Who Decides Who's in the Tent?: Parashat Vayigash 5786

Many Jews are approaching the new year feeling shaken. The violent attack against Jews in Sydney was a reminder that antisemitism is not a theoretical concern, and that Jewish vulnerability is not a thing of the past. For some, that realization has brought fear. For others, anger. For many, a sense of uncertainty about what we are supposed to do with all of it.

In moments like this, Jewish communities tend to respond in familiar ways. We talk about safety and security. We reassure one another. And very often, we hear renewed calls for unity — for closing ranks, minimizing disagreement, and aligning as one. Internal conflict, we are told, weakens us. What this moment requires, above all else, is cohesion.

That instinct is understandable. It grows out of love of our people, out of a long and painful historical memory, out of the visceral knowledge that when Jews are vulnerable we cannot afford to be naïve. 

But at the same time the Torah never assumes that fear, however justified, is a reliable guide for how a community should hold itself together — or for what kind of togetherness actually sustains a people over time, ethically and spiritually, rather than merely keeping us intact by narrowing the soul.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan has recently given voice to this tension in a way that has resonated widely — first by arguing that the Jewish community needed to close ranks against what he understood to be an existential political threat, and then by offering a more nuanced reflection on contemporary Jewish life, warning against a reflexive narrowing of the communal tent. “Against those who stand outside our tent,” he wrote, “we must hold the line. And for all who seek to dwell within our tent, we must expand it.”

On one level, this sounds not only reasonable but responsible: danger without paranoia, boundaries without isolation, strength without surrendering openness. And yet the image quietly leaves one question unresolved: who determines who is inside and who is outside? And by what authority are those decisions made?

This week’s parashah, Parashat Vayigash, forces us to confront these questions. To feel its full force, though, we have to slow down and place it back into its narrative context:

Joseph, the favored son, was betrayed by his brothers, thrown into a pit, and sold into slavery. The brothers return home with his bloodied coat and allow their father Jacob to believe that his beloved son has been killed by a wild animal. They live for years inside that lie.

Meanwhile, Joseph is purchased as property, accused falsely, thrown into prison, and forgotten. But through a stunning turn of events, his fortunes are radically reversed and he rises to power in Egypt to the position of viceroy, second only to Pharaoh. When famine strikes the region, Egypt becomes the storehouse of survival, and Joseph becomes the gatekeeper of food that stands between life and death.

The brothers come down to Egypt seeking grain. Joseph recognizes them instantly. They do not recognize him. He could reveal himself. He could punish them. He could forgive them. Instead, he subjects them to a series of encounters that force them back toward the unresolved moral core of their past — placing them, again and again, inside situations that echo their earlier betrayal.

Eventually, Joseph demands that Benjamin, the youngest brother and only remaining child of Jacob's beloved Rachel, be brought down to Egypt, Jacob refuses outright. He cannot risk losing another son. Judah, however, ultimately steps forward, binding himself personally to Benjamin’s fate: אָנֹכִי אֶעֶרְבֶנּוּ — I will be his guarantor. If Benjamin does not return, Judah will bear the guilt forever. 

Joseph then orchestrates the final test. After the brothers purchase grain and prepare to leave, Joseph secretly orders his silver goblet to be placed in Benjamin’s sack. His steward pursues them, searches their belongings, and “discovers” the goblet with Benjamin. The charge is theft. The punishment is enslavement. Benjamin must remain in Egypt; the others are free to go.

Once again, the brothers are offered a way out. They have food. They have permission to leave. They can return home and explain the loss as tragedy. They can tell their father that misfortune has struck again. They can survive. All it would require is leaving one brother behind.

But one brother refuses this tradeoff. And our parashah begins with Judah stepping forward to confront the Egyptian ruler in a desperate attempt to try to save Benjamin.

When Judah steps up, he does not argue law. He does not plead innocence. He does not deliver a neat moral speech. He tells the truth. He speaks about his father’s grief, about a life that cannot withstand another loss. He speaks about the promise he has already made, knowing what it might cost him. And then he does something that places his own future in genuine danger: he offers himself in Benjamin’s place. He will remain enslaved so that his brother can go free.

Judah does not know that the ruler before him is Joseph. He does not know that this appeal will succeed. He acts without guarantees. He simply refuses to preserve the family by sacrificing his brother’s life.

