JOSEPH, OR THE
EDUCATION OF
A TZADDIK

THIS IS A STORY of dreams and dreamers. A frivolous, profane story. Seemingly concealing nothing in its depths, it brings into play every facet of human passion: love and hate, ambition and jealousy, glory and spite. Only one element is missing: the passion of God.

This Biblical tale is unlike any other. Expressed in terms of psychological intrigue or political conspiracy, there appears to be no metaphysical or theological dimension. God is not part of the cast. As if to illustrate that in a situation where brothers become enemies, God refuses to participate and becomes spectator.

A strange story it is, filled with spectacular turns of fortune, accompanied by shouts, tears and fury. Its heroes are warriors and prisoners, beggars and princes who know but do not recognize one another: characters in search of a destiny.

Beautiful and disquieting, it is also a tale about love— sublime love, lost and cursed love; it fairly bursts with tensions, quarrels, silence and . . . waiting, waiting most of all.

In my hometown, when I was a child, this story was performed on Purim. Perhaps to mock Ahasuerus, the pagan king who fell in love with a beautiful young Jewish girl, we juxtaposed his story to that of the Jewish prince passionately loved and pursued by a heathen woman. Joseph made us laugh and cry, made us feel sad and proud: it is easier for a woman, if she is beautiful, to become queen than for a Jew to become prince. That is what this story is all about: man’s capacity for transformation. The tale of Joseph is the tale of a metamorphosis—no, a series of metamorphoses.

First, a family metamorphosis: a favorite child falls victim to his own prerogatives. A social one: a poor immigrant becomes a huge success in his adopted country. A political one: a servant turns activist and changes the socio-economic policy of the land. A philosophical or artistic one: the slave turns into a prince. And finally, a purely Jewish metamorphosis: a young refugee, without friends or connections, builds himself an astounding political career culminating with his accession to the post of chief royal advisor.

No wonder that in our traditional literature Joseph is the object of passionate admiration bordering on worship. Here is a Jew whose tribulations had a happy ending, who owed his success to no one, who imposed his ideas on hostile surroundings thanks only to his natural gifts, who transformed exile into a kingdom, misery into splendor, and even humiliation into mercy. He was indebted to no one and that made him a free man, a man free to do whatever he chose.

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For the Midrashic storytellers, his life is a veritable gold mine. Joseph: a feast for the imagination. There existed no Jewish nation as yet, but there already was a Jewish prince, a Jewish viceroy—how could one not applaud, not celebrate? He was loved because he illustrated the fact that for Israel the impossible is possible, and that in him and through him the Jewish child proved stronger than his enemies, stronger even than his temptations. In him the Jewish child lived and grew without betraying himself or his childhood. One loves him more, and more readily, more joyously than any other Biblical figure. Abraham is respected and admired; Isaac is pitied; Jacob is followed; but only Joseph is loved. Joseph: the sublimation of the Jewish child.