Shabbat Chanukah, December 24, 2011 | 28 Kislev 5772 | Genesis 41:1-17

On our flight to Denver earlier this week I read the Sunday Atlanta Journal Constitution.  As I glanced at the article about real estate tax and housing values developments in recent years I confirmed what I already knew.  It can best be summarized in one word – “Oy.”  The value of our homes has tumbled. We hope that the value of our homes will rise again and, if they do not, we hope we won’t be too adversely affected..

For most of us, the recession of these past three years has caused some difficulty, but we have not been forced to change our lifestyles. For some of us, it has caused pain and changes in our daily lives. And for a still smaller number of people, who we may or may not know, the recession has been devastating. They are the subjects of stories we sometimes read or see on television news programs. They are the “successful” people who bad economic times have devastated.  This week our parasha projects Joseph’s brothers as such people.   

“If you please, my lord,” they said, “we came down once before to procure food.” (Genesis 43:20)

Joseph’s brothers utter these words upon their return to the Land of Egypt. They have done exactly as their brother ordered.  While Joseph held Simeon hostage, the brothers returned to the Land of Israel and to their father Jacob with the food Joseph had given to them during their first visit. The brothers described their Egyptian ordeal to their father and insisted that in order to win Simeon’s freedom, Benjamin had to accompany them on their return trip to Egypt.  

Just prior to verse 20 the brothers become frightened when they are ushered into Joseph’s home. They fear that he will punish them for having “taken back” the money they had used to pay for the food that Joseph gave them on their first trip. In verse 20, the brothers turn to Joseph’s house steward and assert their innocence.

Verse 20 contains a noteworthy verb construction, a doubling of the Hebrew root, y-r-d, “go down”.  “Yarod yarodnu” – “we (surely) came down” - the expression places added emphasis on the brothers having gone down to Egypt on their previous trip. Why the emphasis? The medieval commentator Rashi finds two meanings in the doubling of the verb.

First, the brothers literally “went down” to Egypt from the Land of Israel. Whenever anyone leaves Israel, he/she is considered to “go down” from Israel. However Rashi suggests a second, subtle meaning. He says that the brothers “had a real come down.”  Back in Israel, in better times, the brothers were food suppliers. Now, however, they have “come down” in the sense that they have been forced against their will to become recipients of food.

As usual, the Torah does not dwell on what such unanticipated impoverishment meant to the brothers, their mental health and general well-being. But it does provide some hints – blame, regrets and understandable worry about the future. Much of the story that remains in these last weeks of the Book of Genesis reflects Joseph’s brothers’ recovery.  Obviously, at least it would seem, they never could have come back from economic devastation without Joseph’s generosity. And yet, the recovery is never complete. While the brothers and their families prosper in Goshen, we will see in Parshat Vayechi that, from the vantage point of Joseph’s brothers, their reconciliation with Joseph is never complete.

With hard work and some mazal we can only hope that those whose lives have been devastated in recent years by economic harm and dislocation will largely, if not fully, recover. But when they do so, the “scars” of this time and what they have done to them will likely never fully disappear.   

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukah.