ESSAY: On Yosef’s Healing Process (Parashat Miketz and Parashat Vayigash)

(Originally published in 2020) 

In these two parshiyot, we witness Yosef’s healing from trauma, from the trauma of being thrown into a pit and sold into slavey by his brothers at the age of 17 and never hearing from his family, along with all the subsequent traumas of his life as a slave, and later, a prisoner, in Egypt.  

At this point in his life, Yosef is very successful; he is viceroy of Egypt, in full control of the country and all its citizens, with enormous power and prestige.    But this success does not mean he has recovered from the trauma.   It seems that what he has done in order to survive is push away the memories and erase the past — he names his first child Menasheh, or “Forgetfulness,”  explaining that “God has made me forget [nashani] completely my hardship and my parental home” (41:51).   

This strategy works well, at least as a temporary band-aid, until his brothers show up, uncovering the old memories and unhealed trauma inside him.  He reacts in the typical fashion of a victim of trauma: he simultaneously tries to push them away and bring them close.   Part of him wants desperately to renew the connection; part of him wants equally desperately to stay estranged and to hurt the brothers and punish them.  What ensues is the push-and-pull dance of last week’s parsha.   One minute he is speaking harshly to them, accusing them of being “spies,” and the next minute he is asking kindly after the welfare of their father; one minute he is locking them up and the next he is honoring them in his home with a special meal.  He sends them away without revealing himself, resolving to remain estranged, but at the same time, he keeps one with him to maintain the connection and ensure they will come back.  Sending their money home with them in their bags is the perfect enactment of both of these parts’ desires; he is simultaneously showing his special care for them — his own family shouldn’t have to pay for food from him — and at the same time punishing them, knowing that they will suffer with worry over the false accusation of their thievery.  

As he is doing this dance of approach and avoidance, we see little cracks in his well-groomed exterior, signs of the deep hurt and vulnerability that lies hidden underneath.   At one point, he overhears his brothers’ speaking among themselves, saying that all this difficulty is coming to them now because of their guilt at not listening to their brother when he was crying out to them from the pit and pleading with them (42:21).   This is actually the first that we hear of Yosef’s having cried out in this way; the text had erased these emotions just as Yosef himself erased them inside of him.   Hearing about these desperate cries now — being reminded of his own childhood pain through their memories — Yosef’s covering is broken; he can no longer hide from the pain and turns aside and cries (42:24).   Again, upon seeing Binyamin in their second visit, Yosef is so moved by pity and love for his brothers — a yearning for connection and perhaps some grief at all the lost years of seeing Binyamin, his only full brother, grow up — that he again turns aside, to another room, and cries (43:30). 

These are little cracks, little glimpses of the intense pain that lies underneath his viceroy veneer.  In order for Yosef to fully heal from the trauma, he needs a full re-enactment, a full remembrance and coming to terms with the traumatic event itself.   It is for this purpose — whether Yosef consciously understands it or not — that Binyamin is brought onto the scene.   Binyamin is the stand-in for Yosef as a young boy.  Like Yosef, he is the son of the favored wife, especially beloved to his father in his father’s old age.   Yosef himself tries to add to this sense of favoritism, giving him extra food portions and clothing, as his father had done to him with the special cloak.    Next Yosef manipulates the situation so that Binyamin, too, is in danger of being sold into slavery before all of his brothers’ eyes.  Usually the explanation here is that Yosef is testing his brothers to see whether they have changed.   Perhaps another way of seeing it is through the prism of Yosef’s trauma, seeing that Yosef is actually —  whether consciously or unconsciously — seeking healing, and he understands that in order for healing to take place, he needs to re-enact the original situation but with a different outcome, both for his own healing and perhaps also for that of his brothers.

The scene is set.   The youngest brother — favored by father and now viceroy — has been caught red-handed and in danger of becoming a slave.   In steps older brother Yehudah, in a remarkable speech, feeling his way and managing to say exactly the things that Yosef needs to hear.   First, that this younger brother will not be abandoned here and left to a life of Egyptian slavery, but instead, his brothers will rally around him and save him and stand in his stead.  Imagine how this message hits the hole inside of Yosef caused by the trauma.   He was abandoned, left alone to a terrible fate, no one caring to save him or coming after him to rescue him.   Surely the trauma is not just the terrible life of slavery itself, but the gnawing sense of abandonment by his family, the emptiness of feeling that no one really cared what happened to him.  Now Yehudah’s love and courage and loyalty seep into those hurt places inside Yosef, so that he is reliving the original event but this time with a brother who cares.   He is not alone in the pit, crying out with no one listening.  He is safe and cared for, like Binyamin, surrounded by brothers who will stand up for him and not abandon him.  

Second, Yehudah emphasizes their father Yaakov’s emotional attachment to Binyamin and the unbelievable pain that it would cause him to lose Binyamin after having lost Yosef.   Yehudah also mentions that Yaakov believed that Yosef had been killed by a wild animal.  Many have questioned why Yosef never contacted his father during his time in Egypt.  I wonder whether Yosef didn’t feel abandoned by his father as well as his brothers.  Yosef didn’t know that Yaakov thought he was dead.   He also didn’t know how sad his father was.  Perhaps Yosef imagined that his father gave up on him quickly and moved on with his many other sons, not missing him enough to send out a rescue squad and look for him.  Of course, Yosef was the favored son, so he should have trusted that love, but think back on the scenes immediately preceding the trauma; Yosef had been reporting his dreams and his father had rebuked him (37:10).  Right after that, his father sent him off to see about his brothers’ welfare.  Yosef may have understood these two acts as signs of his father’s increasing disapproval of him and concern for his brothers at his own expense.  So that then, when he is sold into slavery and no one comes to rescue him — not knowing the story about the wild animal — Yosef must have felt deeply hurt and abandoned, perhaps beginning to doubt his father’s continued love for him.  .   

