Joseph and His Brothers, page 178
Jacob had maintained his upright, almost rigid posture.
"God will decide as to that," he said with a firm voice, "for only from Him does Israel take instruction, not from the great men of this world." And then from his lips came "My Damu, my child!" Hands clasped to his chest, he lifted his brow to the clouds and slowly shook his old head at them.
"Boys," he said, lowering it again, "this young maiden, whom I bless and who, if God hears my prayer, shall not taste of death, but living enter the kingdom of heaven—she sang to me that the Lord had restored Rachel's firstborn to me, but also that though he is indeed still beautiful, he is now somewhat stout. Does she mean then
to say that over time he has unavoidably grown rather fat from the fleshpots of Egypt?"
"Not very, dear father, not very," Judah rephed, trying to set his mind at rest. "Only in a stately sort of way. You must recall that it is not death that restores him to you, but life. Were such a thing possible, death would give him back to you as he was; but since it is from the hands of life that you receive him, he is no longer the fawn of former days, but has become a great stag, with all its ornament. You must also be prepared for his seeming somewhat strange to you in his worldly customs, and he wears pleated byssus cloth, whiter than the snows of Mount Hermon."
"I will go and see him before I die," Jacob said. "Had he not lived, he would not now live. The name of the Lord be praised."
"Praised!" the crowd cried and pressed forward to congratulate him and join the brothers in kissing the hem of his robe. He did not look down at their heads; his eyes had turned toward heaven again, and he kept on shaking his head at it. Serah, however, the songstress, took her seat on his mat and sang:
"Read it in his rascal glances, all was God's eternal jest; and, though late, in happy trances, take him to your father's breast."
Part Seven
RESTORATION / Will Go and See Him
And so the headstrong cow heard the voice of her child, her calf, which the shrewd farmer had brought to the field that was to be plowed so that the cow would yield to his wishes; and the cow submitted to her yoke and followed. It was still quite difficult for her nonetheless, given her distinct aversion to the field, which she believed to be a field of death. And for Jacob as well his declared decision remained a dubious matter, and he was glad that at least he had time to deal with his doubts; for the execution of the decision to move the entire clan to the land below meant abandoning deep-rooted custom—it both demanded and permitted him time. The sons of Israel were not the sort of people simply to leave everything behind, to take Pharaoh's instruction literally and give no thought to their household goods, inasmuch as they would be provided with everything in the land of Goshen. At most "to give no thought to" meant not to take every last item—not every tool and utensil, or even every sheep, goat, or cow—for that was impracticable; but that most certainly did not mean leaving whatever would encumber their move to whoever might be willing to take it. There was much to be sold, and those sales could not be hurried, but had to be done with all the usual ceremony of leisurely hard-bargaining. But that Jacob allowed these sales to proceed indicated that he was holding fast to his decision in all parts, even though the way he spoke about it had been open to interpretation.
"I will go and see him"—hearing that, one might take it to mean at most "I will go visit him, see his face again before I die, and then return." But as everyone, including Jacob himself, was aware, it could never actually mean that. Had it been only a matter of a visit after which he would return home again, then, if we may say so, it would have been His Excellency and Importancy Joseph who owed his old father a visit, if only to spare him the great inconvenience of a journey to Mizraim. But that ran counter to the motif of
sending for others to follow, which, as even Jacob fully understood, determined this fateful hour. Joseph had not been set apart and carried off for that, nor had Jacob's face been swollen from weeping for him so that they might pay one another a visit, but rather so that Israel might follow after, Jacob was far too skilled at reading the ways of God not to realize that the theft of his beautiful son, his glorification in the land below, the persistent drought that had forced the brothers to go to Egypt—that all these arrangements were part of a farseeing plan that it would have been crude folly to ignore.
One might say that it was presumptuous and all too egotistical of Jacob to regard such a vast calamity as this ongoing drought, which afflicted so many nations and resulted in great economic upheavals, as nothing more than a measure taken to guide and advance the history of his own house—it evidently being his opinion that when it came to himself and his family the rest of the world simply had to make the best of it. But presumption and egotism are only pejorative terms applied to beneficial conduct worthy of highest commendation—a far lovelier term for it is piety. Is there a virtue that does not leave itself open to terms of censure or in which certain contradictions, such as humiUty and arrogance, are not inherent? Piety is the privatization of the world as the story of one's self and one's salvation, and without the, yes, sometimes offensive conviction that one is the object of God's special, and indeed exclusive care, without the rearrangement that places oneself and one's salvation at the center of all things, there is no piety—that is, in fact, what defines this very powerful virtue. Its opposite is neglect of the self, its banishment to the indifferent periphery, from where no benefit for the world can come either. The man who does not think highly of himself will soon perish. Whoever thinks something of himself—as Abram did when he decided that he, and in him humankind, should serve only what is Most High—proves himself to be a demanding sort of person, true, but with that demand comes a blessing for many. This demonstrates the connection between the dignity of the self and the dignity of humankind. The demands of the human ego are of central importance as a precondition for the discovery of God, and only if—by failing to take itself seriously—humankind were utterly to perish, could both discoveries be lost together.
