I have a great business idea for the shul. Has anyone here seen the Harry and Meghan Netflix series? There was a documentary all about Prince Harry and his wife Meghan that was put out earlier this year; it was the most watched documentary on Netflix. I want to pitch a new documentary to Netflix that is similar but so much better. My documentary would also involve royalty, romantic intrigue, and family drama, but it would have more royalty, more romance, and more drama. The documentary would be called… Joseph and His Brothers.
Think about it – a strapping young man – like Harry, who loses his mother at a young age – like Harry, sold as a slave by his brothers – which is far more interesting than having petty fights with his brother, who is almost seduced by his master’s wife – which for the British royal family is equally scandalous to falling in love with a black woman… who instead of losing his connection to the royal family becomes royalty, and then after two decades apart, reunites with his brothers. Tell me that wouldn’t be the most watched documentary ever. Ner Tamid presents Joseph and His Brothers. We’ll make millions. No more Causematch campaigns, our front lobby will be paid for in cash, gala kiddushes by O’Fishel every Shabbos. It’s going to be great.
There’s only one problem. You know that dramatic scene when Yosef reveals his true identity to his brothers. The music stops. The cameras pan the room. You can see the pain in Yosef’s eyes, the shame on the faces of the brothers. We all know what happens next in the original. They fall on their feet; they beg Yosef for forgiveness, and Yosef embraces them. But if this story were to be retold in 2023, I am not so sure what would happen next.
In 2023, I do not think Yosef’s brothers would fall on their feet. I think they’d storm out of the room. I think they would pull out their phones and tell all their followers how they had been victimized by the power-hungry Yosef and how unsafe they feel around him. Yosef would call a press conference and let reporters know that as far as he’s concerned, his family does not exist. In 2023, I am fairly certain that the brothers would sooner starve than apologize, and Yosef would sooner give up his position in Egypt than forgive his brothers. And that’s because the greatest currency in this day and age is not power, not money, not prestige, it’s victimhood.
Parul Seghal, a brilliant columnist for the New Yorker, observed how the plotline of almost every show and movie over the past decade involved someone’s trauma. Storylines are no longer about some future goal or even about romance, all stories revolve around something hidden in the closet, with flashbacks, of course, helping us understand why the protagonist is who they are today – they have been traumatically victimized in one way or another. Whether it’s Ted Lasso, Wanda Maximoff, Claire Underwood, Fleabag. There is even a reboot of “Anne of Green Gables,” only now Anne is given a history of violent abuse. Or think about the origin story of Joker – Now we know why he’s so deranged! The trauma of his life caught up with him; he was a victim!
This idea that we’ve all been victimized, that we all have trauma is true in real life as well. Television and movies serve as mirrors held up to society, giving us a chance to see ourselves. As David Brooks, in an article in the New York Times wrote, in the past “the word “trauma” referred to brutal physical wounding one might endure in war or through abuse. But usage of the word spread so that it was applied across a range of upsetting experiences… For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.” Trauma was selected by Vox as the word of the decade.
And on the one hand, this development is great. Maybe we don’t use the word trauma or victim when we think of ourselves. But all of us are far more attuned to the pain we have experienced in the past and its impact on our present. All of us are far more attuned to our emotions – the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that is wonderful. Being emotionally aware and feeling our pain is critical to our well-being. Yosef, the original Yosef, is the Torah’s biggest crier. He cries no fewer than eight times. Shoving that hurt away, ignoring it, “manning up” as they used to say when I was a child, has terrible ramifications.
We should, on the one hand, celebrate how far we’ve come. Imagine two generations ago, the survivors of the Holocaust would have been given the tools to heal instead of bottling up all their pain. There’d probably be a lot less Jewish anxiety in the world today. Feeling our pain, being true to our pain, recognizing its impact on who we are, should be encouraged.
But here’s the problem – Victimhood comes with a price. To define ourselves as a victim of someone else’s actions, to constantly ruminate over all the injustices that others perpetrated against me, is to define ourselves as someone who is acted upon; as a slave, not a master of our own destiny. But even more importantly, to hold on to resentment towards those who have wronged us is like eating rat poison and hoping the rat dies; not letting go only hurts ourselves.
And I want to pause here and make something very clear – Trauma is real, it has devastating effects on a person’s life. There are experiences which are objectively traumatic, such as abuse and war. And there are experiences which for one person is uncomfortable and for another it is truly traumatic. Each person’s emotional pain threshold is different, and sometimes the pain is so deep that it is just too hard to move on. Who are we to judge someone else’s pain? My heart goes out to anyone in such a place.
But sometimes we don’t move on because we prefer to be a victim, we prefer to hold on to that grudge, we prefer to not let go of the pain. It’s usually not conscious, it’s usually to protect ourselves in some way, but also, having a complicated origin story is kinda trendy.
(You’ll notice, by the way, I quoted the New York Times and the New Yorker. This is not a political critique; this culture of victimhood is apolitical. Yes, it’s true, you will hear Democrats use the term and idea far more often than Republicans. But Jordan Peterson and co. who constantly describe themselves and their beliefs as being under attack, is that not just another way of saying that we too are victims?)
