6/20/2023 0 Comments The cavorite sonYet of all of his brawny offspring, he chose the fair Joseph as the favorite. Jacob as a father was abundantly blessed with sons. His preference for his brawny boy may have reflected his inner yearning for an assertiveness and strength he lacked, or suppressed, perhaps leaving his quieter, softer son Jacob to dwell in Rebecca’s female realm. Isaac himself, as a boy, a young man, and as a father, doesn’t seem to have much of a “voice” in Torah. His twin brother Esau was an outdoorsman Jacob a pale, smooth-skinned “mama’s boy.” Jacob, guided by his mother Rebecca’s devious plans, deceived his elderly father Isaac by disguising himself as his deeper- voiced, hairy brother. Jacob, if you recall, was the favorite son of his mother. There is something else about Jacob’s favoritism towards Joseph, something related to masculine-feminine tension. It is a saga of brothers, fathers and sons, male bonding, and brotherly betrayal and loyalty. ![]() Parshat Miketz, like most of the Joseph cycle, seems to be people almost exclusively by male characters. Miketz offers several of these inner, circular connections, especially through the father-son connections. Indeed, the emphasis on family lineage in Genesis, particularly focusing on Jacob, Esau and their offspring, seem disrupted somehow by the “novella” about one son’s sojourn in Egypt.īut as we know, the story will circle around and redress old scores, the tensions between Joseph and his brothers due to Jacob’s preferential treatment of him. There is nothing directly in the parsha to suggest that the father-son connection reflects anything but Joseph’s status as the first-born son of Jacob’s beloved Rachel. As poet Ruth Brin, in her collection A Rag of Love, speaks the connections: “Joseph stood before the King of Egypt / as his father, Jacob had stood before the Wrestler.” His dreams place him at the center of a universe in which every one in his sphere paid him homage, a scenario that was actualized, apparently, through his dream-interpretation skills for the Egyptian Pharaoh. Yet Joseph’s dreams of a heavenly connection are far more earth-bound in their implications. Young Jacob dreamed of a stairway reaching to heaven, traveled by angels. ![]() It is no surprise that he is Jacob’s favorite son. ![]() Joseph, the dreamer and interpreter of dreams, is the son of a dreamer.
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