On Creating a “Father”

“And Yosef said to his brothers, ‘I am Yosef. Is my father still alive?’ ” (Bereishis 45: 3). The question requires explanation. What, for instance, was the point of asking, “Is my father still alive?” Obviously, Yehudah had no more way of knowing the state of Yaakov’s health, after the brothers took leave of him, than did Yosef.

The Beis HaLevi understands Yosef’s question to have been a reproof: Now you beg for mercy for Binyamin based on your concern for the terrible pain that Yaakov, our father, would suffer if you were to return to him without Binyamin. But where was that concern for our father when you sold me into servitude, and allowed our father to think that I had been devoured by a wild beast?

The brothers could not answer Yosef, and retreated in fright before him. For they realized that their own past actions refuted their present claims. Nothing is more horrifying than such self-refutation, particularly as it presages what we will one day face in the World of Truth. There we will, kiveyachol, be shown a movie of our life. Every time we enter a plea in mitigation for some misdeed great or small, we will be forced to view another reel in which that same mitigating factor was present. Only this time the issue was not one of avoiding an aveirah or failing to perform a mitzvah, but rather the fulfillment of our desires. And in the latter case, the mitigating factor served as no impediment to us.

That insight of the Beis HaLevi has served generations of mashgichim well, as a prototype of the self-deception to which we are all prone and which will one day be fully exposed: Oy lanu l’yom hadin.