one of the most beloved moments in the Torah, Josef and his brothers will fully show one another who they are, through acts of vulnerability, care and generosity. They will overcome the culture of silence in their family and embrace one another, despite what came before. Eventually they will all set aside their grievances and become a family again. Josef and his brothers will be able to do what Jacob and Esav could not: stay together after reconciliation. 

So the birds-eye view of the progression from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob finds its resolution through this sequence of difficult but ultimately humanizing events. This family learns to do differently.

This is the story of Jacob.