Podcast #44 Parashat VaYeshev

The speaker discusses the painful reality of anti-Semitism and the rise of accusations against Jews. They mention the rejection of Israeli academic papers abroad due to their nationality. They talk about the importance of transformation and self-awareness, using the story of Yehuda and Tamar as examples. They highlight the heroism and ingenuity of women in Jewish continuity. They compare men to the stable sun and women to the constantly changing moon. Shalom Shlomo. Shalom Elisha. It's great to sit opposite you again this Tuesday. Tuesday, as you know, is Paman Ki Tov, is doubly blessed. And what a blessing it is to be able to sit here and study Torah together. So I can reveal my secret plot, Elisha. I do this podcast because I get to spend a whole hour with you every single week. That's like the MasterCard says, priceless, beyond price. I appreciate it and I think I enjoy it just as much, if not even more. So we have a painful parashah this week. And it's as painful as the reality right now in the world and the reality in Israel. And everyone I'm talking to, those of you who are going to be listening to it outside of Israel, we're hearing that as difficult as things are in Israel, they may be even more difficult for those living outside of Israel. Jews being accused and often secluded and the rise of anti-Semitism, etc. So if you would like to share with us what's the reality like where you are, we would really be interested in hearing. And may this parashah and this podcast help in some mysterious way, which we don't even know yet, but we will know shortly. And there is comfort in this parashah and we'll see it in a moment, Elisha. By the way, speaking of anti-Semitism, I hear many reports, Israeli academics who do excellent research, they're now sending papers abroad and they're being rejected without even being reviewed, simply because they're Israelis. I've encountered this before, but it's rampant right now, one small thing. That's incredible, that's incredible and there's a lot to be said about that, but maybe at another time we'll see. So Elisha, as an educator, when I used to teach my students, at the end of every talk I would ask them, what's your take home? The idea is, okay, you spent a whole hour listening to me babble in hot air. What have you benefited from? Is there anything at all that I've taught you that you can possibly use? Sometimes the answers were disappointing, often the answers were surprising, but it made the students think, maybe there is something here that I can use. And I think that always about your drashot, Elisha, what is the take home? And there's always a take home, because I think you do this consciously, you interpret the parashah for us in a way that relates it to our daily life and what can we do with this and how can we use it. Basically, how can we be better people? And this drashot is special in that sense, because you tell us how we can be better people by telling us, reinterpreting the story of the parashah of Yehuda and Jacob and Joseph and deception and trickery. And let's remind everyone we're parashat of a yeshiv. I forgot to mention that. Yaakov is finally back in his homeland. It's not yet the land of Israel, it's the land of Canaan. And he's home. The yeshiv is just finally sitting, sitting down and thinking, oh, all my troubles are over, I'm home. And that's when the big drama actually begins. Exactly. And kind of the star of the parashah, I think, is Yehuda. And this is really strange, and you've mentioned this before, because we are descendants of Yehuda, because we are Yehudim, we are Jews. Wait a second, this is the man we are descended from, who engages in deception, who deceives his father about Yosef, about how Yosef was killed by an animal, and then deceives everybody about Tamar and behaves in a duplicitous manner. This is Yehuda, our person after whom we're named, as Rabbi Hertz, who was the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, J.J. Hertz, and we use his homage, he said that the divine providence and the stories of God and the children of Israel are highly complex. And Rabbi Sachs makes the point that Jewish stories are totally different from Greek tragedies. In Greek tragedies, there's a hero, and the hero has flaws. I call it fleas, pish pashim. The Greek hero has fleas, pish pashim, and it ends badly. And in the Jewish stories, the slight difference, vive la différence, the Jewish hero, like Yehuda, has major, major flaws. He's a cheater, duplicitous, and liar, and you name it. And somehow things seem to turn out well, because we're here. So, we have a real tragedy in Vayeshiv, and in the next chapter, boy, it takes a twist, a turn, and things should look pretty good in Vayeshiv. Right, and the beauty of it is not just that everything turns out well at the end, and they lived happily ever after, but it's a story of transformation. Like, all these stories, what's so beautiful about them is that there is transformation, suggesting that, you know, you talk about a take-home. So, we're all called upon to transform. It's not that if you have a weakness, you may want to consider transforming. It says we all have weaknesses, and the weaknesses are there in order to