Parashat Vayigash

SERMON    Parashat Vayigash  Dec 26, 2025 

Rabbi David Edleson   Temple Sinai   South Burlington, Vermont

The Joseph story is among the longest independent narratives in Genesis or the Torah.  Like the story of Jacob, Joseph’s father,  it is a complex novella of a story complete with fratricide, prison, court intrigue, lust, a national crisis, seizing and nationalizing land, and, oh yes, reconciliation.   It would be one of the great feel-good stories in the Bible if you forget for a moment that what feels good in this story ends up with the Jews enslaved in Egypt for hundreds of years.  The Bible is like that:  the best endings are quite temporary and often set the state for the disaster that is already on its way, but the people didn’t know it yet.

In some ways, we are living through that now with something that feels like a radical change but has been building slowly and evidently for decades;  we just chose to look away.

The story of Joseph reaches its high point this week.  Joseph has been dressed in Egyptian finery and speaking Egyptian, so his own brothers didn’t recognize him at all.   Sure, they had questions as to why he kept running out of the room and crying, but what do the bumpkin brothers know about Egyptian court culture?    

Joseph was passing as an Egyptian.  He didn’t let on to the brothers that he understood their language.  He used Hebrew interpreters.  He didn’t let on that he longed to speak his native language again.  Instead, he passed. 

Joseph was in the closet as a Hebrew. 

He had a drag name:  Zaphenat-Pane’ah.

Now, some scholars say he might have been in the closet in terms of gender as well.  His coat of many colored stripes is believed by some scholars to have been the special garment of gender-variant religious figures in the Ancient Near East.  

And rabbinic midrash tells us that Joseph’s old boss, Potiphar, was, like his wife, so attracted to the gorgeous, well-built Joseph that he couldn’t resist him, so instead he changed his gender, and while that didn’t quite work out, he did, according to midrash, eventually become Joseph’s mother-in-law.  

So there are a lot of queer possibil

ities in the text, but that’s not exactly what I mean by coming out in this case.  I mean something much more universal.  Joseph needed to be seen for who he really was.   Joseph had needed to play the Egyptian power monger for over a decade, and through all his interactions with his brothers.  The last time he saw them, they had thrown him in a pit and sold him into slavery, so I’m sure he had some pent-up words to share for them, words he had probably run over and over while he was in prison. 

Yet, seeing his brothers must have brought back both the hurt and rage, and the longing for brothers and for his family that he didn’t know he still had.  He thought he was long over it, but we never really get over our longing to be seen and held by family.

In this moment, Joseph finally snaps.  His older brother Judah, the leader and the bully of the group who had come up with the idea of selling him as a slave, comes close to Joseph and says that rather than allow his youngest brother to be arrested, he, Judah,  would stay as a prisoner and give his life in exchange for his brother’s freedom. 

Hearing that his brother was not the same person he had known, that he had changed into a person who would sacrifice himself for his brother instead of selling him for profit shakes something loose in Joseph.  He wants them to see him for who he is.

The text tells it this way:

Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants, and he cried out, “Have everyone withdraw from me!” So there was no one else about when Joseph made himself known to his brothers.

His sobs were so loud that the Egyptians could hear, and so the news reached Pharaoh’s palace.

Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still well?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dumbfounded were they on account of him.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come forward to me.” And when they came forward, he said, “I am your brother Joseph, he whom you sold into Egypt.

Joseph shares his story, explains how he had ended up standing before them in Egyptian finery running Egypt, but even then, the brothers are silent.  They are, understandably,  in shock. 

Joseph was a person of words and language, but here he understands that words are not what is needed.  Instead, Joseph changes tactics.  The text tells us, “kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; only then were his brothers able to talk to him.”

Imagine that.  Being seen as both this powerful ruler and their baby brother at the same time, because both were true at the same time.

Just speaking to his brothers in Hebrew must have been an overwhelming emotional experience, not to have to keep up this pretense, with the pleasure of speaking one’s native tongue.  

We may not all have Joseph’s story, but we all share Joseph’s need.  We all want to be seen as we really are, behind the masks and the crafted presentation.  Humans have a profound need to be seen and known for who we are.  Without that, there can be no real intimacy.    

Judah, probably without knowing it,  also wanted to be seen, not for being the punk he had been when he was younger, but for being a person who had changed – who life had changed.  He needed to be seen for who he was now, and Joseph was the person he needed to be seen by.  

No wonder he sobs so loud they can hear him all through the palace. 

We all need to be seen and known for who we are now, not who we were in college or high school, or in our career before we retired.  We need to be seen here and now, because it is in being seen by others, that we better able to see and know ourselves.  In a profound way, coming out isn’t about letting other people know you; it is also a way to finally know yourself.    Without drawing close, without intimacy,  without vayiggash, the name of our portion,  we can’t know others, and we can’t know ourselves fully.   Our spiritual life and spiritual journey is deeply wrapped up in the need to be fully known, and if not by our brothers, or our spouses, or our friends, then at least to ourselves and to God.

Shabbat shalom.