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Yaakov reaches Beersheba at night, halting his caravan at the edge of the land. He is an old man now, and his son Yosef—whom he mourned for 22 years—is alive in Egypt, a ruler second only to Pharaoh. The famine gnaws at Canaan. His grandsons are starving. The logical move is obvious: go down to Egypt, where there is bread. And yet Yaakov stops. He offers sacrifices to “the God of his father Isaac,” invoking the one patriarch who never left the Land of Israel, who was bound on an altar and told by God not to descend to Egypt even during famine. Yaakov knows what he is about to do. He knows the weight of crossing that border.
For modern Jews who have built lives outside Israel, this moment at Beersheba carries an uncomfortable resonance. The question hovers unspoken in synagogue pews and around Shabbat tables, surfacing after every crisis and then receding—Kishinev, the Holocaust, the weeks before the Six-Day War, Pittsburgh. For some Jews, recent years have sharpened an old anxiety: that staying outside Israel leaves us vulnerable physically, or that our comfortable diaspora lives have insulated us from the destiny of our people. For others, American Jewish life feels as stable as ever.
Vayigash does not adjudicate between these experiences. It offers a framework for living Jewishly regardless of which camp one inhabits.
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God appears to Yaakov that night and speaks words that have echoed through Jewish history: “Do not fear to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there.” Egypt is a stage within the covenant, and what follows in Vayigash is a template for Jewish survival in foreign lands—a template our ancestors have deployed for two millennia, and one that remains urgently relevant today.
1. The Divine Permission Slip: Fear That Still Moves
“Jacob, Jacob,” God calls in the night vision at Beersheba. The doubled name recalls Avraham’s binding of Yitzchak and Moshe at the burning bush—moments when God arrests a trajectory and redirects it. “Do not fear to go down to Egypt,” God continues, “for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up.”
Nechama Leibowitz, in her studies on Genesis, asks what exactly Yaakov feared. He was not fleeing persecution. His son controlled the Egyptian economy. The journey promised reunion, food, and security. Leibowitz argues that Yaakov’s fear was spiritual. He feared that his children and grandchildren, surrounded by Egyptian culture at its zenith, would dissolve into the dominant civilization and vanish from history. This fear, Leibowitz observes, was prophecy. Yaakov knew what Egypt could do to a family.
As Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has articulated in his scholarship on Jewish history and providence, the events of the patriarchal narratives are covenantal. God’s command to Yaakov is a deliberate sending. The family must go to Egypt because Egyptian slavery is necessary for the formation of a nation that will stand at Sinai. This theological framework transforms Yaakov’s descent from refugee flight into covenantal mission. Yaakov moves because he is sent.
But if God commands the move, what room remains for Yaakov’s fear? The text is careful here. God does not predetermine Yaakov’s path—He accompanies the path Yaakov chooses. “I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up.” The promise is not that Egypt is inevitable, but that if Yaakov goes, God goes with him. This is accompaniment, not predetermination. God does not tell Yaakov to stop fearing—He tells him to move despite the fear. A measured anxiety about diaspora is theologically appropriate. It keeps a people alert to the dangers of cultural dissolution. The error lies in allowing that fear to calcify into paralysis when history demands movement.
2. Infrastructure Before Arrival: Building the Yeshiva First
“And Judah he sent before him to Joseph, to show the way before him to Goshen.” The Hebrew phrase l’horot (to show, to teach) caught the attention of the Midrash. Rashi, citing Midrash Tanchuma, offers a striking interpretation: Yehuda was sent ahead “to establish a house of study from which teaching would go forth.” The reading is not a claim about what the verse literally means—the Hebrew l’horot could simply mean “to point the way.” The Midrash is doing something else: it is reading backward from history, asking what Jewish survival has always required. Communities that built institutions of transmission survived; communities that prioritized comfort first did not. Whether or not Yehuda literally founded a yeshiva, the pattern the Midrash identifies is empirically sound. Before the family unpacked a single pot or blanket, there had to be a beit talmud—a house of learning.
This interpretation reflects a fundamental insight about minority survival: culture does not preserve itself. It requires institutions. A people that arrives in a new land thinking only of economic opportunity and physical settlement will, within a few generations, find its grandchildren indistinguishable from their neighbors. The infrastructure of identity must precede the infrastructure of comfort.
As Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer has explored in his work on American Jewish identity, the 20th-century American Jewish community followed precisely this pattern. The immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were poor, but their children and grandchildren built one of the most elaborate Jewish institutional networks in history. Studies from organizations like the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education have consistently confirmed what the Midrash intuited: educational infrastructure is the single most reliable predictor of Jewish continuity. Young Jews who attend day schools marry other Jews, raise Jewish children, and transmit Jewish knowledge at dramatically higher rates than those who do not.
Yaakov’s family survived Egypt because Yehuda arrived first with a curriculum. American Jewry built its golden age because Eastern European immigrants understood that shuls and schools were preconditions for meaningful Jewish survival, not luxuries to be added after prosperity arrived.
3. Distinct in Goshen: The Mental Health of Boundaries
Yosef coaches his brothers before their audience with Pharaoh: “When Pharaoh calls you and says, ‘What is your occupation?’ you shall say, ‘Your servants have been keepers of livestock from our youth until now, both we and our fathers.’” The reason for this script is clear: “For every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.” The family will settle in Goshen, geographically and culturally separate from the Egyptian heartland.
This is strategy. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in his writings on Jewish identity, developed the concept of ger v’toshav—resident and stranger. The Jew in exile must be both: sufficiently integrated to function in society, sufficiently distinct to remain recognizable to himself. Joseph himself marries an Egyptian woman and serves in the Egyptian government; engagement with the host culture is permitted. Disappearance is the danger. Goshen provides the geographic buffer that makes distinction sustainable.
