Stephen Mitchell - Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: A Biblical Tale Retold

JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS is the final section of the Book of Genesis. Tolstoy called it the most beautiful story in the world. It takes its hero through a death and transformation, from the charming but arrogant brat of its first part to the master of reality of its last, and it has an all-embracing forgiveness at its core. Significantly, God doesnt appear in it. The storytellers understanding of God was too clear to permit that. He knew that stories in which God appears can never be about God; they can only be about a character called God. But God isnt God.

You may be wondering why I have reimagined Joseph and His Brothers. Isnt it perfect as it is? Yes, certainly, whether you read it in the original Hebrew or in the more dignified, less earthy King James Version, and its beauty shines through even in the most vulgar or tone-deaf of modern translations. But, like most of Genesis, its written in a style of extraordinary concision, so spare that it can compress pages of characterization into a single phrase. The storyteller leaves much of his tale hinted at but unstated, as if it were a hypertext with unprovided links. To take just the first example: Jacob loved Joseph more than all his other children. This one phrase, which sets up the whole drama of the storyhow tantalizing it is! Close, prolonged attention to it yields rich rewards. Many passages are like that: Japanese paper flowers, which unfurl when we place them in the water of the imagination.

Thats why I was so attracted to this story: not just because of what it says, but because of what it leaves unsaid. It cries out for the ancient Jewish art of midrash, or creative transformationa way of inhabiting the text in order to deepen your understanding of it. To penetrate into these unsaid realms, you need a certain degree of irreverenceor, more accurately, reverence masking as irreverence. Conventional reverence means standing at a distance from the text so that the light is refracted through it, as through a stained-glass window. With midrash, you need to get much closer than that. You need to swallow the text whole, digest it, assimilate it, excrete it, walk around with it resonating inside you for hours or days, let it become your constant meditation and your unceasing prayer.

Joseph is the most spiritually mature character in the Hebrew Bible, someone who has literally ascended from the depths to a freedom that every reader can recognize and enjoy. But how does he get there? How does he learn a deeper humanity, sitting at the feet of his own suffering, and move from the dreamer of visionary dreams to the dream interpreter, the shaman of the tribe? What allows him to grow beyond anger and resentment at his brothers murderous jealousy? The forgiveness he embodies at the end of the story is unparalleled elsewhere in the Bible, even in the Gospels, where Jesus tells us to forgive seventy times seven but doesnt show us what forgiveness looks like. (That wasnt his job.) In the Joseph story we can see the enlightened mind in action, the mind in harmony with the way things are, after the deadly tricks of the ego have been met with understanding. Joseph realizes that there is a vast, compassionate intelligence always at work beneath the surface of the apparent. He has come to the point where, with

all hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is Heavens will.

I wanted to provide you not only with the what of his transformation, but also with the how. To that purpose, I have enlisted the help of a team of imaginary second-century Galilean rabbis. (Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to make it up.)

I should also warn you that the Egypt of this book is an imaginary country, in which anachronisms may sneak up and tap you on the shoulder. The dream systems and textbooks, the three schools of divination, the haute cuisine with its mustard/white-wine sauceI imagined them all, for my own pleasure and, I hope, for yours.