And here’s where Yosef, the original Yosef has something to teach us. Yosef could have easily played into the “currency” of his day. In the ancient world the currency was not victimhood, it was power and strength. But Yosef did not use his power to hold himself above his brothers, and despite being exquisitely attuned to his own pain, he did not hold that over them either. Not only did Yosef forgive his brothers, he did so without them even asking for it. “Where’s the justice?” you may ask. “It’s not fair! After all they did to him, how can he just go ahead and forgive them?!”
Perhaps Yosef was a pious man. The Rambam in Hilchos Deios writes that a victim may choose to forgive without being asked for forgiveness, and to do so is ‘midas chassidus,’ an act of extreme piety. Perhaps Yosef was spiritually mature – that’s the label given by a modern philosopher, David Bednar, to those who let go. Or perhaps, Yosef realized that he stood nothing to gain, only to lose, by holding on to the pain. Yosef never said what his brothers did was okay, it was not, they tried to kill him. But he did say, it was time to move on.
But if we were to make a reboot of Yosef and His Brothers, the plotline would have to be adjusted. Forgiveness is so corny, so out of touch, so unjust. In a world in which victimhood is a badge of honor, why would anyone want to forgive? Why would anyone want to forget?
I have to add a very important caveat – another lesson we can learn from Yosef. There is an age-old question – if Yosef was such a good guy, why did he wait so long to reveal himself to his family? It’s a good question. Forget his brothers for a moment, what about his father? His father was devastated. He couldn’t send him a postcard. “Hi dad, I’m alive.” What was he waiting for?
There are many answers to this question, but I’d like to suggest something new. Perhaps Yosef was waiting until he could feel safe with his brothers. They hurt him, physically and emotionally. To forgive them and to get right back into that toxic relationship, one in which he would be hurt time and time again, that is a grave mistake. Forgiveness should not be given if it means that I lose all boundaries and allow someone to hurt me all over again. But if the individual is remorseful, or if the individual is no longer capable of hurting us, that’s when forgiveness is something to strive for.
And yet, some of us in this room are still holding on to pain from parents who are no longer in this world. Some of us are holding on to pain from siblings or friends who cannot hurt us anymore. Some of us are holding on to resentment against our community, society, maybe even G-d. And you know what? The Torah does not mandate that we forgive. One is not obligated to let go. Nor does the Torah tell us to forget. On the contrary, G-d demands of us to remember our experience as victims every day – l’maan tizkor es yom tzeis’cha mei’eretz Mitrzayim. We are commanded to remind ourselves of our experiences as slaves in Egypt, the ultimate victims. But then we are told to take our victimhood and use it as a catalyst to change; to be more compassionate people, to be more thoughtful people, to be more understanding people, and to be more forgiving.
So how do we do so? Maybe we know how much we are hurting ourselves, we want to, but we still can’t let go? How do we sincerely say, salachti, I have forgiven?
I’d like to share with you a reflection by Esau McCauley, a columnist for yes, you guessed it, the New York Times, which I found enlightening. He writes: “I do not recall giving a single Father’s Day present. There were no cards hastily scribbled on colored paper during elementary school art class. My dad never received the barbecue apron with a silly message on it. My siblings cannot recall ever giving him gifts, either. This was no joint decision; it was an instinctive, shared response to trauma…
We shared a city, if not often a home, with a man troubled by addiction. He came and went in our lives, his presence and absence coinciding with the cycles of sobriety and relapse. For a long time, all I felt about him was anger because he seemed to care more about drugs than his children.
We never developed that traditional father-son relationship, but I did forgive him before he died in 2017… I forgave my father not because I concluded that his actions were not as bad as I recalled. They were. I began the long process of forgiving when I recognized him as more than a character in my story. My father, Esau McCaulley Sr., was a human being in his own drama… We enter our parents’ lives… in the middle of things. Our parents have their own traumas and disappointments that precede our arrival in their lives… As children, we think of our parents’ decisions in terms of us. We prefer to believe that they have only ever been parents. But we are only a part of their story, not the whole of it.
…Placing my father and his addiction in his own story made his failures not less tragic but more. What was at stake was not merely a father failing a son but a whole life crumbling. His story was much bigger than the two of us. Seeing that larger story stirred my sympathy.”
Esau McCauley saw the bigger picture. He recognized the person who hurt him was not only his father, but he was also someone who had a whole life, a difficult life, independent of his role as father. For Yosef, the bigger picture was not only seeing the full picture of who his brothers were but also seeing how him being sold as a salve was part of G-d’s divine plan. Trying to understand the entirety of the life of the person who has hurt us, acknowledging G-d’s hand in our lives, allows us to begin to transform from being a victim to being able to forgive.
As we stand before G-d on this Yom Kippur morning, as we reflect on this past year and maybe even reflect on years past, it’s okay, it’s healthy to feel pain over the hurt and yes, the trauma that we have experienced. But if we are no longer in danger of being hurt again by that same person, then maybe this is the year that we change the trend of our times. Maybe this is a year not of passive victimhood, but of transformative victimhood. Maybe this is the year that we no longer define ourselves by what happened to us, but by what we do about it. Maybe this is the year we let go of all the poison and pain, the baggage that is weighing us down. Maybe this is the year that we can forgive. And in that merit, may G-d forgive us.