“Just When You Think They Learned Their Lesson”

  How stupid could Jacob be! He saw the damage done when his parents each favored a different twin yet in this week’s Torah portion the numbskull is said “to have favored Joseph among all his other sons.” 

   Now we’ve got three children and each one thinks s/he is my favorite. Of course, there are days when they thought they were the less favored…far closer to the truth. We have no “favorite” children; we take into account their unique personalities, their strengths and weaknesses, and we love each one for what s/he was, is and will be (or so we tell them).

   I found that to be true as well in my years as a congregational rabbi. Yes, there were some congregants who were “mean, cruel and rotten” (a phrase I used to describe myself when any one of our children bugged me), but fortunately there were few of those. Actually, even those had at least one very favorable characteristic. 

   You know the story about the rabbi standing at the grave of a member who was absolutely awful. Since you have to say something good about the deceased, he pleaded with those present to help him out. Out of the back, he heard one person say, “Well, his brother was a bigger mamzer.” 

   Jacob gave his favorite a multi-colored coat; he treated him as a prince; his sons knew this, hated Joseph for flaunting it and plotted to kill him but then agreed amongst themselves only to sell him. As I asked/exclaimed, how stupid could Jacob be?!

  But having said that…considering my belief that the Torah was not written by the Eternal One but rather divinely-inspired mortals…the trajectory of the Genesis stories, including this one, leads our ancestors in the right direction – ultimately, that is – though along the way they do really stupid things. Our literary ancestors, as I’ve written about at least a gezillion times, knew human behavior, knew no mortal is a saint, and knew that revealing these foibles would make it all far more believable. So stupid or not, we can learn – we can learn a great deal in fact – from this gross error made over and over again, hoping we learn the lesson. Do we?