You Are What You Feel
I was raised on Gershwin and showtunes. Our piano bench was stuffed full of musical scores from Porgy and Bess, Sunset Boulevard, and Sondheim and Bernstein and probably a few pieces that weren’t written by Jews. The stereo system in our living room was housed in a piece of corner furniture with two wings that swung out from its sides, each lined with tapes and, later, CD jewel cases with jazz and Broadway hits.There was a small but robust Christian Community Theater group that put on three shows a summer, staged in the amphitheater on top of Mt. Helix, minutes from our home.
It was a considerably huge deal when my parents took me to my very first touring show, all the way up in Los Angeles. We saw Beauty and the Beast, starring Paige Davis as Babette long before her “Trading Spaces” days. My second touring show was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Michael Damian, and I didn’t stop listening to that album, on repeat, for half a decade. I would twirl and belt my way across the living room, imagining myself cast in the enviable role of narrator (no dancing required!). In my public school’s annual talent show, I sat in the spotlight, legs dangling offstage, singing the prologue: “We all dream a lot: Some are lucky, some are not. But if you think it, want it, dream it, then it’s real — You are what you feel.” This is how Andrew Lloyd Webber framed the Joseph narrative: that we are the dreamy protagonists of our own stories, that our stories are written through our dreams.
Many years later in seminary, I took a course at the non-denominational sister seminary across the street, the Union Theological Seminary. Up on the third floor of this castle-like building, we studied the theology of Job, and we were encouraged to explore the world of theologies that departed from our native conception of God’s role in the world. I picked up a book by Tanya Luhrmann, an American anthropologist who studied, and studies, evangelical Christian communities and their evolution. Her book is titled, “When God Talks Back” and it is, among other things, an excursus into the world of prosperity gospel: the notion that God’s will is our success and we can achieve financial and physical well-being through prayer and material dedication to our own spiritual communities.
This concept hinges on a personal familiarity with God that resonates deeply with my own Jewish sensibility as a biblical reader. Luhrmann theorizes that moderns who experience God conversationally — people who talk to God and hear God’s voice speaking back — are doing so by means of a willful subversion of “Theory of Mind”. We are all born into a baby consciousness that has us believing that the thoughts in our head are the very same thoughts in everyone else’s heads around us. They feel what we feel. As we grow and age, we cross a critical mental milestone where we finally conceive of our own thoughts as existing only in our minds until expressed. At some point, it’s quite the revelation that what you’re thinking is not what I’m thinking. And when I embrace that concept, I now have the building blocks of empathy, because before I learn to care about your feelings I must understand your mind and emotional state as completely distinct from my own. When Tanya Luhrmann met with Christians who described intimate conversations with God, she reflected the following: “The task of becoming a Christian… demands that one set out deliberately to overcome this fundamental human awareness that our minds are private.” She calls this, “participatory theory of mind,” wherein the devotee conceives of their mind as “porous”. For these individuals, God has access to their thoughts, and is present within them. Many of them describe it as sitting down and pouring a cup of coffee for themself, and another across the table for God as they share what’s in their heart and ask for what they need.
It’s easy for me to turn and balk at the conviction of those who adhere to a prosperity gospel that if they do good and do right, they’ll be blessed with the material requests they make of the Holy One. And indeed there are many reasons to be wary of the predatory nature of religious communities that focus on the acquisition of big, shiny things. But we are also a religion of askers, of requesters, of ones in need who pray for healing and help and action, so I rather I’ll focus on my curiosity about the nature of will, and of free will, in a world where one prays directly to God to bring them the things they most want and need. Here we are at the point in the Joseph story when we’ve watched the most beloved son of Jacob fall downward again and again, even when the narrative voice of the Torah tells us explicitly that God was with him. His dream reporting led to jealousy; his father’s gift of a coat induced a scheme to kill him that later turned to a story of slavery; he was wrongfully accused of sexual assault; and even when his dream interpretation served as a pastorally healing salve for a fellow inmate while incarcerated, he was forgotten. The text insists that God was there, but we watch Joseph suffer. Is he meant to suffer? Is God distracted? Absent? Uncaring?
Here in this Parsha, we are finally present with a relatively redeemed Joseph, a Joseph in a position of power, finally, and we as readers — and he as a figure, a man, a character — might say in that position despite God! When Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, quietly, in a hesitant whisper, pulling them aside, he seems insistent on a dissuasion of any of their guilt.
Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.
My humane read of this verse is that Joseph refuses to give any power to his abusive brothers. He would prefer to give credit to his fate to God, and this is a fate that now has him in a position of authority but for years hence has had him suffering, truly suffering.
