Moving Forward, Looking Back
Va-yehi 5778 / 30 December 2017
I once drove with a friend to the rural town where he grew up. As we turned onto the country highway that would take us into town, we fell silent and I could hear him murmur quietly. We sat in stillness for a while as I remembered the story he told me earlier that day: how he had been the sole survivor of a fatal car accident just before graduating from high school; his weeks of slow recovery in the hospital; mourning the loss of a friend who died in the crash; the weight he carried living a life that three others had been denied. The accident happened in that intersection, on the main road into town, forcing him to drive through those memories every time he traveled home; and each time, as he passed the site of the accident, he would recite the blessing שֶׁעָֽשָׂה לִי נֵס בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה, blessing God “who performed a miracle for me in this place.”
Hearing him recite that blessing, I felt the profound significance of that place. At Rosh HaShanah this year I spoke about everyday miracles, but it is equally true that some moments in life stand out from the others. They mark a crossroads, a turning point where life could have gone down any number of alternate routes. The power in these moments comes, in part, from our awareness that no matter which way we go, there can be no going back. Even when we encounter choices or challenges that we faced before in life, the configurations are never exactly the same. We may cross old roads again, but they will always converge in new ways.
An unsettling midrash on this morning’s parshah imagines that Joseph, returning from Israel to Egypt after burying his father, stopped along the way to look into the pit — that pit. All week I have tried to imagine what Joseph felt, gazing down into the murky gloom. Here was the scene of his life’s greatest calamity: the place where his brothers betrayed him, where he was cut off from his father and family, the beginning of years of torment and suffering. In the shadows at the bottom, can he still see the scared boy calling for help, cringing in fear as he listens to his brothers plotting his death? Can he trace the lines of his life emerging from that pit, pointing toward Egypt, slavery, imprisonment, turning upward with his rise to power, and then looping back to Canaan and to this moment, standing above the pit? The midrash doesn’t answer any of these questions; it tells us only that he recited, in what I imagine sounded like my friend’s pensive murmur, שֶׁעָֽשָׂה לִי נֵס בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה.[1]
We understand our lives through our stories. The facts don’t mean anything on their own; meaning emerges from the lines we draw between the dots. The difference between fact and story gives our lives a strange malleability: we can’t change the things we have done or experienced in the past, but the meaning we ascribe to those facts can evolve over time. What happened won’t change, but what it means can and almost certainly will. Our present frame of reference determines what the past means to us — and also sets our direction toward the future. Like Joseph, each of us stands over our own pits, looking backward; we can only move forward once we have stopped struggling and accepted that past. We need to grasp the pain in order to heal.
Joseph tells us his story. When his brothers come before him, in fear of the revenge they anticipate will come any day now that their father is dead, Joseph reassures them that he harbors no ill will: וְאַתֶּם חֲשַׁבְתֶּם עָלַי רָעָה אֱלֹהִים חֲשָׁבָהּ לְטֹבָה, “Although you intended me harm, God intended it for good.”[2] In the most common and probably simplest reading of this verse, Joseph’s autobiography boils down to, “God has a plan.”[3] This is the kind of thing that you are welcome to say about your own life but should never, ever suggest to someone else — that amounts to what one of my teachers described as “theological malpractice.” Nevertheless, it is one story a person could tell himself to make sense of the up, down, up trajectory of his life.
This kind of autobiography seems to be built into the human condition. Our brains are wired to look for patterns; we can’t help but try to connect the dots. But our stories have a fluid, dynamic quality. New dots show up every day, new facts emerging as we live life. Some we choose; some choose us. Either way, every additional dot changes the meaning of the accumulated past as we reconnect all of our life events into a new picture.
Our meaning-stories are inscrutably personal: one finds resilience and hope in suffering, while another finds only despair and defeat. The midrash tells of Joseph’s visit to the pit in order to explain his brothers’ sudden fear of revenge. They watch their long-estranged and immensely powerful brother look out upon the scene of their betrayal and they imagine violent rage churning inside his heart. Everyone agrees on the facts of what happened, but where Joseph sees God’s benevolent hand, his brothers see a fist of cruel retribution.
Well before we’re aware of any of this, we see the world through a frame built of our environment. We pick up on the stories that parents and teachers tell, about themselves as well as about us, and use those patterns to begin connecting our own dots. Jacob favors Joseph; Joseph, in turn, sees himself as infallible and invincible, while his brothers regard him as an entitled brat. In a sense, they’re all right. They’re also not really telling their own stories at this point — they’re still looking through their parents’ eyes, not yet interpreting the facts in their own distinct ways.
At a certain point, however, progress in life demands that we take the default story and make it our own. Whatever we might think of it, Joseph’s take on his life — “Although you intended me harm, God intended it for good” — shows how he has generated a new, self-directed autobiography. His brothers, on the other hand, continue dragging around guilt and insecurity. Joseph has moved on, but they haven’t gotten over what they did.
Of course, Joseph has the luxury of looking back on his life from a position of comfortable success. It must have been harder to draw a hopeful picture while suffering, year after year, some of the worst indignities known to man. What did he tell himself at night in prison? What can we tell ourselves, day by day, as we meet life’s challenges?
These questions returned to the front of my mind this year after I had the privilege of sharing my personal story with a conference on infertility in the Jewish community, sponsored by Uprooted.
It’s a chapter of my life that isn’t well known here; I came to BZBI with three kids, my family complete. By the time I received the conference invitation, several years had passed since I had shared publicly about our struggles with infertility. I needed to write my story again, connect the dots again. I found it much harder than I had anticipated. In my own story I found places where, like Joseph, I had accepted the facts in order to make meaning and move forward — and also many places where, like his brothers, I continued to wrestle with a past that would never change, with life experiences that I didn’t ask for and, given the choice, would gladly send back.
In telling my story that night in May, I learned that as long as we breathe our stories are never fully written. Each new development not only adds to the picture but forces a reevaluation of all that has come before — and, as a result, reopens all the apparently settled emotions. Yonah is almost three years old, we’re done with IVF for good, and still at times I find myself mourning, wishing things had turned out differently in some way or another. Unlike Joseph, I can’t bring myself to say אֱלֹהִים חֲשָׁבָהּ לְטֹבָה, “God intended it for good,” with a whole heart. I’ve definitely learned important lessons and grown as a person through those experiences, but I know if I had the choice I wouldn’t willingly take them on. The catch is, we don’t always get to choose. The uncomfortable truth is that we only bless שֶׁעָֽשָׂה לִי נֵס בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה in places where something legitimately bad happened — and where we now see that some good came out of it. What is the difference between me and Joseph? He knew he was looking into the pit. He walked right up to the edge, looked in, and acknowledged the miracle. I have my own pits, as I am sure you do — but I can’t always find the courage to look in. There is deep pain at the bottom of that pit, abandonment, disappointment, frustration and resentment. It’s often easier to look away. But at the very end of his life, Joseph offers his brothers one last lesson: we need to visit the pit in order to recognize the miracle. We can’t move forward until we’re willing to look back.
[1] Tanhuma Va-yehi 17.
[2] Gen. 50:20.
[3] Rashbam 50:20; cf. Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis 50:19-20.
