There is Enough

This week’s Torah portion is Vayeshev, which means, “and he settled.” It relates the beginning of the story of Joseph, Jacob’s favored son and offspring of Rachel, his favored wife. The teenage Joseph tattles on his older brothers and they hate him. He dreams of ruling over them and they hate him more. While they are far from home, the brothers plot to kill Joseph. They throw him into a pit on Ruben‘s advice, Reuben being the oldest brother, who means to save him later. Then on Judah’s advice they decide to sell him. He is sold to traders who take him to Egypt and resell him to a courtier of the Pharaoh.
There is then an important incident which interrupts the main story, concerning Judah and his family. Judah’s son marries Tamar, but his son dies. As was the custom at that time, Tamar is given to Judah’s second son, who also dies. Tamar, who is childless, impersonates a prostitute when she realizes that she will not be given to Judah’s youngest son. She arranges to have sexual relations with Judah without revealing her identity and becomes pregnant. When her pregnancy becomes known, Judah sentences her to die. But then he learns that it is he who committed the sin and relents. One of their twin boys becomes the ancestor of King David. Then the Joseph story resumes. Joseph is thrown into jail, when he the courtier’s wife wrongly accuses him of sexual misconduct.
This portion is filed with human passions. It begins with jealousy. The brothers are jealous of Joseph because they realize that their father loves him more than he loves them. In this family there seems to be a shortage: a shortage of love. Joseph’s dreams and the brothers’ reaction to them also suggest a shortage of money or perhaps power. Their feeling and actions are all about that which they lack. But we know that love is not a finite quality. It’s not limited. Power is also not finite, and really, money is not finite either when viewed over time. Money flows just as love and power do. The brothers do not seem to understand that there is Enough: there is enough love for each of them, enough personal power, even enough money for their ultimate prosperity. One of my teacher Rabbi Gelberman’s sayings, from his Chassidic forebears, is “Kol B’Seder”: all is in Divine order. We are provided for by the Divine Presence: with enough food, enough space, enough money, enough power. Sometimes I get very rushed and act as if there is not enough time, but in truth, there is even enough time. Kol B’Seder, there is enough of everything.
However, we can cause temporary shortages in money, in love in power, and in time by our actions. Divine justice is the outworking of the problems we cause. This is illustrated in the Judah story. It was Judah who proposed to sell Joseph, separating Joseph from his father. Judah then experiences Divine Justice. Later, Judah himself is separated from his two sons when they die young and before their time. In the Joseph story, the brothers kill a goatling, dip Joseph’s coat of many colors in the blood, and bring it to their father, saying, Identify if you please, is this Joseph’s coat? When Tamar is being taken to die, she sends several articles to Judah, which belong to him, saying, Identify if you please, thus reminding him of his earlier transgression against Joseph and Jacob, their father. Further along in the story, Joseph when he is sold to the courtier in Egypt and is thrown into jail becomes separated from his father, and family, and freedom, because he spoke against his brothers. By separating himself, he himself became separated.
Truly there is no lack of the things we need, but we can cause a temporary lack when we choose to act or speak against the flow of Divine love and plentitude. We stop us the flow of blessings, until such time as our mistakes and shortcomings are worked out, and the blessings begin to flow once more. There is an infinite supply of love. The more we love, the more love there is. The challenge is to be able to live it: to act as if we believed it. Truly, all the blessings we need and all the love we desire are available to us. The Torah teaches again and again that the Eternal God wants to bless us. When we are a blessing we are greatly blessed with Enough and with everything we need. May each of us be a blessing and through our love, be greatly blessed.