The Rambam, Maimonides, uses Joseph’s lengthy chronicle in his explanation of free will in the Guide for the Perplexed. He writes that it is God who gave will to dumb animals, freewill to the human being, and natural properties to everything. And all of these examples of will, of which God is the ultimate source, are present in Joseph’s story: For example, when Psalm 105 speaks of an angel that comes and looses “him,” that’s a reference to Joseph being freed from prison as a matter of man’s will when he is remembered by the cupbearer. But events that are evidently due to chance, that cannot be ascribed to any of the three above forces, says Rambam — those are ascribed directly to God. What’s his example of this? שְׁלָחַ֥נִי אֱלֹהִ֖ים לִפְנֵיכֶֽם: God sent me before you. Faith is the attribution of inexplicable circumstances to the plan of the Holy One.
When we relinquish a sense of control, or at least complete control, over our circumstances, our relationship with God necessarily shifts. We might still engage with prayerful requests for circumstantial and material changes in our lives, but more so our requests resound with pleas for the strength to respond in the best and most sacred and righteous ways to the circumstances that arise. Joseph is so close to his own story, as we witness him crying out to his brothers from within a wrenchingly emotional moment, that he may very well believe with a full heart that his suffering was all part of God’s intentional plan. But we as readers, as Jews who learn from this text not only the story of our people but also draw from it lessons on how to live and act and do, we are watching Joseph respond to an opportunity for closure in facing his brothers with positivity, and faith, and grace.
Jacob sees this, too. The 16th and 17th century commentator, the Shnei Luchot HaBrit, writes about the moment when Jacob is physically reunited with Joseph. As soon as Jacob looked at Joseph’s face he expressed willingness to die. The Torah phrases this peculiarly when it writes: “After I have seen that you are alive.”
וַיֹּ֧אמֶר יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל אֶל־יוֹסֵ֖ף אָמ֣וּתָה הַפָּ֑עַם אַחֲרֵי֙ רְאוֹתִ֣י אֶת־פָּנֶ֔יךָ כִּ֥י עוֹדְךָ֖ חָֽי׃
Then Israel said to Joseph, “Now I can die, having seen for myself that you are still alive.”At first glance the words “that you are alive” seem superfluous. Jacob indicated by his words that being “alive” in itself was quite meaningless unless Joseph had remained loyal to his father’s teachings. Joseph’s face reflected G–d’s approval, meaning G–d made Joseph’s face light up.
What is it that Jacob saw in Joseph, in that moment of reunion, that secured Jacob’s hope that his legacy was in steady hands? The Shnei Luchot HaBrit continues with a beautiful teaching about the way in which Joseph held himself, in that moment and throughout his journey:
We are charged to appear in the Temple three times a year. The commandment appears in such a way that it caused our sages in Chagigah 2a to say that the word יראה can be read both passively or actively, as in “to be seen” or “to see.” Their message is that if one comes to the Temple with a positive attitude, meaning in order to “see” G–d, then one will also be positively “seen” by G–d.
ועל זה בא הרמז, יראה יראה (שמות כג, יז), כדרך שבא לראות כך בא ליראות (חגיגה ב, א):
Jacob saw in Joseph what his tremendous faith — in his dreams, in his fate, and most of all in God — had done for him. Joseph had every reason to have lost the will to believe, to claim his identity as Israelite, along the way. And here was Joseph, at this juncture, so certain that even after all this suffering it was God who was responsible for his deliverance and for putting him in a powerful enough position to protect his family. And as Joseph saw the world and saw God, so too would he be seen.
In a Rambamian way, we either have very little or a tremendous amount of control over our circumstances at any given time. But we have the utmost control over the way in which we respond to our circumstances and approach each moment, each day, each situation in which we find ourselves. Just this week, I listened to Bella Kapp recall the memory of her dear father Irving Szkolnik z”l, whom we miss so deeply this Shabbat, as she spoke of his attitude regarding parties: “If you go in thinking you’re going to have a good time, you’re going to have a good time!” This is a radically approachable twist on a prosperity gospel: K’derekh shebah lirot kakh ba lirot, in the way you choose to see a situation, so you will experience or be seen in that situation.
This is a radically approachable twist on a prosperity gospel: K’derekh shebah lirot kakh ba lirot, in the way you choose to see a situation, so you will experience or be seen in that situation.
So, dear Andrew Lloyd Webber, If you think it, want it, dream it… I cannot guarantee that it’s real. Or that it will come to fruition. But you are, indeed, what you feel. It is the way in which we approach our circumstances that defines our character. We do not hold our entire fate in our own hands, but we are the designers of our impression upon the world and its impression upon us.
