Vayigash

Genesis 44:18−47:27

D'var Torah By: Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff; Reprinted from ReformJudaism.org

Does God Have a Plan for You?

After receiving bad news or experiencing a tragic event, people will sometimes respond with the words, "It's God's will." There's even a Yiddish phrase that captures the idea, "It's bashert," meaning it was meant to be.

What is your reaction to such a response? Are you comfortable with it? Or does it fall on unreceptive ears? Is it in keeping with your philosophy of life or does it rub you the wrong way?

In this week's parashah, Vayigash, Joseph reassures his brothers that they should not feel guilty about the way they treated him. They had good reason to be frightened and harbor guilt. After all, they had tossed Joseph into a pit and sold him to passing merchants who led the lad into servitude in Egypt.

But Joseph tells his brothers not to fear, because ". . . it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. There have already been two years of famine in the land, and (there remain) five more years without plowing or harvesting. So God sent me ahead of you to assure your survival in the land, and to keep you alive for a great deliverance" (Genesis 45:5-7).

If Joseph had spoken Yiddish, he might have said that it was bashert. Of course he couldn't use those words because Yiddish developed more than two millennia later than the time Joseph lived.

Bashert suggests a fatalism that doesn't quite fit in with the lives we live today. Most of us believe in free will. We believe that we actually have choices and are responsible for the choices that we make. Most of our actions seem to be under our control. If a student works hard and writes a fine paper, she expects to be rewarded with a good grade. If that paper were bashert--destined to be written in just those words--no matter what she did, any grade or reward would be meaningless. Maimonides taught that free will is a fundamental belief in Judaism.1 (A Maimonides Reader, Isadore Twersky, ed., Behrman House, New York, 1972, pp. 77-78).

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