Parshas Vayigash 5784
“Don’t run!” This is the sort of advice one would expect from a concerned mother whose children suddenly go into full-on Pavlovian mode upon hearing the familiar jingle of the Mr. Softee truck. Prudent advice to be sure, but not the sort of direction we might expect if the occasion called for something more profound or inspiring.
When the brothers take leave of Yosef, we’d expect profundity and inspiration. What we get is, “Don’t run.”
Yosef sends his brothers back home to retrieve their father and make preparations to move the entire family down to Egypt. As he does so, he leaves them with just one word of advice, “Al tirgezu badarech — Do not quarrel en route.” (Bereishis 45:24)
Rashi offers two homiletic interpretations as to what Yosef was really driving at. Yosef may have been telling his brothers not to get swept up in halachic discourse while they traveled, or perhaps was warning them against the pitfalls of pesiah gasah—of taking unduly large steps as they traversed the terrain en route back to Canaan. Be careful. Don’t run.
Of all the critical advice, encouragement, or even rebuke that Yosef could possibly have offered at a time so ripe with emotion, why were these the words he chose?
Rav Yosef Salant suggested that Rashi’s two interpretations are actually one and that in reality, Yosef was cautioning his brothers not to repeat their mistakes of the past.
How did we get here? How did we arrive at this place of Yosef’s descent to Mitzrayim? The brothers saw him as an enemy, as an interloper looking to usurp the highest rank in the family pecking order, and as a crazed and narcissistic dreamer. And they decided to do away with him. “Looking back now,” Yosef suggests, “Can you see that that decision was made too hastily? Can you see now that you should have spent more time considering the issue? From other angles and additional vantage points?”
“Don’t quarrel on the road,” Yosef tells his brothers. “That’s what happened last time. You became embroiled in a halachic decision that should have been given more time, but you didn’t didn’t give it more time. You didn’t wait to return home, to talk things over with our father, to ask for his insight and his perspective. You decided on the road—on the fly—to throw me in a pit, to sell me into slavery. Hashem had my back—all our backs—but your behavior was unjustified.”
“In other words,” Yosef continues, “You took steps that were too large. You jumped to conclusions without giving the matter its due, its proper consideration and deliberation. What happened as a result? Pain and suffering. Our father sunk into a state of mourning from which he’s still not recovered. I suffered humiliation, pain, and loneliness.”
The brothers erred in a way that should be more identifiable today than perhaps any other in history. If in an era of traveling by foot, donkey, or horse at best, the human psyche wants to move swiftly and decisively in solving one problem so it can quickly move on to the next, how much more so in a time in which people, goods, and information are ferried about in just a fraction of the time?
In a world in which everything moves quickly, it is so much more difficult to stop the clock and slow things down. We have grown accustomed to instantaneous communication, troves of information always at our fingertips, and traveling miles and miles away in just minutes.
But the rapidity with which the world moves has not changed the fundamental truth that Yosef urged his brothers to remember: important things tend to take time. Major life decisions need to be thought through slowly. Impressive careers must be painstakingly built. Meaningful relationships take years of commitment to lovingly craft.
When Moshe Rabbeinu is first called upon by Hashem to serve as the emancipator of the Jewish People, Hashem’s voice emerges from a bush that burns but will not be consumed. What is the meaning of this symbol at such a critical juncture? I once heard a beautiful interpretation from Rav Judah Mischel, shlit’’a. How could a bush be ablaze without actually becoming destroyed? If time was stopped. In a halted slice of time, the bush would be on fire but would not actually burn. Moshe leans into a stoppage of time—ceasing from all his own errands and preoccupations to see the great site of a burning bush frozen in time—and emerges as the liberator of the Jewish People.
The Jewish Nation descends into Egypt as a result of moving too quickly. We begin to rise up out of Egypt by slowing things down. We move from steps too large to steps appropriately small.
The world moves more quickly today than ever before and it is impossible to remain unaffected. The question is, are we trying to stand our ground, or are we blindly leaning into the quickened pace of life? Are we making efforts towards preserving our ability to think slowly, methodically, and deliberately, or have we jettisoned that mode of operating in favor of diving headlong into the hurried frenzy of today’s world?
There is value in slowing things down purely l’shmah—for its own sake—for the sheer purpose of maintaining that muscle memory for when it becomes critically necessary to call upon it. Putting down the phone just for the sake of disconnecting. Slating time to read a whole book rather than just perusing headlines or snippets of articles. Going for a walk just to clear your head and slow down the frantic pace of the daily grind.
If we forget how to take small steps, we will have no ability to do so when life truly demands it of us. Be it a critical Shemoneh Esrei, building a valuable relationship, or making a weighty decision about the direction to take in life.
Servitude began with steps too large, redemption came through steps shortened and slowed. What shape do we want our own steps to take?