Saying from the Zohar: When Israel went into exile, so did its language.

Coming back from his father’s funeral, Joseph made a detour and visited the site where long ago he had touched the bottom of the abyss; for a long time he stood at the well’s edge and looked into the darkness. The brothers assumed that he did this to remind them of their misdeeds, but in truth he wanted to recall his past to himself so as better to express his gratitude to God; he was thankful for what he had been allowed to experience up to that moment.

The brothers told Joseph: Before he died, your father ordered you to forgive us. Yet in the Biblical text we find no mention of such a desire in Jacob.

Explanation: one may lie if it is on behalf of peace.

When Jacob’s children settled in Egypt, they were at first prosperous, respected and content. Then people began to envy them secretly. Then openly. Still, that was not dangerous. But later, people began to fear them. To hate them. They were thought to be too rich. Too numerous. Pervasive, cumbersome. That still was not dangerous.

Came the time when the Egyptians found themselves embroiled in a bloody war with their neighbors. And owed their eventual salvation to the intervention of the children of Israel.

Only then did the danger that hung over the children of Israel become real. For that was something the Egyptians could not forgive.

And yet. As long as one child of Jacob was still alive, nobody dared attack the Jewish tribes. At the death of Levi, the last living son, things changed abruptly. Soon appeared the first anti-Jewish measures: forced labor, public humiliations. Worse: laws were enacted forbidding the men to sleep in their homes, thus preventing them from loving and multiplying.

MOSES: PORTRAIT
OF A LEADER

A LEGEND.

When Moses went up to heaven to receive the Torah, he found God in the process of adding to it various symbols and ornaments. Conscious of his role as spokesman, Moses asked shyly:

— Why not give the Torah, such as it is? Isn’t it rich enough in meaning, sufficiently obscure? Why complicate it further?

— I must, answered God. Many generations from now, there will live a man named Akiba, son of Joseph, who will seek and discover all kinds of interpretations in every word, in every syllable, in every letter of the Torah. So, you see, I must put them there, so that he may find them.

— Would you show me that man, asked Moses, impressed. I should like to know him.

Since there was nothing—or almost nothing—that he could refuse His loyal servant, God said to him:

— Turn around, go backward.

Moses did as he was told. He turned backward and found himself projected into the future. There he was, in a Talmudic academy, sitting in the very last row, among the beginners, listening to a master delivering a course on Moses’ teachings and work. What Moses heard was beautiful, probably even profound, but. . . too much for him. He understood nothing, not one concept, not one word. And a new sadness overcame him; he felt useless, diminished. Suddenly, he heard a question a pupil was asking the rabbi: