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Listening to Joseph

peace_parsha_logo186x140.jpg Is it possible to hear those we hate?

At the beginning of this week's Torah portion Vayeshev (which means "he dwelt"), the patriarch Jacob is living in Canaan with his children. Jacob has many children, but Joseph, the elder son of his beloved wife Rachel, is favored.

It is in fact in the very first lines of this week's portion that we see the favoritism play out: first we hear that Joseph has brought his father, Jacob, "an evil report" of his brothers. In the very next line, we read that Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children and that he made him a special multicolored coat.

Not only did Jacob love him more than his brothers, but he gave him special gifts. And Joseph did not improve matters for himself - he told tales about his brothers (and we don't know from the Torah verse whether the evil report is even true). According to one commentator, the fact that Joseph was better loved than even his brother of the same mother, Benjamin, made the brothers suspect that the reason Jacob loved him more was that he carried tales to his father and that he was building himself up at their expense. They might have had some reason to think this, since Joseph did not help matters by displaying a rather impressive ego: he reported his dreams to his family members - dreams that seemed to say his brothers would bow down to him, that Joseph would come to rule over them.

We could say that for these reasons, the brothers of Joseph had reason to hate him. But should they have? The Torah says, "when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him." (Genesis 37:4) One Chasidic commentator says of this "But had they sat down together, they would have spoken to one another and told one another what bothered them. Then they would have ironed out their differences. The trouble in every argument is that there is no common language and no one listening."

How true this is: whether we are speaking of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, or among Jews who disagree on the best way to resolve that struggle, we are all busy dreaming our own dreams, telling our own stories, and refusing to sit down with one another and entertain the possibility that what we perceive as malice is perhaps nothing of the sort.

In Israel over the past few weeks, we have seen what happens when a particular viewpoint is asserted as if it were holy in itself, as a dogma that cannot be disputed: this attitude begets violence not only against those who are involved in the struggle, but even against those who wish to show another way, or provide another perspective, even those who agree with you, if they don't agree enough. Your brothers and sisters become your enemy.