Angelology - Part III
A man found [Joseph], and behold! -- he was blundering in the field; the man asked him, saying, "What do you seek?" (Beresheit 37:15)
Yonaton ben Uziel Gavriel, in the form of a man, found Joseph...
Oznaim LaTorah Why was Gavriel sent from Heaven to show Joseph the way to his brothers? After all, his brothers were planning to kill Joseph, or at best, to sell him into slavery! Could it be that God sent the angel in order to relieve Jacob's burden of guilt, inasmuch as he knew his sons hated and were jealous of Joseph?
Rather, the angel came to show Joseph the way to Egypt, to teach us that the entire episode comes from Hashem. The time had come for Jacob and his sons to descend to Egypt. The matter was hidden from Jacob's wisdom and intellect, and he sent the son of his old age, whom he loved as much as life itself, to his brothers, who were planning to kill him. Therefore the Holy One, Blessed be He, sent an angel to protect Joseph on the way to Egypt.
Yonaton ben Uziel and Oznaim LaTorah address a problem with our text: who is this unnamed man and what is he doing in the field? The tradition teaches that Torah does not waste words. Every seemingly trivial detail must convey meaning. So it must be with a seemingly chance encounter between Joseph and an unnamed man.
The traditional interpretation holds that the man is an angel. The text provides several clues as to his identity: first, the man finds Joseph, rather than the other way around, as though the man had been looking for Joseph; second, the Torah states 'the man asked [Joseph], saying... (Va'y'shalayhu ha-ish laymor).' In Sefer Beresheit, the combination of verbs derived from the roots shin-alef-lamed + alef-mem-resh usually refers to communication with a malakh, human or Divine (e.g. 24:47, 32:18, 32:30). Finally there is the curious exchange between Joseph and the man:
And [Joseph] said, "My brothers do I seek; tell me, please, where they are pasturing." The man said: "They have journeyed on from here, for I heard them saying, 'Let us go to Dothan.'" (37:16-17)
The man's answer begins with a seemingly superfluous comment: 'they have journeyed on from here.' This is obvious! Rather, the man is conveying a secret to Joseph that only a Divine being could know: that they had 'moved on from brotherhood with Joseph [for] they sought a legal basis to kill him' (Rashi to 37:17.) Furthermore, the man knows exactly where the brothers are, even recounting a supposedly overheard conversation, without first asking Joseph for any further information as to the boys' identity!
Oznaim LaTorah explains why Hashem sent an angel to Joseph. If He hadn't done so, the narrative would have ground to a screeching halt right here in Chapter 37 of Beresheit. There would be no descent into Egypt, no enslavement, no redemption, and no Sinai! Instead, the Torah teaches that Hashem guides Israel to Sinai and beyond.
One more phrase in our text deserves comment. It is the angel's wonderfully-phrased question to Joseph 'what do you seek?' (ma t'vakesh:) If we accept that the angel already knows that Joseph is seeking his brothers, why doesn't he ask 'whom do you seek?' Perhaps the angel is actually asking Joseph a philosophical question. Perhaps he is asking the boy Joseph to tell us what he has planned for his life. Will he carry on lording it over his brothers like a spoiled child, or will he grow up and respect them as equals like a grown man ought to? Though the question is surely rhetorical, it must have sounded harsh to Joseph's ears. Perhaps this is why the tradition identifies this angel as Gavriel, the angel of severity.
No comments:
Post a Comment