Word: את, et, here meaning “with”
Context: ויהי ה’ את יוסף, “And God was with Yosef” (Gen 39:2 and 39:21). This phrase appears twice in our parsha, once when Yosef is first sold as a slave to Potiphar, and again, when he is sent to prison on false accusations.
Root: את, et, is the most common word in the Torah. In its normal usage, it connects a verb to its definite direct object, as in the first sentence of the Torah — בראשית ברא אלוקים את השמים — “In the beginning God created את the heavens and the earth.” The word את precedes “the heavens” and “the earth,” making it clear that these are the direct objects of the verb “create.”
However, the use of the word את in our context is slightly different; here it means “with” — God was with Yosef. A similar usage can be seen in: את האלוקים התהלך נח, “Noah walked with God.”
Interpretation: את is a word that facilitates direct relationships, that connects a subject directly to its object. In the same sense, God is “with” Yosef here, directly and intimately connected. So fully is God accompanying him through his travails, that it is as if Yosef is in some sense the direct object of God’s beingness (the verb hayah, to be), held completely in the flow of the divine life force.
Message: We are not alone. God is with us, accompanying us through life’s ups and downs. And perhaps it is precisely in our moments of greatest suffering — as with Yosef here — that we can feel this accompaniment most intensely, that we can become aware of being carried along not by our own will to “be,” but by God’s.
Note that in Noah’s case — “And Noah walked את God” — Noah was the subject, making an active move, “to walk,” with God, whereas here, in Yosef’s case, it is God who is the subject, the actor, the one who takes the initiative to be את Yosef. Sometimes we are that fragile and immobilized, so far gone, that we don’t have the capacity or the energy to initiate walking with God, and it is precisely in those moments that God takes over, that God carries us through, taking the initiative to be with us, to accompany us and carry us through the heartache. At those times, we need only to be open to this accompaniment, to receive it and to trust it, to know that, through no effort of my own, in my deepest pain, through the pure grace of God, I am carried through life by God.
Bereishit bara Elokim et — “In the beginning, God created את.” God’s first creation was not the heavens and the earth, but את, the capacity to be directly “with” someone, the capacity for intimate joining and connection. And this את quality — as the most common word in the Torah and in all Hebrew usage — is ubiquitous, everywhere present and in every fragment of the created world at all times; everything is made of את — a word consisting of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, holding all of language inside it — everything is made of את, of these precious divine fibers of connectivity.
We are accompanied and we are accompaniers; may we feel the divine capacity for את in ourselves and in everyone and everything around us, and may we know that we are, like Yosef, even in the darkest times, not alone.
Watercolor by Tim Lytton