transform. Life is about transforming. Life is about growing. Life is about becoming. And there's no becoming without growing and without transforming. So, Yehuda is just a beautiful story of transformation, which is not necessarily true for Yosef. There's a twist in his story, but he himself, and I love Yosef, I love the figure of Yosef, but it's Yehuda who really goes through transformation, while Yosef stays pretty much the same throughout. When he's in the pit, or when he's in monarchy, he's still the same old Yosef, never really changes. So, you mentioned transformation, Elisha. I'm in the management, leadership, education business, or was for many, many years. And the word transformation, it's every second word. Transformative leadership, transformative innovation, you name it. But the truth is, it's mostly a slogan, because mostly people, products, leaders, managers, they don't transform. That means taking God's name in vain. Taking transformation in vain, that's a sin. Yes, it is a sin. But your parasha, your dosha, actually, I think, hits the nail on the head. Where do you start with transformation? You start with hakernah, face it, look at yourself. I have a friend, Elisha, and he once explained to me an exercise that he did. You become stark naked, and you stand in front of a mirror, preferably a full-length mirror, and you look at yourself in the mirror for as long as you can. It's amazingly difficult. Wow. You see all the flaws and the problems, and you begin to think, and some of the things you did weren't so great. Transformation, if you're serious, begins with self-awareness. And your two words, hakernah in Hebrew, they appear twice. Hakernah, when they talk to Yaakov, the sons, and tamar, when she says it to Yehudah. Hakernah, face it, recognize it, face the facts. Start by seeing yourself as you really, really are. Not so easy, I can tell you. Not easy at all. For those who are less familiar with the text, or know the text but are not making the connections, after they sell Yosef, Joseph, to Egypt, they dip his tunic, his coat, in the blood of a goat, and they tear it, and they bring it to Yaakov, and they say, like, recognize it. Suppose they're saying, do you recognize? Isn't this Yosef's tunic? Look, a wild animal must have devoured him. But what we're suggesting here is saying, hakernah, recognize it, look. Look at what you've done. Look at the favoritism that you've brought into our home. Look. And the second time that you're quoting hakernah is when Yehudah sleeps with Tamar. Long story. Thinking she's a harlot, while in fact she is his daughter-in-law. And it's a complex story worth reading. Usually people don't read that story. They read the first part with Yosef. It's a very deep story with Tamar. And just before she's about to be burned at the stake, she takes out his staff, and she had it not by coincidence, and she said, like, recognize it. Look what you've done. You've abandoned me. You wanted to marry me off to your youngest son, and you didn't. So recognize, look, see, face it. Look at your nakedness, as you said. Yes, indeed. And Tamar is a heroine. According to the Midrash, Tamar is a geoid, is a convert. And according to the Midrash that I read, probably from the Canaanites of all people, which is amazing because Tamar has two children, Eretz and Zerach, and they are forefathers of HaMelech David. That's right. And HaMelech David is the forefather of Mashiach, the Messiah. Talk of transformation. Total. So she too went through transformation. She converted. She transformed. Indeed. And let's remember that King David is also the great-grandson of Ruth, who was a Moabite. Now, you're not allowed to marry a Moabite. And nevertheless, here's a Moabite woman who also converts and transforms. And it's all those who agree to transform, they are the ones who are going to herald the Messiah. Exactly. And we often talk here about continuity. And we mentioned how much of Jewish continuity really stems from the courage and bravery and ingenuity of the women. Rather than the men, and that's true of Tamar. Because she's in big trouble. She's not going to have kids. And she finds a way to solve the problem, and we have continuity from Tamar, including King David, who came from her. So yes, this is another story of the heroism of the women and their ingenuity. Yes. In the world of mythological literature, very often the male is likened to the sun, and the female is likened to the moon. And it's a very deep and complex and sometimes even controversial idea. But nevertheless, the sun is stable. It doesn't change too much. It doesn't transform. The moon keeps expanding and shrinking and expanding, becoming pregnant with life and with light, and then disappearing, and it's gone, and then it comes back again. It constantly changes and transforms. And we men, there are so many good jokes about that, I don't know how politically correct they are today, but we men always complain that we just don't understand women. And indeed, we don't understand the moon. The sun is easy. The sun doesn't change too much. Many women have told me, you guys are so predictable. I wish sometimes we could say the same thing about our beloved other gender. Yes. So somebody made a lot of