Parashat Vayigash by Seth Pertain, High School Talmud Teacher

All twelve sons of Jacob are reunited in Egypt, but only one of them, Joseph, knows it. He has framed his youngest brother and has declared that he will be held captive.  Without time to talk through a plan, Judah steps forward and begins a multi-prong attempt to win the release of his brother.  He offers a background story. This isn’t just a nameless, faceless hostage. This is a person who has a father. One who loves him dearly. One “whose soul is bound up with his soul.” When all else fails, Judah offers himself as a substitute. The pain and suffering of Benjamin’s captivity would kill his father, and so Judah is willing to trade his own life for Benjamin’s. This moment of crisis is sufficiently powerful to lead to reconciliation that would otherwise have been unfathomable. 

The powerful moment when hostages are redeemed has played out over the millennia.  However Yehoram Goan managed to capture the feeling particularly poignantly in the so El Eretz Tzvi which was written about the Raid on Entebbe.

אֶל אֶרֶץ צְבִי אֶל דְּבַשׁ שְׂדוֹתֶיהָ אֶל הַכַּרְמֶל וְהַמִּדְבָּר אֶל עַם אֲשֶׁר לֹא יֶחֱשֶׁה שֶׁאֶת בָּנָיו לֹא יַפְקִיר לְזָר, אֶל אֶרֶץ צְבִי שֶׁדִּמְעוֹתֶיהָ נוֹשְׁרוֹת עַל שְׂדֵה חַמָּנִיּוֹת שֶׁעִצְּבוֹנָהּ וּשְׂשׂוֹנָהּ הֵם שְׁתִי וָעֵרֶב בְּבֶגֶד יוֹמָ

To the land of the deer (Israel) to the honey of its fields to the Carmel and the desert to a nation that will not be silent and will not abandon its children to a stranger To the land of Israel that its tears fall upon a field of sunflowers that its happiness and sadness are both intertwined in her daily clothes

I can’t help but wonder if our tradition that the messiah will come from the tribe of Judah may have roots in in Judah’s refusal to allow his brother to be abandoned to a stranger. The Torah records not a single story about anything that Benjamin had done, and not a single quote uttered by him. However, to Judah, that made him no less important. That moment paved the way for twelve brothers to transition from being a family to a nation. The past wrongs and hurt feelings can be put aside as the common bond that they share becomes the focus of the story. We find ourselves today in an eerily similar situation.  We are (hopefully) emerging from a time of extreme divide within our community.  We have sisters and brothers being held in captivity.  To borrow a line from Yehoram Gaon, our happiness and sadness seem intertwined in our daily clothes. In order for us to return to being seen – and seeing ourselves – as a unified nation, we need to make sure that we still do not abandon our children to strangers. May reading the story of the redemption of Benjamin this week be a harbinger for the redemption of our remaining captives. 

Shabbat Shalom