At the climax of the Biblical Joseph story, the mighty Viceroy reveals himself at last to his brothers, addressing them in Hebrew for the first time in two decades:

אני יוסף העוד אבי חי

I am Joseph, is my father still alive?

(Genesis 45:3)

The brothers, utterly dumbfounded, need to be told again, “I am Joseph, your brother.” (Genesis 45:4)

But even two pronouncements are not enough to end the confusion, since the family remains silent as their brother launches into a rather lengthy speech. In it, Joseph tries to reassure them (and, one senses, us) that all of the horror, the abuse, the pit, the slavery, the jail, the trials, the twenty years of separation and the becoming an Egyptian – in other words all of the trauma he endured – was worth it, and in fact was more or less the divine plan all along.

ועתה  אל־תעצבו ואל־יחר בעיניכם כי־מכרתם אתי הנה כי למחיה שלחני אלהים לפניכם

Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.

(Genesis 45:5)

Whose life is he talking about here? Jacob’s? The brothers? What life is being saved?

Frustration with this sentiment is understandable and perhaps justified. How could Joseph, with whom we’ve travelled all this way through the brutal twists of this narrative … the same Joseph who survived outrage and violence only by dint of dreams, who was clearly traumatized by the sudden re-emergence of a past that he thought was over — how could this Joseph let his victimizers off the hook so easily?

A lucid version of this question appears in Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann’s 2019 post Joseph & The Cycles of Trauma.

“I have never liked Joseph,” she begins, saying she refers to this particular Joseph, rather than that annoying youth with the fancy coat.

This is the Joseph that I struggle with. His grandfather Isaac went through significant trauma — and we know he didn’t end up so healthy or adjusted. Joseph, who has gone through a tremendous amount of trauma, seems too righteous and well-adjusted to be part of our original biblical canon.

Was Joseph really that OK with his past? Had he really made peace with the awful things that were done to him?

It is of course possible to look at this passage in Torah from the point of view of pure plot and narrative. A reconciliation and indeed a moral were simply required to tie up the story … otherwise it could have gone on forever or else ended immediately, and what kind of origin story would it have made, etc etc. But if we ascend beyond the constraints of the plot and consider the story’s broader implications, Hermann’s question really begins to linger: Was Jospeh really OK with his past? Why on earth does he say this to his brothers? It seems (psychologically) false.

***

The 20th century American writer James Agee is a clear example of someone who was not OK with his past. Born in 1909 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee died at the age of 45 of a heart attack while in the cab in New York City on the way to his doctor’s office. His life as both a writer and a man had been diffuse and disorganized — brilliant in spurts, but tragic and unfulfilled overall. He spent many years as a creature of pre-beatnik Greenwich VIllage — dissolute, unfaithful, impulsive, barely functional, severely alcoholic, sexually excessive, broke. He worked a long, slow suicide of gigs, writing for years for magazines like Time, Fortune and The Nation across many genres. He was a blazing talent, but could not overcome himself. He was remembered by his own friends as an ingenious, attractive but also quite annoying person – a real adolescent Joseph – loud, magnetic, braggadocious, brilliant and prone to talking too much.

It was his obsession with death, however, that is the key to understanding who James Agee was. His most well known book, A Death in the Family, tells of his early childhood in Tennessee and the untimely death of his own father. When Agee himself was only six, his father travelled to visit the boy’s grandfather who was reportedly on his deathbed some miles away. Finding the grandfather to be still alive and not about to die after all, James’s father was killed on the return journey in a highway accident. From that day on, the death of his father was never far from Agee’s life or work and he was, in the words of his biographer Laurence Bergreen, beset “by a sense of terrible endless deprivation.” Which is to say — he was traumatized.

***

Joseph’s trauma is also connected to his father, about whom he continuously inquires. Does Jacob live? Has he died? Perhaps the patriarch is somewhere in between, for when news that Joseph still lives reaches Jacob in Canaan, we read that “His heart went numb, for he did not believe them.” (Genesis 45:26.) When the news finally does sink in, it’s a result not of words (Jacob silences the brothers) but of evidence — Jacob has sent a lavish donkey-train of fine goods as proof of his status. Jacob reacts to the news with urgency. It is the urgency one who can see death.

ויאמר ישראל רב עוד־יוסף בני חי אלכה ואראנו בטרם אמות

Enough!” said Israel. “My son Joseph is still alive! I must go and see him before I die.

(Genesis 45:28)

But let us return to the words Joseph wishes his brothers to utter to their father on his behalf. What is his message to his numb, possibly dying patriarch? The core of it appears in Genesis 45:13, where Joseph instructs his brothers

והגדתם לאבי את־כל־כבודי במצרים ואת כל־אשר ראיתם

You must tell my father everything about my high honor in Egypt and all that you have seen

What Joseph wishes to convey, in short, is that is he OK. That he has figured life out. That despite it all, he has survived, and thrived, and has entered into wisdom.

Only a few of the classic commentators deal with this verse at all. Rashbam frames the message as a matter of Jewish safety. Joseph wishes to tell Jacob that it is safe to come down to Egypt due to his influence and power, and that he won’t be progom’d by Pharaoh — fair enough. Sforno, the Italian physician, says that Joseph sends this message in order that his father find joy in his success. (How nice.)

Rebbe Nachman the Hasidic master, himself tortured by great paternal entanglements and various traumas, goes yet deeper. To the Breslover, the message Joseph sends is this:

I have prepared the way for the Jewish people to remain steadfast during exile.