money from that. There's a book called, Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars, which is the same idea. And it's pretty obvious, but he made a lot of money. Lisa, I want to talk a bit about apologies. Rabbi Sachs makes this statement, and I think it's true, about the first apology in the Torah. He says, this is a turning point in history. This is Judah, Yehudah, with Tamar, and Tamar confronts him and Yehudah admits, I screwed up. And Rabbi Sachs says, Yehudah is the first person in the Torah to explicitly admit that he was wrong. He apologizes. And kind of looked into this issue about saying, I'm sorry, which Yehudah does. And it's transforming to say, I'm sorry. A small story. So social psychologists do research on things like, how come it's so darn hard to say, I'm sorry, to apologize? And a researcher named Tyler Okimoto, an American who now works in Australia, did a lot of research on this, and he's quoted in a podcast that I often listen to. He explains it. When you do not apologize, when you rationalize what you did, I'm okay, somehow you feel better. You feel empowered. You feel better about yourself. No, I didn't screw up. I didn't mess up. It wasn't my fault. There was a reason. And boy, is it easy, Elisha, to rationalize our actions. Absolutely. All the time. All the time. So a small story. His research was widely quoted. And some of the American talk radio people, the conservative talk radio people from the right wing, came up with it, found it, and listened to the way they used it. I used to listen to this 30 years ago, to Rush Limbaugh. He had 15 million readers, listeners. And he said, you know, there's a researcher, Tyler Okimoto, and he says, if you refuse to apologize, it makes you more empowered. It makes you more dominant. It makes you feel less subservient. It makes you feel not guilty. So, as a professional broadcaster, I can tell you, I don't care what you do, never apologize. Okay, he used it to justify not apologizing. And the peak of this is in a movie from 1970. You were too young. You were three years old. It's called Love Story by Eric Siegel. And it's a gushy, gushy movie. And the one thing that people remember from it is this statement. From Love Story. It's about a couple. Love means never having to say you're sorry. I promise you that's a direct quote from the book. And boy, Alicia, did he not get it. Did he not get it. I'm quite shocked, I have to say. Because love always means you always have to say I'm sorry. So, a lot of people were led astray by that terrible book. Now, the researcher, is his claim indeed, as Rush Limbaugh kind of suggests, like do not say sorry. I thought he meant the exact opposite. The opposite. He meant the opposite. He's explaining the phenomenon, but certainly not justifying it. And has much research in which apologizing is therapeutic and indeed transformative, like with Yehuda. Yes. And let's remind ourselves that we're, as you said at the beginning, we're named after Yehuda. And the name Yehuda, or Yehudi, has two meanings, as we know. One of them is to be grateful. Toda, hodaya, being grateful. And the other is lehodot ala emet, to confess on what the truth is, which comes right before apologizing. And Yehuda, his greatness is he's able to stand there and say, I recognize what I've done. I recognize animo de. I confess, I recognize what I've done, and I apologize. And I want to take it a step further. May I? Sure. Okay. I'm sorry. There's this nagging cough. That I have a practice that I use often. Sometimes, very often in life, you know, things can get pretty bad and ugly or whatever. And not necessarily from our own overt doing. Nothing that we necessarily did. But we're facing a situation of evil. And right now we're facing a lot of evil. And on the surface, we really have nothing to do with it. We didn't do anything consciously wrong. It's not as if we can go to someone and say, oh, I apologize, and all of a sudden the whole situation transforms. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that we err all the time. Now, I don't mean it in a negative sense. I mean it even in a positive sense. You can't live without making mistakes. You have to make mistakes. Otherwise, if you don't make mistakes, it's as if you've never lived. But nevertheless, every move we make has a consequence. And those consequences could be hurtful. It could be just breathing air. Who knows how many little microbes or whatever we've kind of taken in and hopefully killed in the process and kind of taken life. There's this Indian group that as they walk on the streets of Dharamsala, they kind of sweep every step before them not to, God forbid, take anybody's life. So as a practice, which I've learned is a Jewish practice, when facing a bad situation, to ask forgiveness of God. Now, it's very powerful. And it's not just like, oh God, I'm sorry. It's very repetitive. It's almost like a mantra. And it's not as if I've done anything. I'm not even connected to the situation, let's say. But we're always connected. If we are in the presence of some ugly situation, then there's something in common for all the ugly situations we've ever encountered, that we were the ones who encountered it. Somehow we were always