Meiketz: Remembering Oneself
Last week’s parsha ended with the ominous sentence: 23. But the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, and he [the cupbearer] forgot him [Joseph]. - Bereshit 40:23
As a result of the cupbearer’s forgetfulness, Joseph remains in his second “pit”prison - for an additional two years.
Joseph, however, is a survivor. In order to survive as he does, Joseph alternately forgets and remembers details of his life and his trauma throughout the parsha, finding his way from active repression of his past to painful confrontation, to eventual forgiveness and healing.
Part One: The Trauma
Joseph, the loved and favored son, gets thrown into an empty pit by his jealous brothers. The brothers later remove him from the pit and sell him into slavery. Throughout the narration of these episodes, we have no recorded testimony from Joseph himself – no resistance, no pleas. In Avivah Zornberg’s reading, we don’t hear Joseph because he was completely unheard by his brothers. As he gets thrown in the pit and then traded away, Joseph experiences an erasure – a dissembling. “The boy is not (einenu)!” Reuben cries to his brothers, when he returns to the pit looking for Joseph. “Joseph is torn, torn-to-pieces (Taraf, Taraf Yoseph)!” Jacob cries, when presented with Joseph’s bloodied coat.
Even while Joseph’s body is actually intact, these acts of cruelty and erasure create emotional tearing that become etched into Joseph’s psyche. He is terrorized and traumatized by the experience.
Part Two: The Forgetting
Joseph is “forgotten” in the Torah multiple times. He is left in a pit. He is sold into slavery. He is thrown into prison. The cupbearer forgets him for two additional years before being called before Pharaoh. In response, when Joseph emerges from slavery and prison after thirteen years total and becomes Pharaoh’s right-hand man, he turns his most traumatic experience around. Instead of being the one who is forgotten, he tries to forget his past.
The Rambam, among others, asks the question, why doesn’t Joseph contact his father, Jacob to let him know he is alive? We are told that Egypt and Hebron are only a six-day journey from one another – surely a short enough distance to communicate.
Joseph’s behavior is directly in line with most trauma victims, who repress large swaths of memory in order to numb the raw, un-integrated, and overwhelming traumatic experiences from their past.
Interestingly, Joseph is aware of his forgetting. He names his first son, Menasseh, for "God has caused me to forget all my toil and all my father's house." (Bereshit, 41:51). Joseph is pleased that he has “forgotten” his father’s house, and yet how is it forgotten if he names his first-born son in recognition of it? The forgetting is not complete. Joseph is doing his best to dissociate, consciously and unconsciously, in order to move forward with his life. He is building a new life, complete with a new job, wife and children. His trauma, however, is still locked within him, untouched and unprocessed.
Part Three: The Remembering
For Joseph to heal, for him to be able to forgive his brothers, he must first remember who he is. He must return home to himself.
Bassel van der Kolk, psychologist, researcher, and trauma expert, explains that trauma victims who dissociate leave their body to avoid getting re-triggered by stimuli that places them, physiologically, back in the terrifying situation. In an interview with Krista Tippett, van der Kolk explains:
I'd say the majority of the people we treat at the trauma center and in my practice have cut off relationships to their bodies. They may not feel what's happening in their bodies. They may not register what goes on with them. And so what became very clear is that we needed to help people feel safe feeling the sensations in their bodies, to start having a relationship with the life of their organism, as I like to call it
Van der Kolk has started implementing and measuring trauma treatment through yoga, EMDR, Tapping, and other body-based practices, with significant successful outcomes.
Mindfulness meditation is another method by which we “remember” ourselves after having taken leave as a result of pain, trauma, and/or even the daily alienation from our bodies. Through repeated practice and gentle coaxing, we return our attention from fixating on thoughts to feeling our physical bodies, the “life of our organism.”
Thich Nacht Hanh describes beginning sitting meditation as similar to returning home to your house after you have been away for a while. Standing outside the door, you are not sure what is inside. Is it clean and tidy? Has some of the furniture been overturned? Has the house been hit by a tornado, in a complete state of disarray? With courage and gentleness, the meditator practices opening the door to her heart and mind and staying present in that (frequently) messy home.
We have no one event or explanation for how Joseph fully allows himself to remember who he was, traumatic memories and all. Joseph’s remembering seems to exist right alongside his forgetting – a dynamic back and forth between embodying his true self and trying to forget his pain.
There is a midrash, however, that suggests that Joseph resists the temptation of sleeping with Potiphar’s wife because at the moment he is about to do so, a vision appears to him of his father holding up a priestly breastplate with the names of his brothers on the stones. “Should your name be erased from among them?” Jacob asks Joseph. (Sotah 36b). Something in Joseph remembers who he is, and wants to be counted among his brothers and his family.
By the time Joseph’s brothers appear before him in Egypt, Joseph has reconciled himself with himself. He has opened the door of his heart to the totality of his painful past, placing his trauma in a much larger framework. He tells his brothers: “I am Yosef your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. But now, do not be pained, and do not let upset be in your eyes that you sold me here! For it was to save life that God sent me on before you So now, it was not you that sent me here, but God.” (Bereshit 45:5-8). Joseph sees his journey – every shameful and painful part of it, as part of his path and God’s unfolding.
God brought Joseph through immeasurable pain “to save life,” Joseph says. Perhaps all of our own pain can also be seen as a tenderizer for our hearts – to be able to see and be compassionate with the suffering of others?
He goes one step further in another midrash. After Jacob dies, Joseph, on his way to burying him in Canaan, stops by the pit where he was cast so many years ago. Joseph looks into the pit and blesses God “who did a miracle for me in this place.” (Tanhuma, Va-yehi, 17, cited in Zornberg, Beginning of Desire, 313). He blesses the site of his largest trauma, his most searing pain. He is able to see the ways it shaped who was and who he became.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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