(Likkutei Halachot II p 67a)

Joseph’s central message to his father is that he, the son, has figured out something that his father never could: how to be an exhilic Jew. (Jacob tried this for fourteen years and had a bit of rocky time.) Joseph thus reaches back, as it were, into Jacob’s prepared grave (for he would have died of hunger) to show him what he has learned about the universe, himself and the Jewish people. Living in exile is possible. How to do it while remaining “steadfast” is a solvable problem, and he knows this because he has solved it.

***

In 1938, at the age of 29 (about the age he was in the photo above) James Agee composed a prose poem entitled Summer, Knoxville, 1915. The piece later became the introductory chapter of A Death in the Family. The scene Agee paints of his hometown at dusk in the backyard of his house is viewed from the perspective of a small child. He observes the parents around him, the grass, the evening and the world of his childhood like this:

By some chance, here they are,
all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow
of being on this earth, lying, on quilts,
on the grass,
in a summer evening,
among the sounds of the night.

After a little
I am taken in
and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling,
draws me unto her;
and those receive me,
who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home

This is Joseph’s realm, the realm of sleep and dreams. Dreams are the means by which we launch ourselves away from our parental nests. Nightmares aside, one never dreams of living in the parental basement as an adult. Dreams are certainly what very decisively separated Joseph from his family.

Likewise for Agee, dreams were the impulse that took him out of Tennessee and into the literary and journalistic world of New York where he spent most of his writing career. The critic Jonathan Yardly entitled his 1984 review of Bergreen’s biography “A Dream of Greatness.” It is both ironic and somehow fitting that the nurturing sleep which Agee evokes in Summer, Knoxville 1915 is exactly what inevitably gives rise to the realm of dreams and the very imaginings and instincts that will propel him away from home.

In 1947, seven years before Agee’s untimely death, the composer Samuel Barber used Summer, Knoxville, 1915 as the text for a composition for voice and orchestra by the same name. Later, when asked about how the piece came about, Barber said:

Agee’s poem was vivid and moved me deeply, and my musical response that summer of 1947 was immediate and intense. I think I must have composed Knoxville within a few days… You see, it expresses a child’s feelings of loneliness, wonder and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.

Loneliness, wonder and lack of identity. The full cruelty of the world is that though dreams function to sever us from our familial origins, they provide us with few answers about what to do once we detach. Dreams are not in the nurturing business. As Joseph’s story shows, they are a force for individuation and survival, but not for the formation of identity.

Nor can we, as adults, look to our parents for what dreams fail to provide. Our mothers and fathers and other parental types nurture us in our youth, but they specifically can’t define our adult lives for us. Jacob in his later years had little for Joseph, not even a blessing until the strange militaristic one provided from his deathbed in Genesis 49. And yet he essentially adopts both of Joseph’s sons. Many can relate to the archetype of the grandparent who lavishes love on the grandchild while acting coldly or even cruelly toward their own adult child. Jacob loved Joseph no doubt, but what role, really, did he have in defining who Joseph became?

And yet both the biblical Joseph and the very real Agee looked back to their fathers, dead or alive, with a kind of obsession. “Is my father alive?” asks Joseph. Both look back, and neither finds the answers they seek. One of the most famous lines from Knoxville / A Death in the Family comes at the end of Agee’s own description of his family of origin on that summer night. It also concludes Barber’s piece in a musical passage of shattering beauty. The same parents who warmly nurture him as a boy in the backyard, who would do anything to ensure his survival as a child:

… will not, oh, will not,
not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.

***

It is not required that we make absolute peace the the traumas of the past to bring meaning and even greatness to our own lives. In fact on this subject it is fruitless to inquire directly of our elders, be they living or dead. It is our own lives we must save, not the ghosts of our parents and their wishes. Only then, having at least stabilized ourselves, are we granted permission as it were to come back to our own ancestors in love and honor and reassure them — “See? I figured it out.”

Agee’s tragedy was that he could not do this. He was a genius, yes, but one who walked backward through life, facing the ancestral graves and not the present of his own family, whom he left in ruin. Though his dreams propelled him to New York, he became mired in them there. Joseph, by contrast, aged out of dreaming. He exchanged his dreams for the “high honor” (כל־כבוד) he wishes his father to see.

Memory is a fickle fire — it flickers and wanes and then flares up again. Joseph was soon enough forgotten by the powerful (Exodus 1:8) which occasioned the great disaster and, eventually, the great covenant. And yet he remains the Biblical ancestor with the greatest claim on my own heart — for he is the only one, aside from Jacob/Israel, whose name is synonymous with the Jewish People as a whole.

In 1958, three years after his untimely death in the taxi cab, James Agee was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for A Death in the Family. He did not survive long enough to see the person he eventually became. That said, he would have heard Summer, Knoxville in all of its sublime beauty, and he would have heard the sad glory of that last line, which is as pure a distillation of the wisdom of trauma as I can think of.

I think back to Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann’s question: “Was Joseph really OK with his past?” I still don’t fully know. But I do know that I regard figures like James Agee with great awe and pity. I understand how trauma can devour a promising life because I have seen it happen to those around me. And I see Joseph as the alternative to this. He claims his life both through and despite the trauma he has experienced.

Agee’s past was a death, his present a brilliance and a misery and his own death a prelude to a kind of salvation. The manuscript for A Death in the Family was found posthumously and published by his literary executor. In that sense, self-obliteration was the price of his Agee’s own ascent — in that respect I guess he had something in common with the Tzadikim. May his memory, in all of its terrible imperfection and reality, be a blessing.

It was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.

Maybe the life in question was not Jacob’s, nor that of his brothers. Maybe the life was Joseph’s own. Maybe it is our own. Maybe one day I will understand all of this.