involved. No, we didn't do anything consciously wrong, nothing whatsoever. So there's no person we necessarily need to apologize to. But we can apologize to God, to the universe, the cosmos. And amazing things happen when you do that, amazing things. You can really see, I want to really suggest people to practice it as if you're witnessing a fight between two people. They're not even related to you, you don't even know them. But they're fighting. Just apologize to God for having been a part of this situation. Not because you're bad, you're a good person. Everything's okay. But here we are part of evil in the making. So Elisha, let me relate to that, of all things, as an economist. So a basic concept of economics is called opportunity cost. It's not a cost where you write a check, where you have a dollar sum. It's a cost because you do X rather than Y. And the cost is Y because you could have done Y. And this is relevant, Elisha. Because we all are sorry and apologize for things we did. But as you mentioned, we need to apologize for things that we failed to do. The opportunity cost. And boy, there are a lot of those. There are a great deal of those. I think that may be the hardest part. Things that I should have done, should have said, should have helped. We're seeing an amazing outpouring of volunteer work now in Israel. I wish we had done this a little sooner, like 50 years ago. Because it's quite amazing. And just to add one more thing to this. Again, our wonderful Rabbi Sachs. So he quotes my favorite saying from Kierkegaard. And we've talked about this before. We live life looking forward, but we understand it only looking back. And sometimes we think of this as being a real mixed up mess. Because, I mean, looking ahead rather than backward, what good does it do? We live life going forward, not going backward. But he explains it beautifully. I'll read his words. They're better than mine. Our failures, seen in retrospect many years later, turn out to have been our deepest learning experiences. Our hindsight is always more perceptive than our foresight. We live life facing the future. We understand life only when it has become our past. But this is a take home, because if you never think about what you've done, it never becomes transformative. If you never do hakerna, looking at your past, then you really can't correct your course in the future. You're like driving a ship and the wind blows in any which way. And you have no correction. And in the Torah, in our parashah, Yehudah does that. He looks at his past and he fixes it. He corrects his way, his course. And guess what? The Jews emerge from this, because we descend from him. Right. And furthermore, in parashat Vayigash, two parashat away from now, he does it again with Yosef when he stands Vayigash, when he approaches Yosef, and he stands not knowing he's Yosef, or supposedly not knowing. Some scholars think that he did know. And doing the same thing, apologizing in a very deep way, dissolves Yosef's heart and allows for reconciliation. And it's very beautiful what you just said earlier about all those missed opportunities. And I think it's really important, if we're talking about apology, that if we can get out of the mode of apology being a source of weakness, a sign of weakness, it's actually a sign of strength, being able to apologize. And apologizing doesn't mean necessarily that we were wrong at the time. We know today that what we did was not right. But at the time it seemed right. We had good intentions, and we missed opportunities, and we failed at certain junctions. And if we look back with deep regret and self-loathing, then nothing will be achieved. No transformation can be achieved through self-loathing. There needs to be... I think that forgiveness is also forgiveness towards ourselves. And why forgive ourselves? Because I strongly believe, not everybody agrees with that, we have some arguments with Kila members over that, that at every given moment we all do the absolute best that we can. At that particular moment, a moment later, we will do something different. But at that moment, this is the best that we could have done. But we are responsible for looking back and saying, it's the best that I could do. But that was not a good move, and I want to apologize. I want to really apologize. So I have a question. So an apology can be an internal feeling and a statement, I screwed up, I messed up, I'm sorry, I did wrong, I regret it. But what about action, Alicia? Doesn't a true apology that's transformative require at least doing something to repair the damage that we've done? I think it does. If we look at the 10 days of the month, or the 50 days of Tshuva, between the first of Elul to the end of Sukkot or Shana Rabbah, especially between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we talk a lot about apologies, forgiveness, Tshuva, etc. And there are clear halakhot on what counts as genuine repentance and apology. And taking care of the damage done, if that's possible, is certainly part of it, absolutely. If it's just that there's nothing more, I don't know if there's nothing more, but it's very annoying when someone comes up to you, or when we get, you know, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we