Backlight

Parshas Vayeishev, with its riveting episode of Yosef HaTzaddik’s struggle to resolutely spurn the enticements of Potiphar’s wife, sometimes coincides with Chanukah, and in years like this one, serves as its prelude. It seems reasonable to suggest that there is a deeper connection between the saga of young Yosef, alone in an alien land, and Chanukah, which along with Purim, is the archetypal Yom Tov of galus.

The Gemara (Sotah 36b) relates that Yosef glimpsed the image of Yaakov Avinu peering through the window to convey a message to his son about the choice before him: To reject the advances of the temptress and thereby merit the lofty appellation of ro’eh Yisrael (“shepherd of Israel”), denoting an intermediate status between av and shevet, or to yield to her and suffer the spiritual ignominy of being labeled a ro’eh zonos. (The Yerushalmi adds that through that window he glimpsed the countenance of his mother, Rachel, too).

To describe Yosef’s victory in this greatest of nisyonos, the Torah uses the word “vayima’ein — and he refused.” Intriguingly, the trop (cantillation mark) over the word is the sign of the shalsheles, one that appears only four times throughout the Chumash. The word means “chain,” and indeed, looking at its shape and listening to how it is given voice by the baal korei brings a chain of many links very much to mind.

Rabbeinu Bechaye writes that the function of trop is to provide the subtext to accompany and illuminate the Torah’s explicit text. Here, too, the shalsheles conveys to us that it was only by grasping hold of a chain and refusing to let it go that Yosef was able to wrench himself free of the moment and turn his thoughts instead to his righteous past and a potentially glorious future.