D’var Torah: Vayigash 2025/5786 ויגש

Dr. Jonah Hassenfeld, Director of Learning and Teaching, Schechter Parent

By the end of this week’s parsha, Parshat Vayigash, Jacob and his family have arrived in Egypt. What began with a single, seemingly minor decision, sending Joseph to check on his brothers, has culminated in a full family relocation. The immediate frame is one of reunion and relief. Joseph is alive. The family is reunited. Hunger is avoided. And yet the larger context is unmistakable: this moment of healing takes place not in Canaan, but in Egypt.

The Midrash Bereishit Rabbah offers a striking retrospective reading of the entire Joseph narrative. According to the Midrash, the jealousy of the brothers, Joseph’s sale and imprisonment, his rise to power, and even Jacob’s long years of grief were all part of a divine plan to bring B’nei Yisrael to Egypt and set in motion the arc that would eventually lead to the Exodus and the formation of the Jewish people. In this telling, none of the suffering is accidental. It is, one might say, structural.

That explanation immediately provokes a hard question. If this was the plan all along, why did it have to unfold in this way? Why not simply tell Jacob what was required of him? Why not spare him the devastation of believing that Joseph was lost forever? It seems reasonable to assume that Jacob would have accepted personal hardship for the sake of his family, or for the sake of a divine mission,had it been explained to him directly. That is to say, if God had told him the plan, he would have agreed.

Later commentators suggest that something essential would have been lost had the move to Egypt been voluntary. A challenge that you choose is not the same that is forced upon you. The experience of the Jewish people in Egypt had to be one that wasn’t chosen, in which their deepest sense of self and home is disrupted. 

This idea is worth lingering on. To grow often requires us to enter spaces, to have experiences, we would not necessarily choose on our own. For a school, this is not an abstract theological point. Learning regularly asks students, and adults, to tolerate discomfort, uncertainty, and challenge. The work is not to eliminate those experiences, but to ensure that they take place within a culture that preserves agency, worth, and belonging. Parshat Vayigash reminds us that formation rarely happens in comfort alone, and that how we enter difficult terrain shapes who we are able to become.