Jewish tradition gives us a word for what Judah is doing — a word that is not sentimental and not vague and certainly not the same thing as “aligning as one.” The word is arevut — mutual responsibility. Judah is not insisting that the brothers agree with one another. He is insisting that they remain bound to one another in consequence. Benjamin’s fate is now Judah’s fate. Jacob’s grief is now Judah’s burden. Judah does not get to declare himself free of the suffering of someone else in his family.

The haftarah from Ezekiel takes this same moral logic and projects it onto the destiny of the Jewish people as a whole — and it does so from an even more precarious place.

Ezekiel is speaking to Judah in Babylonian exile, after Jerusalem has fallen, after the Temple has been destroyed, after political sovereignty has collapsed. And he is speaking in the shadow of an even older catastrophe: the northern kingdom of Israel — associated with Joseph/Ephraim, and the so-called ten tribes — had been destroyed by Assyria roughly 150 years earlier. Its population was scattered, absorbed, effectively erased from history. The split between Judah and Joseph is no longer a rivalry that might be resolved. It is a wound in Jewish memory — a question of whether a people so fractured can still imagine itself as one.

God commands Ezekiel to take two sticks, one inscribed “Judah” and one inscribed “Ephraim,” and to bring them together in his hand. The audacity of the image lies precisely in its refusal to accept historical finality. Ezekiel is not describing a return to a pristine past. He is imagining a future in which even losses that appear irreversible do not absolve the people of responsibility for one another.

What Ezekiel is pointing towards here is a concept more precise than “unity,” or even achdut, but brit, or covenant. Ezekiel is arguing for a reconstitution of a covenanted people.

Covenant, however, is not only the binding of a people to one another. It functions both horizontally and vertically, between Jews, and between Israel and the One who calls Israel into being.

That is why Ezekiel does not merely imagine tribal reconciliation. Rather, he imagines reunion under a political structure: one people, one kingdom, one king — a Davidic king, from Judah. “My servant David shall be king over them.” 

For a modern ear, especially an American ear, especially in a moment when nationalism is on the rise and blood-and-soil rhetoric is again being normalized, a vision of unity under a single king can sound less like redemption and more like coercion — less like healing and more like domination.

But Ezekiel’s vision signifies a critical difference between covenantal community and nationalist authoritarianism. A covenantal community is not a human club with a human bouncer. The boundaries are not ultimately decided by whoever has the microphone, or the institutional power, or the loudest fear. As teacher, Jewish ethicist Rabbi Elliott Dorff, puts it, the authority of covenant “is derivative from, and dependent upon, God’s antecedent authority.” The tent does not belong to us. We are stewards of a covenant that precedes and exceeds us.

Moreover, Rabbi Dorff reminds that “the ultimate aim” of the covenant is to create “universal peace among people… toward that end Israel is to be a ‘light unto the nations.’” Covenant has a horizon beyond itself. It is not merely about Jewish survival or Jewish cohesion. It is about the transformation of the world. Jeremiah, Dorff notes, experienced the failure of Israel to perform its role of moral leadership and the consequent destruction wrought by God — which is another way of saying that covenant is not merely a privilege. It is a responsibility that can be betrayed.

In his beautiful essay, “To be a Jew — What is It?” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel clarifies that, to be part of a covenanted people means, first (and perhaps obviously), that peoplehood matters. Heschel insists that Jewish existence is not meant to be lived as isolated individuals who happen to share ancestry. “For us Jews there can be no fellowship with God without the fellowship with Israel. Abandoning Israel, we desert God.” Heschel here is not romanticizing Jewish community. He is insisting that covenant cannot be practiced alone.

At the same time, peoplehood must not flatten diversity; covenant is not ideological conformity or the absence of difference. “Israel is the tree,” Heschel writes, “we are the leaves.” Leaves grow in different directions. They receive different light. They bend in different winds. What keeps the leaves alive is not their uniformity but their attachment. Covenant binds without flattening. Arevut binds without erasing. A Jewish people held together by forced sameness is not covenantal peoplehood; it is a frightened caricature of it, a brittle unity that fractures the moment real pressure is applied. 

Third — and this is the part that is most often lost, especially in moments of anxiety and upheaval, such as our current era — peoplehood is not an end in itself. My belonging to the Jewish people,” Heschel wrote, is “the most sacred relation to me, second only to my relation to God.” Our loyalty, in other words, must lie primarily with God and only secondarily with our fellow Jews. 

This means of course that Jewish cohesion is not the ultimate good. “It is our destiny,” Heschel writes, “to live for what is more than ourselves… Israel exists not in order to be but in order to dream the dream of God.”

In other words: peoplehood is necessary. Peoplehood is sacred. Peoplehood is binding. But peoplehood for its own sake is not enough. Belonging is insufficient. Cohesion is insufficient. Survival is insufficient if it is purchased by abandoning the vocation that gives survival meaning.

The work Israel is meant to do in the world — the work of being a light, the work of modeling covenantal responsibility, the work of pursuing a horizon of universal peace — cannot be carried by fragments that treat one another as strangers. A people that cannot remain bound to and responsible for one another cannot bear moral responsibility in the world. 

At the same time, reconciliation alone is not enough. For Ezekiel, reunification itself is not the goal. It is the condition that makes the goal possible. Redemption is the goal; reconciliation is but its precondition. Ezekiel’s sticks becoming one is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the possibility of a story. A reunited people can still betray its purpose. A cohesive community can still become cruel. A united front can still become a cudgel, used to silence those who speak inconvenient truths, used to demand conformity to the dominant group “doing the calling,” as Letty Russell, a pioneering feminist theologian and activist, argued. Russell warns of the danger of a so-called “reconciliation” that is really domination dressed up as harmony.

That, I think, is the test of this moment. 

Because when antisemitism rises and Jews are attacked, the instinct to close ranks can become not merely a strategy for safety but a theology — a claim about what faithfulness looks like. And if we are not careful, fear will persuade us that the highest Jewish value is alignment, that dissent is betrayal, that critique is disloyalty, that moral discomfort is weakness. 

But this week’s parashah offers a different picture of faithfulness under threat.

Judah steps forward and binds himself to the fate of someone vulnerable, at cost to himself. He refuses to treat his brother’s life as expendable. He refuses to let his fears dictate the terms of belonging. He makes responsibility the price of survival.

And Ezekiel does not imagine redemption by pretending loss never happened. He speaks to exiles and says: you do not get to give up on one another. Even when history has scattered you. Even when reconciliation seems impossible. Even when the other stick feels like it belongs to a different story. Because without that binding, the covenant cannot function. Without covenant, Jewish existence becomes only survival — and survival alone is not enough.

So what does any of this demand of us, concretely, now, in this moment of fear?

It demands that we distinguish between solidarity and alignment. Solidarity means we refuse abandonment. We show up materially. We support Jewish institutions. We protect one another. We grieve together. We do not pretend that antisemitism is someone else’s problem, somewhere else, inflicted on someone else’s Jews. We practice arevut, not as a slogan, but as a posture of consequence: your safety is my concern, and mine is yours.

But covenantal solidarity does not require the flattening of difference. It does not require us to treat moral unease as disloyalty. It does not require us to declare that the only way to keep Jews safe is to “align as one” around whatever the dominant communal consensus happens to be, as though God outsourced covenantal authority to the loudest voices in the room.

Covenantal solidarity asks something harder: that we remain bound to one another even when we disagree, and that we refuse to use fear as a weapon against moral responsibility.

And then it asks something harder still: that we remember why this binding exists in the first place. Not so that we can survive forever as an anxious remnant. Not so that we can win arguments. Not so that we can patrol the boundaries of the tent with ever greater suspicion. But so that we can “dream the dream of God” in history — so that we can become a people whose very existence is a stake in the possibility of justice and peace.

Which means that in the weeks ahead, the question is not only how we respond to antisemitism externally, but how we respond to fear internally. Do we turn inward and demand alignment as though cohesion is the highest good? Or do we strengthen our bonds in a covenantal way — through care, through responsibility, through the patient insistence that difference is not a threat but part of what makes peoplehood real?

And perhaps the most practical test is painfully simple: when we hear another Jew speaking from a place of fear or conviction that is not our own, do we treat that voice as an enemy to be silenced, or as a sibling whose fate remains bound up with ours — a voice we may challenge, and argue with, and even oppose, but not discard?

May we have the courage to be a people who can hold fear without being ruled by it, who can practice solidarity without demanding sameness, who can strengthen our bonds without turning them into shackles, and who can remember — even in a moment when antisemitism makes Jewish life feel precarious — that our peoplehood is not only for our sake, but for the sake of the world God still demands we help repair.

May we feel bound to one another in covenantal responsibility; may we resist the temptation of the false comfort of enforced alignment; may we courageously protect our communities and all communities threatened by hatred, becoming, together, a living testimony to Your dream of justice and peace.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.