Genesis - Cycle One - 4418-4727 - VaYigash

Sometimes you know something even if you can’t see it. Still, you live it, breathe it. No matter if it hurts, if your actions don’t make sense to anyone. No matter if you are a fool or a sage. We do what we must. As Rumi says, we can all jump up and volunteer!

Then, one day, that something is solid. It’s so clear (as you stand before Torah). What was once an abstraction is now a foundation.

In Judaism (from what I can tell) this is the way with God. In the parasha VaYigash we focus on re‐joining and reconciliation brother to brother, body to body, body to soul.

I remember sitting at a table during a class on Judaism. The subject was incarnations.
“Reincarnation?” one man asked. “Jews and reincarnation?”
“Check out the Hopi tribe,” someone said.
“I’m a Buddhist,” a woman said.
“I have this great book on the Hopi tribe.”
“The Muslims mention it in the Koran.”
“You read about it in the I‐Ching.”

You could almost see us all high-tailing it out of there. After all why settle for eighty years when you can get eighty again and again?

I remember sitting at a table years earlier with my sister in a café in San Francisco.
“Prove it,” she said.
“What?”
“Prove that there’s a God.”

I glanced at the birch tree outside the window, sipped my chamomile tea. I could have dragged her down Union through the fog to the nearest Temple. She would have considered me a fanatic. In any case, I would say I was a fair weather Jew back then. While I was circling around taking pieces, my sister was refusing the whole package.

In the beginning of VaYigash we get two brothers, not two sisters. We don’t get anyone talking about incarnations. But there are many references to death and lineage. And all of this is framed by a beginning that isn’t a beginning and an end that isn’t an end.

First, VaYigash begins in mid‐conversation. I repeat mid‐conversation. Speech has been cut off from connecting speech, placed in a new container. Of course, we can always say that the cut off is practical. An ending, if we like it or not, is often practical. But it’s so direct here. We have no choice but to jump in as if new to a story that is ancient. Sound familiar? Sure it does. One body, like one parasha, is a piece of Torah, of a universe here and now, of the journey of one soul. Torah is life. We jump into each body as well. And of course, there are other pieces during before and after the one now with other beginnings that we can’t possibly know. As the Zohar says, all of the souls in the world come and go from the same river…the Yesod of Zeir Anpin Now, more on the beginning. Judah draws near to Joseph. Judah (see Miketz) is the earthly. According to Rabbi Leazer, he draws near for battle, reconciliation and prayer. Joseph’s name is not mentioned here. Therefore the earthly, in detail, is nearing the divine. The gap is being closed. We are both Judah and Joseph, making tangible the eternal merging of above with below. The action has not stopped simply because we have entered a new parasha. The continuation of the action is stronger than the force of the physical world. It flows through it. It flows through us.

Now, let’s look at Jacob, Joseph’s father. Jacob, while traveling to Egypt, stops in Beersheeba. This is where Isaac has dug a well and water has been found. This is a place of ancestry that joins our bodies to God. There God says to Jacob (calling to him twice…to both body and soul) I will go to Egypt with you and I will also bring you back again. Egypt represents our bondage to this earth. So, we will be bound to this earth and freed again. This isn’t a one time deal. Then, when Jacob speaks to the Pharoah, he doesn’t just say I am 130 years old. He says that the years of his wandering have been 130. In referring to his wandering as separate from his body he is taking as a fact the divine continuum. Later, in the listing of names and lineage, those who enter Egypt are not referred to as people…rather as souls. Seventy are in Jacob’s household (46:27) yet in numbers we count sixty nine (46:8‐27). In my opinion, one is in transit, in the coming and the going, in the act of the reconciliation so prevalent in this parasha.

Now, let’s look at the Egyptians. First, they give money for bread. When they run out of money, they give livestock. When out of livestock, they give themselves and their land. Each time they repeat that not only will they otherwise die of starvation but Joseph will have to watch them die. Therefore, we (with Joseph) are visualizing the deaths and the renewal of the Egyptians over and over again. Yes, the journeying of souls happens to everyone, Egyptians included. VaYigash is not the only parasha that includes divine journey. It just knocks you on the head. If we want to look at Chayai Sarah the description of Sarah’s life in portions (23‐1) further infers not only the chapters in a life of one body, but a body as one chapter in the journey of one soul. There’s an amazing feeling we get when the abstract is made clear, when we read it within the sacred writings that we study. We don’t have to wear hippy clothes, sit on pillows, hike the Himalayas, find a guru, read Zen, get ultra‐serious or leave Judaism to see God as solid, to see our souls and incarnations as solid. Table to table, conversation to conversation, body to body we continue on. As Rumi says…Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack and accused you of being a thief. Now he says…you are my brother. I am a prayer. You are the amen….We move in eternal regions yet worry about property here…

So may we respect our bodies. May we continue the work of discernment. May we see each other as souls in bodies. May we take for fact the idea of incarnations. May we see incarnations as a part and piece of God, as a part and piece of Judaism. May we work at bringing the above to the below. May we jump up and volunteer! And may we have compassion, hope, joy and faith and live in the radiance of God.