This proposition can be developed as follows: Privatization does not mean reduction, and placing a high value on the self in no way
implies its isolation, that it cuts itself off and hardens itself against the universal, against what is outside and above a person, in short, against everything that extends beyond the self, but in which it solemnly celebrates its recognition of itself. If, in fact, piety is the unshakable certainty of the importance of the self, then solemn celebration is its extension, the means by which it flows into what is eternal, which then returns through it and in which it recognizes itself—which results in a loss of the self's closed-off singularity that not only does not detract from its dignity, not only is compatible with that dignity, but also enhances, indeed consecrates it.
We therefore cannot overemphasize the solemnity of Jacob's mood during the time prior to his departure—even as his sons were settling business affairs associated with it. He was about to carry out in actuality what he had dreamt about in his days of his most extreme grief and had feverishly babbled into Eliezer's ear: that is, a descent to his dead son in the underworld. This was a fateful course of action, and whenever the self opens up to the cosmos, losing itself there and identifying itself with it, how can one possibly speak of isolation or of cutting oneself off? The very thought of departure was filled with momentous, self-expanding elements of eternity and of return, elevating the moment beyond any paltry singularity and particularity. Jacob the old man was once again Jacob the youth departing from Beersheba for Naharaim after having set things to rights by deceit. He was Jacob the grown man, who with his wives and flocks had left Haran behind after a sojourn of twenty-five years. But he was not only himself, in whom at various ages in the spiral of his life departure repeatedly rediscovered itself. He was also Isaak, who was journeying to Abimelek, to Gerar in the land of the Philistines. Still farther back, still deeper in time, he saw the return of the primal departure: Abram, the wanderer, leaving Ur of the Chaldees—and even this was not really the primal departure, but only an earthly reflection and imitation of a heavenly wanderlust, that of the moon in its course, of Bel-Charran, the Lord of the Way, passing through one station after the other. And since Abram, the earthly primal wanderer, had himself sojourned at Haran, it was clear that this, then, had to be represented by Beersheba, which would be Jacob's first station of the moon on this journey.
He was greatly consoled by the thought of Abram and how dur-
ing a different famine he had traveled to Egypt to Hve there as a stranger—and Jacob was in great need of consolation. Granted, ahead lay reunion with all its painful bliss, after which he would be able to die in peace, for no joy afterward would be worth knowing; granted, the right to immigrate to Egypt and graze his flocks on Pharaoh's pastures was a great boon that many sought in vain and for which many envied him and his house. And yet Jacob found it difficult to reconcile himself with God's decree that he shun the land of his fathers and exchange it for the offensive land of animal gods, the Land of Mud, the land of the children of Ham. He had settled in the land to which Abram had once wandered in much the same loose, provisional fashion as his fathers had—like them, always half a stranger. But he had thought he would die here as they had, and as for the promise that Abram had heard—that his seed would be a stranger in a land not theirs—he had assumed he might apply that to this land here, where he had been born and where his dead rested. Now it had turned out that this prophecy—which not without good reason had always been associated with certain terrors and great darkness—went further still, that its apparent goal was the land to which he would now emigrate: Mizraim, the Egyptian house of bondage. That was what Jacob had always disapprovingly called that strictly governed land down there, never imagining it might become the house of bondage for his own seed—as had now become painfully clear to him. His departure was burdened with the insight that the ominous continuation of God's prophecy—"and they shall serve there and be oppressed for four hundred years"—referred to the land for which he was now departing; in all probability it was a bondage of many generations into which he was leading his house. And even if it was for the benefit of all those included in God's plan of salvation, even if good and bad fortune might cancel one another out in the grand view of fate and the future, it was most assuredly a fateful departure to which Jacob had committed himself in God.
Despite his reservations, he was going to the land of tombs; and yet tombs were what he found it most difficult to leave behind: the grave of Rachel beside the road and Machpelah, the double cave that Abram had bought from Ephron the Hettite, along with the field that it was in, for four hundred shekels of silver according to weights current at the time, that it might serve as a hereditary burial place.
Israel was mobile, as shepherds are wont to be; and yet it did own real estate: this field with its caves—and this would remain Israel's property. The emigrants disposed of many movables, but what was immovable, this field and its grave, could not be disposed of. For Jacob they were the guarantee of his return. For despite however many generations might rot in Egyptian soil while his house increased there, he himself was determined that once he had lived out his life, both God and man should be obliged to bring him home to the one permanent home that he, a man who carried his house with him, had on earth, where he might then lie, where his fathers and the mothers of his sons already lay—except for his beloved wife, who was set apart and lay off to the side of the road, the mother of his beloved son who had been taken away, but who now summoned him.
Was it not a good thing that Jacob had time to ponder his departure for the land of the son who had been stolen from him? What a difficult task it was trying to understand the peculiar role God had assigned to this favorite by setting him apan. We shall learn from Jacob himself what conclusions he reached in that regard. When he spoke of Joseph now, he referred to him exclusively as "his lordship my son." "I intend," he might remark, "to journey to Egypt, to his lordship my son. His is a position of high rank." The people to whom he said such things might smile—behind the old man's back, of course—and make fun of a father's vanity, but they had no idea how much earnest aloofness, renunciation, and stern resolve were expressed in those words.
