Once upon a time in my life there
was a man, really a boy - although at the time he seemed far older than me, who
mentioned in passing that being Jewish was something that he thought about in
everything he did. Being the 14-year-old that I was, I thought he was a little lame.
That youth, without even realizing, had a major impact on my life because even
though I had been disdainful in the moment, his words resonated deep within my
soul. For me, that boy, a counselor at a BBYO summer program back in 1990, was an
eesh b’sadeh, the seemingly random man in the field who asked Yosef what
he was looking for and then directed him to his brothers (Bereishis 37).
It is a snippet of
narrative told in just a few verses, but it contains many powerful lessons. In
our current generation, one of the most significant of these lessons is about
Hashem’s great desire for Jewish unity. Yes, it is a common trope, one that is
brought up particularly often after our beautiful Jewish community suffers a
tragedy. The reason it is so pervasive is because it is a concept with which we
struggle mightily – not philosophically, but in actuality. Since biblical
times, we have been working toward achieving and maintaining this goal, but
we’ve had to restart that work far too often. Obviously, it is no easy task.
How does the eesh
b’sadeh offer a lesson on unity when all he did was offer Yosef directions?
It starts with the fact that, according to some opinions, the brothers took the
sheep so far away to pasture because they wanted to get away from Yosef. Here
we have disunity and conflict. Yaakov knew that there was tension between his
sons. He sent Yosef anyway, with the specific mission: "ra’ey et shalom
achehcha," see the peace of his brothers. Yosef is a faithful son -
and some comment that he was actually oblivious to his brothers’ antipathy for
him - and so he went. He loses his way, however, because his brothers have gone
to a different location. Then he meets the unspecified man, the eesh b’sadeh.
According to almost all of the commentaries, this man was the angel Gavriel.
Some commentaries say that in his response that the brothers had left, Gavriel was warning Yosef that they were not of a
mindset for peace with him. Nevertheless, he told Yosef where to go because,
ultimately, Hashem wanted the brothers to be together. Hashem could send His
messenger to warn Yosef and to point him in the right direction, but
reconciliation of the sons of Yaakov had to come from themselves, unity must be
the result of human effort.
The challenge of
unity most often stems from problems with perception. By human nature we like
to believe ourselves to understand the bigger picture. More challenging than
that is the fact that we also tend to believe we understand other people’s motivations
and thought patterns, and most of the time we are pretty far off the mark. When
the ten shepherding brothers saw Yosef approach, they viewed him from their
perception alone. They thought of Yosef with hatred, or with jealousy, or
perhaps with fear – fear for their future. Much of their emotions stemmed from
their reactions to Yosef’s dreams and their belief that he wished to rule over
them. Many commentaries, however, seem to present Yosef as simply an exuberant
youth who just wished to share his dreams.
And the perception
of each brother was not the same, although in many ways, the picture painted by
the narrative is that they were in agreement, on the whole, to get rid of
Yosef. But Shimon saw him as the dreamer, the one who dreamed of being bigger,
for he was the one who called out “Here comes the dreamer.” Reuvain saw him as
a road to redemption, and he convinced them not to kill him so that he could
rescue him and thus build himself in his father’s eyes. And Yehuda was the one
who suggested selling him, looking at Yosef as a broader picture of one with
whom he was connected but with whom he wanted a way to sever that connection.
The distinction
between the tribes have essentially been lost by the great dispersion, but we
remain in many ways, entrenched in this tribal mindset. In centuries past, we
divided ourselves between our minhagim and our countries of origin. Ashkenazim
marrying Sephardim was jokingly [mostly] referred to as intermarrying. In the
current era, we align ourselves by denominations, and then we look at each
other and we make assumptions that may be, but quite probably are not, true.
The eesh
b’sadeh, the man in the field, represents people or incidents in our lives (both
individual and as a people) whom Hashem sends to try to help us become whole
again. When we think back in our lives there
are those moments we can find, like the words of the counselor at that camp, that
give us a nudge in the right direction. However, sometimes these men in the
field are not kind, they are warning that danger awaits on the path we are on. Even when we are given these guides, however, we are
so often hampered by what happens next. When we allow our preconceived notions,
our superficial judgments, our fear of the possibility that another might know
something we do not, to inhibit us from coming together. Like the 12 brothers who were our ancestors,
the Jewish people have always had to learn how to deal with the fact that while
we are all Jews, we are not homogeneous. We can't have unity if we don't learn
to talk to each other like brothers. We today still need to rectify the
inability of our ancestors to look and see from our brothers’ eyes.
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