VAYESHEV
Vayeshev, (chapters 37-40) “and he dwelt” marks the start of the Joseph cycle. It’s a familiar tale; Joseph is Jaccob’s favorite as his oldest from his best loved wife Rachel. Jacob gives him a ketonet passim, a “coat of many colors.” Joseph also boasts of his dreams to his older brothers of how they will bow down to him. They hate him, with cause, and sell him to a caravan of Ishmaelites or maybe Midianites who in turn sell him to Potiphar in Egypt. Then there is a detour to the famous story of Tamar, Judah’s daughter in law. We will discuss this below.
We then return to Joseph. He has risen to running Potiphar’s household because of his administrative abilities, but winds up in jail after turning down Potiphar’s wife’s sexual overtures. In prison, he again proves both his administrative abilities and his dream interpretation ability, as he runs the prison as an inmate and accurately interprets the dream of the wine steward and the baker. The parsha ends with Joseph still languishing in jail because the wine steward has forgotten him.
I’m going to discuss five themes.
Ketonit Passim
Joseph and dreams
Sacred Sexuality
Joseph’s psychospiritual development
The different way in which the divine acts with Joseph compared to how the divine acts with his ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The ketonet passim, the coat of many colors, has long stumped commentators. In a note of great honesty, one translator says “We have no idea what the Hebrew means, so I have retained the traditional “many colors.” The Wikipedia article on this quotes Aryeh Kaplan giving a broad range of historical interpretations which amount to “we don’t know.”
There’s no question that we have a tradition of sacred clothing for religious specialists, as we will see when, for instance, we talk about the vestments of the high priest. (Exodus Chapter 28). However, in those cases the nature of the clothing is elaborated upon in enough detail that people can attempt a reconstruction of what it actually looked like. Here we don’t even know if the garment is long or short, made of wool or linen, how it was ornamented. Does the garment even have religious significance or is it just a sign of Jacob’s favoritism towards Joseph?
We are introduced to the ketonet passim in 37:3. “Now Israel [Jacob] loved Joseph best of all his sons, for he was the child of his old age; and he had made him an ornamented tunic (ketonet passim).” But he actually has one full brother who is younger than he is in Benjamin. So it can’t be that he’s just a surprise gift, like Isaac was for Abraham. Ramban therefore argues that the correct interpretation of this verse is that “it was the custom of the elders to take one of their younger sons to be with them to attend them.” This view is buttressed by Onkelos’s (about 100 CE) translation of the Hebrew as “he was a wise son.” So Joseph is the one who attends Jacob. Now maybe Jacob gives Joseph the ketonet passim just because of his service to Jacob and Joseph is just an attendant for an elderly father. Or maybe, Joseph is more like Jacob’s spiritual heir and the ketonet passim is given to indicate that. This is my personal speculation.
There’s no real way to know from the text we have. More, the reactions of the brothers to Joseph merely indicate their general jealousy and hatred towards him, rather than saying anything about Joseph being Jacob’s spiritual heir. These feelings could be rooted in him as a favorite of their father, or because he’s an obnoxious teenager who boasts how they will all bow down to him some day (37:5-8) or part of the rivalry between the different women who are the mothers of Jacob’s children (though Rachel is dead, the other three are alive).
Sacred clothing is a cross cultural way to distinguish the sacred from the profane. The idea of sacred clothing is some combination of contributing to the transition of the wearer from profane realms to the sacred and a marking that this time and place I am entering is different than my everyday life. It’s different than say dress clothes in our world because dress clothes, for most of us, are just an external skin, devoid of deep significance, a signifier of our conformity to cultural expectations rather than something that says sacredness here.
I don’t have any kind of practice of sacred clothing or ornamentation, but I think I am missing something. Do you have clothes, jewelry, make up etc that you put on that have particular spiritual significance? How does wearing them transform you?
There are four dreams that Joseph interprets in this parsha, two of his (37: 5-11) and the dreams of the wine steward and the baker (40:9-19). All of the dreams, I should note, are remarkably coherent; there’s none of the, for me, normal kind of disconnection, like I’m hiking in the woods and then a car is blaring its horn at me telling me to move and I jump back, wondering what the car is doing on the hiking trail or how it could possibly be going that fast. The dreams in Genesis seem stylized.
