It’s Christmas Eve, which prompts a medley of reflections. On the one hand, for Christians it’s the night when the child is born who will redeem the world from sin. For Jews on the other hand, Nittel Nacht was the sole night when the men were advised not to go to the House of Study, because on that night they’d be at substantially higher risk of getting beaten up. How are these differing accounts to be reconciled?

In Torah Study last Saturday, the parsha (section of the Pentateuch read by Jews world-wide on that sabbath) has one of the most beautiful reconciliation scenes that I know of in world literature. Though I’ve read it many times, it brings me to tears every time we get to it. Let me recap.

As the story begins, Joseph is a good-looking seventeen-year old. The son of his father’s most-loved, deceased wife Rachel, he’s on the receiving end of his father’s preferential (non-egalitarian) love. His ten envious brothers (sons of other wives) conspire to sell him into slavery, afterward showing his father Joseph’s bloodstained coat-of-many-colors in support of their cover story that he’s been killed by a wild beast.

Their plot looked like a good idea at the time. If Joseph could be made to disappear, their father would have no one left to love but themselves. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way. Instead, Jacob (who’d won the name “Israel” in a wrestling match with an angel) went into lifelong mourning for the lost son of Rachel and didn’t love his other sons any better than he had. Maybe a little less …

Meanwhile Joseph, who’d been bought by Potiphar, an Egyptian official, soon uses his talents to rise to the rank of overseer, at which point he gets noticed by Potiphar’s seductive wife. When he rebuffs her advances, she falsely accuses him of attempted rape. Sent to prison, Joseph shows the same talents and rises to a managerial position. In that role, he has occasion to decode the dreams of two jailed members of Pharaoh’s court. When, eventually, one of them brings his talents to the attention of Pharaoh, who is himself afflicted by troubling dreams, Joseph emerges from that interview in the post of second-in-command in Egypt.

What Joseph foresaw, when he decoded Pharaoh’s precognitive dreams, was that Egypt was about to undergo a period of prosperity, followed by an equal period of drought. If Egypt stored its grain during the “fat years,” it could feed itself and the surrounding lands during the “lean years.” It is during the lean years that the ten brothers come to Egypt to buy provisions.

They do not recognize their brother in the clean-shaven, glittering Egyptian Vice Regent. But Joseph of course knows them, and puts them through a series of tests to discover whether they’ve finally outgrown their murderous hatred for Rachel’s sons. It is only after they’ve passed successfully through every trial that he reveals himself, in the Hebrew of his youth, with the sobbing words, 

“I am your brother Joseph.”

It’s the longed-for reconcilement, but in ragged, real-life terms. It won’t give their father back his lost, grieving years. Nor will the brothers ever regain their decades of repressed guilt. Without having to discuss it, Jacob of course now realizes what his sons must have done to Joseph. Even the Israelites’ Egyptian sojourn, which begins well, will take a steep plunge for the worse after this Pharaoh dies. That story will be told in the Book of Exodus.

The Book of Genesis concludes with the Joseph story. The historical part (after Adam and Eve get themselves ousted from the Garden) begins with a murder. Brother Cain has noticed that God likes his brother better, so he murders him. It’s the wrong solution to history’s sibling-rivalry problem – it solves nothing and gives Cain a disfiguring mark – but it will recur frequently as history goes forward. The achievement of the Joseph narrative lies in the model it provides for repairing our broken stories. Cain couldn’t do it but the sons of Jacob could.

Now back to our original challenge to reconcilement: the one between Christians and Jews. (Here I’m not even trying to address the extraordinary, pre-Holocaust and pre-Enlightenment, fratricidal rage against Jews that, since October 7, has sprung up as if it’d never been away!) 

In the case of Christians and Jews, we’re discussing choices faced by real people. So no paper remedies scripted by me can patch up this thing. I’ll just look at my own story. How, within me, might these broken pieces be put back together?

Does Jesus, for whom – be it remembered – “salvation is of the Jews,” bring a species of redemption that’s over and above the on-the-horizontal-time-line kind we saw play out in the Joseph story? I think Jesus underscores what might be seen as “the vertical element.” Let me summon an example. 

Many years ago, I was trying (but failing) to recover from a broken heart. Suddenly, I felt as if pushed involuntarily to get a knife from the kitchen and plunge it into my heart! It was quite strange. At that moment, I saw how it can happen that people commit suicide without intending to! What to do? Calling 911 would take too long. I needed an immediate antidote.

One fact about me (like it or not) is that I love hillbilly gospel. So I reached for a handy Red Foley record, “I Know Who Holds Tomorrow.” The song goes on, “And I know who holds my hand.” Of course, in the song, the hand-holder is Jesus.

What did the song do for me? First, it quieted me down. Next, it directed me to the vertical dimension. No matter what’s happening in the when-and-where of the timeline, there is a Hand that ignores the horizontal dimension and reaches down from above right now.

The Jesus of the Red Foley song did not, for me, arrive attached to any Pauline doctrines of original sin or salvation through the crucifixion of Divinity in human form. The Jesus I’m referencing here acted on me without doctrine – spontaneously – like a friend and co-religionist.

And, despite the dark history with which his image has been encrusted, he had absolutely nothing to do with anti-semitism.

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