Joseph's Bailout Plan

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, January 3, 2009

In Shabbat morning Torah study this year we've been starting with the end of each Torah portion. In this way we compensate for the general tendency of reading from the beginning of the portion and never getting all the way through. With that concern for the more obscure sections of the reading, I was pleased when Aviva included some remarks about Joseph's handling of the famine in her Torah introduction.

The Torah dedicates 21 verses, almost as many as tell the story of the Binding of Isaac, to Joseph's management of food storage and distribution: 6 verses in last weeks portion Mikketz, where Joseph outlines his plan to the Pharaoh and 14 in this week's portion Vayiggash, where we see Joseph in action. We are told that the famine grew very severe and were it not for the food which Joseph had put away during the good years the people would have starved. What is the message of this long discussion which Biblical commentator Nechama Leibowitz suggests might be more appropriate to a history of Egypt than to the Torah of the Jewish people.

Some commentators exploring this material are critical of the way that Joseph took advantage of the people's desperation to centralize power in the hands of the Pharaoh. After all it was Joseph's plan that lead to the Egyptian people losing their ancestral land holdings and becoming serfs to Pharaoh. These commentators suggest that while the new Pharaoh, described at the beginning of the book of Exodus, may have forgotten Joseph and all the good he did for Egypt, the people had not forgotten his role in their becoming serfs. That is why they did not object to his plan to enslave Joseph's people. As in many situations in more recent centuries, the Jews were in the middle between those truly in power and the downtrodden, and bore the resentment of those with whom they interacted on behalf of the ruler. The Egyptian people's willingness to see the Israelites enslaved, while the Pharaoh feels no gratitude is support for the old proverb, "slights are remembered long after favors are forgot."

Despite all this, there are commentators who step up to defend Joseph. Sforno notes, for example, that there was no nepotism in Joseph's administration and no graft. His family received only what they needed, as it says, "according to the want of their little ones" and no more than anyone else. In addition by not allowing people to come and collect their food with multiple pack animals, Beresheet Rabbah credits Joseph with preventing profiteering, something difficult to do in times of rationing.

Those who defend Joseph also point out that the people were so desperate that they offered to self themselves as slaves to Pharaoh and it was Joseph who bought their land instead of their persons. The deal that he set up with 4/5 of the produce going to the serfs, was a good deal for that time and place. In fact the Ramban, Nachmanides, points out that it was the reverse of the situation he was familiar with, where serfs kept only one-fifth of their crops- this over two millennium later.

Most interesting to me was an article written by the Orthodox Jewish scholar, Dr. Meir Tamari, who specializes in Jewish business ethics and argues in most cases that the rabbis accepted market forces as efficient, essential and moral. However with regard to this week's Torah portion, he holds that what this text is here to teach us, is the necessity of society as a whole responding to general emergencies. The storage of the grain through the years of plenty was public storage, not private storage, and in that way it was preserved from rot, vermin and theft more effectively. Individuals might not have had the foresight or resources to put enough away for the lean years. Rashbam, an Ashekenazi medieval commentator interprets the text to indicate that Joseph requisitioned surplus on behalf of the Pharaoh, while Rambam, Maimonides, understands that he bought it up cheaply when the price was low; in either case, it required the authority or resources of a central authority. The famine hit the whole region and so individuals were not left to manage on their own.

This Torah portion teaches that society has a responsibility in severe situations to take care of each member and not to leave them to their own devices. Tamari characterizes this as a "moral issue" and notes that" it is clear that Judaism argues that in the last resort, society has an obligation to protect through coercion (i.e. the imposition of taxes or other restrictions on normal market activity) and education, the basic needs of those unable to provide for themselves." Though Tzedakah, Charity, is highly praised and an important aspect of Jewish society, Judaism does not depend on personal philanthropy to solve problems of this magnitude.

In the face of the many problems confronting us today, we too look to our central government to see that the basic needs of every member of society are provided. In this way we can become, as Aviva challenged us earlier this morning, the "Community of Fate" that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks describes.