Now, in this re-enacted scene, through Yehudah’s speech, Yosef finds out that his father thought he was dead and also the depth of his father’s sadness — Yehudah speaks of the intensity of the sadness that would ensue from the loss of Binyamin, and surely Yosef can feel that Yehudah knows of this paternal despair from a previous experience, that his father has been decimated by his own absence as well.   Yosef now feels the intensity of that sorrow, of his father’s yearning for him and sense of loss, and in opening himself to that loss, Yosef also opens himself to feeling his father’s love, a love he must have buried deep inside him and not felt for a very long time.    That place inside him that was so hurt — that felt so abandoned and unloved — now opens and is nourished by these words of Yehudah, by the image of his loving, mourning father. 

When Yosef hears Yehudah’s speech, he can feel something happening inside him, some transformation, some opening, and he calls out for all the Egyptian officials around him to leave the room.    What he is doing, in essence, is removing the Egyptian viceroy mask he has constructed for himself over the years, the mask that has covered over his pain and his trauma.   Now, opening to it again, to the past and to remembering and to feeling it all, he needs first to ask the parts of him — both those outside and inside him — that have done the masking and protecting for so long — to please step aside, to allow room for the vulnerable traumatized child inside him to emerge.   

What happens next is a cry, a cry so intense and so long-held and so deeply felt, that all of Egypt could hear it; the whole world shook with the emotion that Yosef let out that day.   It was a cry of great pain — the pain of his childhood self in the pit, the pain of his sense of abandonment and homesickness and suffering in all the years that followed, and of his grief at all the lost time with his father and family, of all the years he suffered alone, without the love and care of anyone around him, the pain, too, of his brothers in all their shame and embarrassment and regret, and the pain of his father in his inconsolable grief and despair and broken heart.     Having remembered and re-enacted the trauma in a new way through Binyamin, Yosef manages to bring up all that pain, and for the first time, in the comforting presence of Yehudah’s words, to allow himself to fully feel it, and, by feeling it, to release it into the wider universe.  The losses — his own as well as those of his family — needed to be fully mourned and expressed before moving on.  The cry is one of pain, but it is also one of tremendous release and relief; crying is the last doorway out, the key to letting go and healing.   

Yosef shakes out all the pain he was holding from the past and returns to the present, fully himself, fully alive and feeling for the first time in a long time — “I am Yosef” (45:3) — and then, with the pain of lost time still in him, and an eye to the future, to not losing any more precious time with those he loves — “Is my father still alive?”   Can I still connect to him and love him and feel his love, which I had written off for so long?   

Yosef returns to himself, wanting connection and reintegration, turning next to his brothers — who are too frightened to respond — turning now to them, not, as before, in inner conflict, approaching and avoiding,  but with a full and clear heart, simply wanting to pull them close — Geshu na elay, Come close to me (45:4).  What Yosef says next to his brothers shows the full extent of his healing.   First, he says out loud what needs to be brought into the open — I am Yosef, your brother, whom you sold down to Egypt.   We are not going to step around it and hide from it.  It’s out there: You sold me.  But what follows is full of compassion and love;  don’t be sad or upset about it, Yosef says; it was all part of God’s plan and all very much for the best; I was sent here to provide food for everyone.    In owning and releasing his pain, Yosef has stepped into his largest possible Self, stepped into the Self that is connected to God, that sees the wholeness in everything, even in the pain, that sees purpose and meaning in every step of his own suffering life, and that can, with great generosity and beneficence, from a well-spring that is beyond normal human capacity, offer his brothers not just forgiveness but compassion and peace.   The trauma — facing it and releasing the pain around it — has turned into a doorway to a larger version of himself.   

God’s role here is significant.   It is through his connection to God that Yosef finds the strength to work through his trauma and come out — not broken and bitter — but whole and at peace and with a strong sense of his place in the universe.  God serves as his therapist and his refuge and his rock, not just here, but throughout his time in Egypt, holding him through the times of pain, helping him survive at first by forgetting, as he needed to do, and later, bringing him back to wholeness through Yehudah and the brothers.   Yosef emerges here, post trauma, so much stronger and wiser and larger than his 17 year old “everyone will bow down to me” dreaming self, and this growth happens not just through the suffering, but through his awareness of God in the suffering.  

The power of this story is in its optimism and faith in our human capacity — with God holding us — to fully face trauma and suffering and to heal from it; to feel the pain and release it; to be able to reimagine and retell the story of our own suffering in meaningful terms, and, at the right time and with a willing counterpart, to reconnect to those who hurt us and also to those who love us.  

With thanks to my son Asher for the insight about Yosef’s ambivalence in Parashat Mitketz, and with thanks to Shoni Mirvis for talking through ideas about trauma and healing.  

Photo by Felix Mittlemeier at Pexels