Ezekiel, master of metaphors and mystical visions, lived in the days before and after the destruction of the First Temple, and preached to his fellow exiles in Babylon in the early years of the 6th century BCE. They were captives in a foreign country, and they never ceased to hope for an eventual return to their homeland.
The sidra tells us of the reunification of Joseph with his brothers. Ezekiel foretells that the ten lost tribes will be reunited with the tribe of Judah, which, with Benjamin, had formed the southern kingdom. As we know, history did not bear out Ezekiel’s hope. The Northern Kingdom disappeared into the mists of history, and we Jews – Yehudim – are so called because we are the inheritors of Judah – Yehudah. Yet still we retain Ezekiel’s text, the story of his vision, because we see that it bears more than one interpretation, that the united Israel is more than the physical bringing together of the 12 tribes, but is the spiritual coming together of those who have held on to the vision, who are gathered in by being united in a return to covenant with God.
The sidra begins with the words “Then Judah came near to him”. This meeting between Judah and Joseph, and the dialogue which followed it, marks one of the most dramatic incidents in the whole narrative of the children of Jacob, the forefathers of the tribes of Israel, until their exile into Egypt. The midrashic literature makes a great deal of this drawing near, and the meeting is used as the model of the later interpretational rule that ‘the histories of the ancestors are the paradigm for the children’. Hundreds of years before the historic national events, here in vayigash we have recorded a confrontation between the tribe of Judah, (who settled in the Southern Kingdom,) and what would later be known as the kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes led by the tribe of Ephraim, Joseph’s son – and in this version in Genesis the confrontation ends with reconciliation.
It is curious that the haftarah chosen for this portion is that of Ezekiel’s vision of unification of the two kingdoms that existed in the land of Israel, for while one can read the text at its face value as being a reflection of the reunification of Joseph and his brothers, it is open also to reflecting on that reunification as superficial and temporary. Just as one could make the case that there was never a single state in which all the tribes came together as one easy unity, but that instead there was always some resistance to merger, so too one could read that the approaching of Judah and Joseph remained just that – a coming closer without the final step which would have brought about true shalom, completion.
There are those who say that even at the earliest time of a nation state, during the days of David and Solomon, there were effectively already two separate kingdoms under a joint king who ruled both, (Y. Leibowitz) so that immediately after Solomon’s death the formal partition was inevitable. So how then, if we see the two stories as intimately linked and commenting on each other, do we read of the approaching, the confrontation and the meeting of Joseph and Judah in Egypt, of what was really happening for the forefathers of the two kingdoms?
Ezekiel prophesied after both the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom and the tribes who lived in Judah had already been exiled. His vision was that the two nations would return, and that this joint experience would somehow forge the full unification which had never quite taken place. Jeremiah, his contemporary, foretold in a very emotional style the return of the ten tribes, and of course, there were Hosea and Amos, Northern prophets who foretold the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, who also added their view that in the future Israel would return. We know all of these visions did not materialize in fact. And I think that we cannot reconcile this knowledge by accepting the midrashic view that prophesies that have not yet been fulfilled must be in abeyance, ready to be fulfilled at the end of days. Surely we must accept that the ten tribes, including the descendants of Joseph, were destroyed from the face of the earth, assimilated into other peoples, spiritually erased. Even in Talmudic times Rabbi Akiva stated that “the ten tribes will not return”. Even then he knew that they were lost.
But the fact that the prophecies didn’t happen needn’t undermine our understanding in the prophetic tradition, for the truth is that Jewish prophecy isn’t about fortune telling, but about what will occur if we carry on the way we are doing, or else what ideally should happen – as the Tosafot says “No prophet foretells but what ought to occur, if there is no sin”.
Judah approaches Joseph, comes closer. There is confrontation and there is meeting. One can read the text so that the meeting was a papering over the cracks; or one can read the text to see that the meeting was profound. Certainly it had the potential to be either. The haftarah leaves us with tantalizing hints – Ezekiel prophesying the reunification of the tribes which descended from Judah and from Joseph, should it be a superficial reunification or a will it be a complete one?
One can look at the sidra and the haftarah either way – either there is hope that even after a series of almost murderous problems with each other, the family of Jacob can come together in peace and harmony, approach each other and meet at a fundamental level; or that there has never been a true unity within the Jewish people, that we have always operated a model of dynamic tension, of coming closer but never actually merging. That doesn’t have to be hopeless of course; It could be said that it is the inbuilt diversity of such a model that actually allowed us to survive all of this time. But wouldn’t it change our perception of ourselves if we acknowledged it, that we have no one orthodoxy, there is no one form of the Jewish people, that we thrive on the antagonisms within our structures.
Our great prophets foretold events that never historically happened. Our midrashic literature relocated those events to some mythical end of days, when all problems will be solved and unity will be achieved. We could use our prophetic tradition as a guide to remind us that whatever our differences, our ideals remain – it is that matrix of ideas and beliefs which support us on our continuing journey in Judaism, that blend of varieties of vision which keep us aware of the significance of our journey.
rabbisylviarothschild 