get all these SMSs, all these WhatsApps saying, if by chance I hurt you in any way, I'm really, really sorry, have a wonderful, wonderful year. I hate those messages. I agree, Alicia, I have to admit, when I get those messages, they're like people signing a form letter, they have no meaning, it absolutely makes me burn with anger. Yes, I prefer silence and no greeting than a message like that. Because apology is powerful, it's transformative. This kind of apology has no transformative power, and then what's the use of it, what's the use? It just leaves us feeling like, I think in the apology, part of the apology and hakirna, and recognize, is recognize the pain that you've caused, that this has caused. You can't necessarily change it. Maybe if there is a way to change it, fine, but we can't change what was. But at least recognizing the pain that another person went through as a result of our actions, that opens the gates for healing and for transformation. Agreed, and maybe toward the end of our time, Alicia, a small story. So I moonlight as a kind of a journalist, I write a column for a magazine. Wait, wait, it's a great column, and I would really recommend it in the Jerusalem Report, and there are all kinds of ways to access it. These are great, great columns. Wow, thank you so much. And I think all of us journalists, me included, owe the world an apology, because we seem to always write about the bad stuff and rarely about the good stuff. And I have a small example, Alicia. So there's a state in the U.S. called Vermont, and there was a terrible incident in Burlington, Vermont, last week. Some guy, not Jewish, took a rifle and shot three Muslim students who were in Burlington, Vermont, because they were Muslims, and they were wearing kafiyas, so he knew they were Muslims. And they were badly injured, one of them may never walk again, they won't die, but they were badly hurt. And the press widely reported this. And there's a back story, Alicia, and I managed to dig it up. I have a friend who knows one of the students involved. And the back story is this. Vermont has very few Muslims. There are only 5,000 Muslims in the whole state, and Burlington, the city, has 650,000 people. So they're very rare. And they needed a place to pray. They look for a place, and they finally found a former church, a Mormon church, and they have a mosque there. They have 350 families. And the mosque is next door to a synagogue, to a beknesset, where the Jews pray. And there's a parking lot. And on Friday, the Jews empty the parking lot so the Muslims can have a place to park. On Shabbat, the Muslims do the same. They empty the parking lot so the Jews have a place to park. There's a collaboration. There's a mutual respect. Nobody reported this. There's a back story somewhere. One thing we need to apologize about is seeing the dark side of the moon rather than the bright side. The goodness in people, as you note. And people are basically good. I truly believe that. Yes, I choose to believe that. There's a wonderful quote by Anne Frank in her diary. She says, and it's not an exact quote, but more or less, even though things are really dark right now, people are doing horrible things, I still insist on believing that people are essentially good. Amazing. So Elisha, as we close, my last question to you. Hakeronah is a wonderful take home. And by the way, I don't think it's translatable. Hakeronah, face it, it's not the same. And the now, by the way, is kind of a polite addition. So please, please face up. Please face reality. How do we do this, Elisha? What is the best way to practice Hakeronah in our daily lives in a way that's genuine, that's sincere, that's truly transformative? Wow, what a beautiful question. What a great question. So, there's so much to say about it. Maybe just one thing, because we do need to end. No, every person who irritates us, annoys us, and whether it's someone that we know or someone that doesn't know, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to face something. We seem to have attracted that person one way or another. And there's a question here, what are we asked to see? We're constantly blind to so much. We're more blind than alert. And I think that every person we encounter, good, bad, neutral, they're all messengers. They're all angels. They're all messengers of reality saying, recognize. What are we not recognizing? But especially those who are hurtful towards us. Trying to tell us, hey, there's something you need to recognize. What it is that we need to recognize, that takes a lot of hard work. But everyone is a messenger. And you know what? Maybe even Hamas down south. What is Hamas telling us to finally recognize that we've refused to see? Wow, I can use that, Alicia. That's brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you all for listening. And your feedback is always, always welcome. I think you can even respond on the site where the podcast appears or send us an e-mail, whatever. We'd love to know what you think. We'd even love to know that you're listening to it. We're not on YouTube yet, so we don't know who's listening and who's not. So we always welcome your responses. Thank you so much. Shalom. Thanks, everybody, for listening.