A Wagon of Poetry Brings the Hebrews through the Portal of History

רַב עוֹד־יוֹסֵף בְּנִי חָי  (Gen 45:28)

The story of Joseph and his brothers is one of the most novelistic passages in the Bible, filled with hidden motives, deep emotion, staged revelations, ambiguous plots and an apparently happy ending. Joseph finally reunites with the eleven brothers in Egypt. He puts them through an elaborately staged torture in Pharaoh’s court, but finally Joseph reveals his true identity and can’t wait to see his father, so he sends his brothers back to fetch him.

• rav רַב – is translated as an exclamation “enough,” but it really means much, many, great
• ohd, עוֹד – an adverb that seems to modify “live” as in “Joseph still lives” but beyond continuance (still) also implies besides, again, more and directly modifies Joseph as in “more (still, yet) Joseph …”
• Yosef – יוֹסֵף – Joseph’s name is prophetic. It means He will add.

Together the three words express “much more greater enlargement.” Jacob’s sudden burst of emotion expresses deep currents.

“Much more greater enlargement!”

Jacob knows the wagons are symbolic of Joseph’s essence and exclaims it with a burst of emotion. His favorite son’s very presence, even as a young boy, seems to make life bigger and more extravagant. Joseph’s lavish coat is just outward expression of his unrestrained charisma. Even his dreams are tinged with megalomania, but he brings his fantastic dreams and those of others to life. Through him, dreams become true. Joseph’s whole life is the story of bursting the bounds of one adversity after another: snake-filled pits, slavery, jail, marooned in a strange country. Everywhere he goes, he expands the borders of life itself. He brings fabulous fantasies into reality. He is the source of survival and abundance for his adopted nation, Egypt, and his own tribe, the Hebrews. The wagonloads of goodies symbolize his lavish success.

Jacob evokes this enlargement of reality that Joseph brings to the world here: “My son adds so much more life.” The father sees the son’s spiritual potential, not the material illusion of the coat that arouses his brothers. Jacob isn’t swayed by the lavish riches in front of him. He’s not toting up the wealth presented to his earthly senses, but what it evokes in his heart. He is rich in material things, but the loss of his beloved son has dug a pit of loss in his soul. And now, by this wagon, he sees instantly Joseph has been miraculously reincarnated.

And then, in case we thought we were just kanoodling around with wordplay, there’s a clincher. When Jacob revives, he is called by his birthname: “the spirit of Jacob revived.” But in the next verse he is “Israel,” the prophetic name he got after winning a wrestling match with an angel. Israel is Jacob’s spirit name, the name of the father of nation that is redeemed – resuscitated – from slavery in Egypt and who also get a lavish gift beckoning them to their destiny. In short, the verse is altogether prophetic, concentrating the whole history of the Hebrews in a few words. Jacob suffers a mini-death and is resurrected as Israel by his son Joseph’s spiritual largesse. He knows the prophecy of exile that awaits his family and their descendants, yet immediately embarks on the fateful journey almost joyfully.

Now if we read Jacob’s cry sideways, the whole verse says,

And he said, ‘Israel to have much more life must go down to my son before I (Israel) die’.

They will go to Egypt to survive the famine as a re-united family, endure a spiritual famine, and emerge as Israel. As Hebrews they all must march through the portal Joseph has opened in history to be resurrected as liberated slaves with the Torah as their fusion engine.

Rashi reads the poetry

Then Rashi tells us there’s yet another secret message encoded in the wagons. The word for wagons – ahgalot – contains a pun for eglot – calves. They may even be etymologically related at a deep level to the primitive root for turning, circling, wheeling.  Just as calves cavort by running in circles, wagons run on wheels that turn round and round. In that pun, Jacob sees the last law in the Torah father and son studied before Joseph disappeared: the eglah arufah. If a corpse is found in the wilderness between two cities, how do we assign responsibility for burial and pursuing justice? You can’t just let the corpse lie there. The priests of the closest town must go into the wilderness, sacrifice a calf by breaking its neck, throw it over a cliff, and thus cancel the bill for an unsolved injustice and guilt that would come due to innocent townsfolk. (Deut 21:1-9)

On the surface, Rashi’s neat detective work forms a nice sermon (never mind the anachronism of father and son reading the Torah before Moses brings it down from Sinai. The sages assume that the patriarchs had the Torah).  We now see that all the prior stagecraft about loading the eleven wagons with stuff from Egypt fior the brothers to bring back to Jacob in Canaan carried a double message from the prodigal son to grieving father that only the two of them would understand.

Poetry of the Torah and dreams connect the material and spiritual world

The Lubavitcher Rebbe expands our understanding of this ritual. Though he doesn’t refer to this scene with the wagon explicitly, he deepens our understanding of it even more by parsing the meaning of the wagon-calf secret message Joseph sent to Jacob. The elaborate ritual involves sacrificing the calf by severing its neck. Why? The Rebbe calls the neck “the precarious joint.” In the Torah, he notes,

“the neck is a common metaphor for the Holy Temple.” It links “heaven and earth, points of contact between the Creator and His creation. … G-d, who transcends the finite …  chose to designate a physical site and structure as the seat of His manifest presence in the world …. The Sanctuary, then, is the ‘neck’ of the world … the juncture that connects its body to its head and channels the flow of consciousness and vitality from the one to the other.”

“The Neck,” Chabad.org)

The unclaimed corpse leaves unattached guilt lying around in a no-man’s land unaccounted for. It is intolerable. The guilt must be expiated. If we cannot determine which city owns it, we sever the calf’s neck to show that the integrity of the Holy Land has been broken and restore it symbolically.

Joseph’s wagon is an invitation to walk through the portal in history. Time collapses as the whole vista of Hebrew destiny appears to Jacob upon seeing the wagon laden with gifts. That walk leads down to Egypt and then up to Sinai and the Torah and eventually the landscape of the Promised Land, an Israel with towns and a system of justice and order and holy calculus so sensitive that an unaccounted for corpse has to be brought back into balance. The Torah is itself the gateway to a whole other consciousness about the world for an entire nation, connecting the material world to the spiritual world.  Joseph here is the avatar of this new understanding, introducing dreamspace into reality, enlarging the world through the flow of consciousness and vitality between the different channels in our senses. Reading the Torah as poetry enables us to rehearse, to recapitulate this connection over and over. We are always standing before the wagons, laden with treasures, symbol of resuscitation and reading secret messages, interpretation.

Layers of meanings and cross-references within the text and outside it deepen rather than interfere with one another. The means to deciphering the scene before us is not only through our senses but by short-circuiting our rational, empirical senses. They see only the goodies. We need to open up to the mysteries inside the poetry, the associative, artistic, aesthetic resonance of the images and words acting together. We need to have the Joseph super-power, to see the reality in the dream. Like him, and like Jacob on seeing the wagon, we must create a channel, a precarious joint, from the spiritual realm to the material one. This way of reading life and the Torah and the world before us enlarges everything. The original Hebrew, without vowels or punctuation is Moses’ transcription of God’s one long transcendent utterance atop Sinai and virtually demands that we approach it with openness.

I’m no prophet, but I imagine this is how it must work and why the prophets are such great poets: they are seized by a sudden flooding expansion of their senses, a wheeling, prophetic perception of past and future unfolding in the fateful moment. We can get some small taste of this if we read the poetry in the Hebrew: Israel, summoned by a secret sign from his son, sings a song of extravagant overflowing joy and in that moment can’t wait to go down to Egypt.