There’s a change in the maturity of Joseph over the course of the dream interpretations. In the first two, he is an obnoxious brat who should keep his mouth shut. After he recounts the second dream, “his father berated him. ‘What’ he said to him, ‘is this dream you have dreamed? Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers and bow low to you to the ground?’” (37:10). (Note that his mother is dead, so this either refers to a different woman who raises him after Rachel’s death or is an editing mistake). There’s no evidence of the divine in these childhood dreams or their interpretations.
However, when the wine steward and the baker are downcast, Joseph comes to them and says why are you looking sad. They say to him they’ve had dreams and have no one to interpret them. Joseph responds “Surely God can interpret! Tell me your dreams.” (40:8) So here these interpretations aren’t about Joseph, but about the divine working through Joseph.
Dreams and dream interpretation are important in Jewish tradition. There’s a wonderful new book by Rabbi Jill Hammer called UnderTorah about dreams as a kind of Torah. Dreams give us access our unconscious, and, following Jung, our collective unconscious, that is the archetypes of humanity that connect us to the sacred. Thus working with our dreams can be a really important sacred practice. It's not a core practice of mine, but there have been times when working with dreams has been crucial in my spiritual development.
What kind of dream practice do you have, if any? How do you think about the divine and dreams or dream interpretation?
The story of Judah and Tamar raises the possibility of sacred sexuality. This is a topic that as Jill Hammer writes “is a powerful undercurrent in the Bible, even as the Bible condemns it.” (The Hebrew Priestess p.104)
Judah refuses to give his third son to Tamar after his first two sons die childless as the husbands of Tamar. He is supposed to do this in order to preserve the family name of his eldest. She then disguises herself and poses either as a prostitute or a holy woman in order to get pregnant by him. She bargains for his staff, seal and cord as surety against payment before they engage in sex and says that she will bill him for a goat kid. Judah gives the goat kid to a friend to make the payment and retrieve the identifying items, but the friend can’t find her. Three months later, Tamar is pregnant and starts showing (yeah, not likely on a first pregnancy, I get it). The gossips start wagging their tongues that Tamar is pregnant by whoring, and Judah says she should be burned as an adulteress. That’s ironic, because she wouldn’t be an adulteress if he would give her his third son to marry. Then she emerges and presents the cord, seal and staff and names Judah the father. He confesses that she has the right of it and that he was wrong to deny her his third son. She bears twins, one of whom is the ancestor of King David.
Is Tamar a simple prostitute or is she a holy woman? The text is ambiguous. Judah meets Tamar at a visible place on the road to Timnah and the text says he thought her a Zonah, a word that means prostitute. (38:15). But when his friend goes to make his payment, the friend asks about the Kedeisha (38:21 and 22). Now, the word Kediesha, has the same root as the word Kadosh or holy, which is why we get this weird translation of “Sacred Prostitute.” But Kedeisha by itself simply means “holy woman.”
There are a number of things that seem odd about the story if she is a simple prostitute. The payment to her for services rendered isn’t rendered at the time. Prostitution seems like the ultimate in transactional relationships, who is going to take an IOU? A goat kid also seems like really excessive payment. Lastly, sending a friend to make the payment just seems odd. These problems disappear if Tamar is a Kedeisha and that is regarded culturally as something acceptable. I’m just speculating here, but the story makes a lot more sense if Tamar is engaging in sacred sex, then if she is just a simple prostitute.
Now I know that many scholars are queasy about the possibility of sacred or cultic sex existing amongst our ancestors, though our neighbors practiced it (see Numbers 25 for Midianite sacred sex in which our ancestors participated). It seems to me, that the connection of holiness and female sexuality is not something our text wants to touch. While our tradition doesn’t, for the most part, condemn or devalue sexuality in the way Christianity or Indian religions do, it certainly doesn’t embrace it, particularly female sexuality.
For a completely different perspective, there’s a wild book that explores these questions, Kedesha by Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi who is a proponent of what he calls sexual shamanism.
