Fear is all around us. We are being beaten down by so much harshness, but the murder of innocents, as we saw at Brown and Bondi Beach this week, is the hardest to accept. The image of a ten year old girlnamed Matilda, a name symbolic of joy and love of the nation of Australia, of the very nation itself, and a girl there to celebrate the festival lights, gunned down in all her innocence. The students at Brown and the MIT professor in Brookline, all killed so senselessly. These events can easily crush us - I know, having a close connection to all three scenes of the crime, and to the Jewish people, once again ruthlessly targeted in Sydney.
And the murder of Hollywood icons Rob and Michele Reiner add to our grief and fear - and we are too dazed to respond to the indefensible tirades of Donald Trump in reponse to all this. And now we brace ourselves for more shock with the release of the Epstein files.
It’s a good thing we have the Joseph story in the portions surrounding Hanukkah. For it has lots to teach us about these uncertain times.
We live in a constant state of perplexity.
It is so easy to become confused by all the posturing among pundits and politicians, which only paralyzes us all the more.
So did Joseph. He teaches us how to respond to things that might otherwise freeze us in indecision and shock.
In chapter 39 of Genesis, Joseph is confronted by the greatest test of his young life, the advances of Potiphar’s wife. She finds him handsome, wants him and from her position of power, proceeds to embark in a campaign of what we would call in our day sexual harassment in the workplace. The Torah gives us Joseph’s response to those advances in verse 8, “But he refused, and said unto his master’s wife: ‘Behold, my master, having me, knows not what is in the house, and he has put all that he has into my hand.”
It all sounds very clear-cut and courageous. But the musical cantillation for the word “he resisted,” “Va-y’ma’en,” tells another story entirely. It’s a shalshelet, a note found only four times in the entire Torah (listen to it here). This roller-coaster, Hamlet of a note goes up and down three times, and wherever it is used it connotes hesitation, accompanied by the recognition of a fateful personal choice that needs to be made.
Rabbi Steven Nathan comments that Joseph was actually living in a world of shalshelet. He writes, “For at various times in our life we all live in the shalshelet, that long, drawn out, wavering place where all seems uncertain.”
In his commentary, he is speaking about sexuality and identity. But I think the analogy can also apply to violence and fear.
We often speak of being numb to the endless wave of mass murder that is happening around us, and to a degree that’s true. The list of mass shootings has become so endless that we barely have time to assimilate one before we need to shift focus to the next. We saw that this week with the mass shootings in Providence and Sydney. Murder has become all too routine.
It’s easy to be paralyzed both by this overwhelming, apparently unstoppable wave of horror that we confront and by our fear to do anything or say anything about it.
We need to resist that fear and break that paralysis. We need, as Joseph does, to assume control over our lives and to act courageously.
The Talmud (Yoma 36a) shows how Mrs. Potiphar tried to seduce her prey.
“Each day, the wife of Potiphar would attempt to seduce him with words. Clothing she wore for him in the morning she would not wear for him in the evening. Clothing she wore for him in the evening she would not wear for him in the morning. She said to him, ‘Surrender to me.’ He answered her ‘No.’ She threatened him, ‘I’ll confine you in prison…I’ll subdue your proud stature…I’ll blind your eyes,’” but Joseph refused her. She then gave him a huge sum of money, but he did not budge.”
Not even Mrs. Robinson went to such lengths to seduce Benjamin Braddock.
The Talmud (Sota 36b) then provides a detailed picture of Joseph’s inner struggle:
“The image of his father appeared to him in the window and said, ‘Joseph, your brothers’ names are destined to be inscribed on the stones of the [high priest’s] apron, and you will be among them. Do you want your name to be erased? Do you want to be called an adulterer?’”
In the end, the ambivalence of the shalshelet is transformed into an amplification of the refusal. Joseph doesn’t just refuse her, he does so three times in a single word. His “No!” becomes “No! No! No!”
I can almost hear Joseph banging on the glass, a la Benjamin Braddock at the church door, proclaiming that his ambivalence toward life is now over, and he is ready to forge his destiny, rather than being the passive pawn in someone else’s game.
With the wave of terror so intense in our lives, we need to say “No! No! No!” to it by affirming life in the face of death.
How do we do that?
By celebrating life wherever and whenever we can.
By acting courageously to defeat the ideology of hatred.
By acting courageously to remove the means of mass murder.
By living lives of senseless beauty and practicing random acts of kindness wherever we go, guided by an ethos of an unbounded love for our neighbor.
On this Hanukkah, let’s fight fear with fire. As this conflagration of madness engulfs the world, let’s defeat it by lighting one, simple flame – and then courageously add one more each night, until the whole world is filled with our light.