As Dr. Malka Simkovich has documented in her research on Second Temple Judaism, diaspora Jews in the Greek and Roman periods faced similar challenges. Those communities that maintained distinctive practices survived the collapse of ancient empires. Those that pursued complete integration vanished from history. A modern reader might reasonably ask: why is vanishing necessarily bad? If integration brings peace and belonging, why fight it?
The tradition offers one answer: the Jewish project is mid-task. The work of ethical monotheism, the prophetic insistence on justice, the covenantal vision of human dignity—these remain unfinished.
But there is also a humanistic answer that requires no theology. Human beings need roots, narrative, and belonging. Complete assimilation rarely delivers the frictionless universalism it promises; more often it produces rootlessness—people untethered from any story larger than themselves. Jewish civilization, whatever its origins, represents a distinctive approach to the deepest human questions: How should we live? What do we owe each other? How do we find meaning in suffering? These are human achievements worth preserving not because God commanded it, but because the alternative—cultural homogenization—impoverishes everyone. The questioning Jew need not accept the covenant to recognize that something irreplaceable would be lost if the Jewish conversation simply stopped.
Social Identity Theory, developed by Henri Tajfel in the 20th century, confirms what ancient Jews discovered through lived experience: maintaining a strong in-group identity actually reduces anxiety and increases psychological stability for minority populations. The boundaries are preconditions for flourishing.
Contemporary Jews often lack a geographic Goshen. We live in suburbs indistinguishable from our neighbors’, send our children to the same schools, consume the same media. The challenge becomes creating what might be called “Digital Goshens.” Consider the WhatsApp group for Daf Yomi that buzzes at 6:00 AM, creating a pocket of Jewish time before the secular workday begins. That group chat functions as Goshen did—a space where Jewish rhythms override the surrounding culture’s tempo. Shabbat observance creates a temporal version of the same phenomenon: 25 hours each week in which the family operates on covenantal time rather than commercial time. The geography has changed. The principle has not.
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4. Blessing Pharaoh: The Ambassador Model
“And Joseph brought Jacob his father and stood him before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh.” The scene is extraordinary. Yaakov is a refugee. Pharaoh is the most powerful ruler on earth. And yet it is Yaakov who blesses Pharaoh—twice, in fact. The text offers no explanation for these blessings, but Sforno, the 16th-century Italian commentator, suggests that Jacob blessed the Nile to rise and end the famine. The Jew brings blessing to the land that receives him.
This is theology. As Rabbi Jeremy Wieder has discussed in exploring Jewish moral responsibility, the tradition consistently frames Jewish presence in foreign lands as carrying ethical obligations to those lands. Jeremiah would later command the Babylonian exiles: “Seek the peace of the city where I have exiled you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace you shall have peace.” This is a theological claim about Jewish purpose.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks frequently invoked the concept of or la’goyim—a light unto the nations. The phrase originates in Isaiah, but its meaning has been debated for millennia. One reading emphasizes passive exemplarity: live well and others will notice. Another reading emphasizes active engagement: bring ethical teachings into the public square. Yaakov blessing Pharaoh suggests the second reading. The patriarch stands before power and offers blessing. He participates in the welfare of the host society.
The ambassador model demands that our values bless the host nation. Consider a Jewish physician who has built a successful practice. The ambassador model asks whether she uses that position to insist on bioethics that protect vulnerable patients—the elderly facing pressure to hasten death, the poor facing pressure to forgo treatment. Her professional success becomes a vehicle for covenantal ethics. The blessing she offers her society is the moral framework she brings to her work. Yaakov’s blessing of the Nile benefited his family too—and it was still a blessing.
5. Take My Bones Home: Exile as a Long Layover
The famine ends. Goshen prospers. And then, as death approaches, Yaakov makes a singular request: “Do not bury me in Egypt. When I lie down with my fathers, carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial place.” Yosef swears an oath. Generations later, the Israelites will carry Yaakov’s embalmed body back to Machpelah, the cave Avraham purchased from the Hittites.
Traditional commentators offer various theological reasons for Yaakov’s insistence on burial in the Land. But whatever the metaphysics, the immediate function of Yaakov’s request is mnemonic: it ensures that his descendants never confuse the layover with the destination. Goshen can be comfortable and prosperous. Goshen can be home for 17 years, or for 400. Goshen is not the end of the story.
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As Dr. Daniel Gordis has articulated with characteristic directness, the centrality of the Land of Israel to Jewish identity is woven into the fabric of Jewish liturgy, law, and longing. The Passover seder concludes with “Next year in Jerusalem.” The wedding glass is broken in memory of the Temple’s destruction. To claim that American Judaism can achieve completeness without reference to Israel is to misunderstand both American Judaism and Israel.
Is it honest to call a 2,000-year exile “temporary”? Jewish communities have flourished and perished across four continents. Generations have lived and died without seeing Jerusalem. The answer depends on what one means by honesty. If temporariness requires a fixed end date, then no, the claim is not honest. But if temporariness describes an orientation—a persistent refusal to grant ultimate significance to any place outside the Land—then Yaakov’s request represents a profound and sustainable truth. The bones go home. The heart remains oriented east. The layover, however long, does not become the destination.
Questions for Reflection:
- Does living in the diaspora contradict the Zionist ideal?
- Is it wrong to feel at home in America?
- How do I explain “chosenness” and “separation” to assimilated friends?
This project is made possible with support from the Simchat Torah Challenge and UJA-Federation of New York. Learn more about the Simchat Torah Challenge and get involved at their website.