Seventy in All
Blossoming spring had become late summer before Israel concluded its final transactions and could undertake to depart from the groves of Mamre which are at Hebron. The first goal was Beersheba, and several days of pious devotions were planned for that frontier town, the place where both Jacob and his father had been born and where Rebekah, that resolute mother, had once readied the thief of the blessing for his journey to Mesopotamia.
Jacob freed himself from his ties to those groves and set out with his goods and cattle, his sons and sons' sons, his daughters and
I
daughters' sons. Or as it is also said: He departed with his wives, daughters, and sons and the wives of his sons—a reciprocal count, since here "wives" means the wives of his sons, but "daughters" means the same thing, plus perhaps the daughters of his sons, for example Serah the songstress. They set out with seventy souls— which is to say: they regarded themselves as seventy in all; this was no numbered count, but more an emotional count by considered agreement—that is, determined by a moonlit accuracy that, as we well know, is no longer suitable for our own era, but was perfectly justifiable and held to be correct in theirs. Seventy was the number of nations of the world listed in God's tables, and therefore as the number of progeny to emerge from patriarchal loins it was subject to no recount by the light of day. But since it is Jacob's loins we are dealing with here, the wives of his sons should not have been included in the count, should they? But they weren't. If there's no counting to begin with, nothing can be included in the count, and given a result based on the lovely bias of sacred foregone conclusions, the question of what is or is not included in the count is moot. It is not even certain whether Jacob himself was counted, whether the others included him as part of their number, that is seventy, or excluded him as the seventy-first. We must simply accept the fact that this era allowed for both possibilities at once. Much later, for example, a descendant of Judah—more precisely, of his son Perez, whom Tamar so purposefully bore him—this descendant, then, whose name was Jesse, had seven sons and a youngest, a keeper of sheep, above whose head the horn of anointment was raised. But what does that "and" mean? Was the youngest included among the seven, or did Jesse have eight sons? The former is the more likely, for it is much more beautiful and appropriate to have seven sons rather than eight. But it is more than probable, which is to say certain, that the count of seven for Jesse's sons did not change, when, for instance, the youngest was added to it, and that he managed to be included in it even when he exceeded the count. On another occasion a man had a grand total of seventy sons, for he had many wives. A son of one of these mothers slew all his brothers, the man's seventy sons, all upon one and the same stone. By our prosaic sense of things he could, as their brother, have slain only sixty-nine, or more correctly still, only sixty-eight, for to cap it all, another brother, whose name, Jotham, is expressly provided, was left alive. It is hard
to accept this, but here we have one man of seventy who slays all seventy, and yet besides himself leaves another of them alive—a solid and instructive example for being both excluded and included at the same time.
Jacob, then, when viewed correctly, was the seventy-first of the seventy wanderers—to the extent that this number can hold up in the light of day. It was, to be prosaically truthful, both lower and higher—a new contradiction, but it cannot be seen or put in any other way. Jacob, the father, was the seventieth and not the seventy-first inasmuch as the male members of the tribe came to a total of sixty-nine souls. But it did so only if one included Joseph, who was in Egypt, and his two sons, who were in fact born there. Since these three members of the tribe were not part of the caravan, they must, though they are included in it, be subtracted from its number. This does not, however, put an end to the requisite subtractions, for the simple reason that it is obvious that souls were included in the count who at the time of their departure had not yet been brought into the world. One might discuss the justifiability of this in the case of Jochebed, a daughter of Levi, with whom her mother was pregnant at the time and who was born "between the walls" (presumably, those of the frontier fortress) upon their arrival in Egypt. But it is clear that included in the sum of travelers were grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Jacob that had been neither born nor conceived—that is to say, were only anticipated, but not yet present. They came to Egypt, as pious erudition puts it, in lumbis patrum, and were members of the caravan only in a most spiritual sense.
So much for the necessary subtractions. But there is also no lack of compelling reasons for adding to the total of sixty-nine. This was in fact only the tally of Jacob's male seed; but if—or better, since— the entirety of his direct descendants are to be accounted for, one must include, if not the wives of his sons, then at least their daughters, Serah, for example, to name but one, though certainly with all due emphasis. It would have been quite impermissible not to have counted the maiden who first brought to Joseph's father news that he was alive. She was held in high regard in Israel, and there was never any doubt that the blessing Jacob had spoken over her out of gratitude would be fulfilled—that is, that she would not taste death but living enter the kingdom of heaven. Indeed, no one knows when
she is supposed to have died; her Kfe has every appearance of continuing unbounded. It is said of her that generations later she helped the man Moses as he wandered aimlessly in search of Joseph's grave and shov^ed him the spot: that is, in the flood of the Nile; and it is even said that a vast number of years later her presence moved among Abram's people under the name of the Wise Woman. Be that as it may, whether this same Serah was actually alive at such disparate points in time or whether other maidens assumed the sentient nature of this little messenger and announcer of glad tidings—no one can ever cast doubt on the fact that she is to be counted among the seventy wanderers, whatever "seventy" may mean here.