Here are our questions. Why is this story included in our text at all instead of just being suppressed? What do you make of the possibility of sacred sexuality? What lessons are there for you in your own life?
Our text is frustratingly quiet about the psychospiritual development of Joseph. We discussed last week about the text’s lack of interest in Jacob’s psychospiritual development, so I won’t repeat that here.
We have already recounted Joseph’s maturation from the adolescent braggart to the more mature young man in prison who attributes his skill in interpreting dreams to the divine. But we aren’t given any indication of how this maturation happened. Being put in the pit in the wilderness is a really tempting piece of text to interpret. The pit carries an obvious association with the underworld and/or mother earth. The wilderness is connected to revelation, as we’ve seen with Jacob, Hagar and will see with Moses and Elijah. But there’s just nothing in the text that lets us say anything. (37:22-28) The prison is also a kind of liminal space, that is a space not of our ordinary world.
Transformation usually happens in liminal space and time (part of the problem with expecting lasting transformation in weekend seminars that take place in hotels). Transformation also often happens on mountaintops or in some kind of depth setting, such as caves, dungeons or pits because these spaces are different than the settled hillsides and valleys in which we live our daily lives. Further, the physical space gives us certain metaphors of transformation. There’s a difference between “plumbing the depths” of something and “getting high.” Bill Plotkin explores this difference in much greater detail in his theory of spiritual development and his medicine wheel. He differentiates between spirit and soul, and spirit is this upward transcendent experience of the sacred, while soul involves an immanent and deep experience of the sacred.
Think of where you are drawn to when you are walking in the woods. Are you drawn upwards? Downwards? Or do you want to hang out in the valleys? Think of your transformational experiences that have stuck. Have they been more upwards, downwards or again in the valleys? What metaphors of transformation speak to you?
Joseph’s dream interpretations lead us to highlight a significant difference between Joseph and his ancestors, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Let me distinguish between three different ways the divine appears to people in the Hebrew Bible.
One way is by having a simple conversation. YHVH appears to Noah, Abraham, and Moses and they have conversations with YHVH. YHVH talks and they respond.
Another way is prophecy where the divine seemingly uses a person as a mouthpiece. Here are two examples. The book of Jeremiah begins “The words of Jeremiah, son on Hilkiah, of the Kohanim who were in Anathoth, in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of YHVH came in the days of Josiah son of Amon…The word of YHVH came to me saying, Before I formed you in the belly I knew you…” Or this opening from Isaiah “Hear, O heavens and give ear, O earth for YHVH has spoken. Children I have raised and exalted, but they have rebelled against Me….”
Joseph gives us a third mode of communication. The divine seems to move through Joseph, though what Joseph says and does is not mere repetition of what he has been told. Joseph is the actor, but he consistently gives the divine the credit. The divine acts by blessing Potiphar’s house with the credit redounding to Joseph (39:5) and again disposes the chief jailor to favor Joseph whose actions are then highly successful. (39:22-23). Lastly, the credit for the interpretations of the wine steward and the baker belong to the divine, as discussed above.
Personally, my experience of the divine is much more like Joseph’s than like the other two kinds I’ve described. I’ve never had a conversation where I heard the divine talking to me and I’ve never been some kind of channel of exact words. But I have felt the presence of the divine, learned something, and have not been hesitant to think that this wasn’t me who gave me the vision or interpreted it.
If you have ever experienced the divine, how did that manifest?
QUESTIONS
Do you have clothes, jewelry, make up etc that you put on that have particular spiritual significance? How does wearing them transform you?
What kind of dream practice do you have, if any? How do you think about the divine and dreams or dream interpretation?
Why is this story included in our text at all instead of just being suppressed? What do you make of the possibility of sacred sexuality? What lessons are there for you in your own life?
Think of where you are drawn to when you are walking in the woods. Are you drawn upwards? Downwards? Or do you want to hang out in the valleys? Think of your transformational experiences that have stuck. Have they been more upwards, downwards or again in the valleys? What metaphors of transformation speak to you?
If you have ever experienced the divine, how did that manifest?
