In our parsha, Yoseph does something unusual. Revealing himself to his brothers, fully aware that
they will suffer shock and then guilt as they remember how it is that their brother is in Egypt, he
reinterprets the past:
“I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be distressed and do not
be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead
of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will
be no ploughing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on
earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but
God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.” (Gen.
45:4-8)
This is markedly different to the way Joseph described these events when he spoke to the chief
butler in prison: “I was forcibly carried off from the land of the Hebrews, and even here I have done
nothing to deserve being put in a dungeon” (Gen. 40:15). Then, it was a story of kidnap and injustice.
Now, it has become a story of Divine providence and redemption. It wasn’t you, he tells his
brothers, it was God. You didn’t realize that you were part of a larger plan. And though it began badly, it
has ended well. So don’t hold yourselves guilty. And do not be afraid of any desire for revenge on my part.
There is no such desire. I realize that we were all being directed by a force greater than ourselves, greater
than we can fully understand. Yoseph does the same in next week’s parsha, when the brothers fear that he may take revenge after
their father’s death: “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to
accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. (Gen. 50:19-20) Yoseph is helping his brothers to revise their memory of the past. In doing so, he is challenging one
of our most fundamental assumptions about time, namely its asymmetry. We can change the future. We
cannot change the past. But is that entirely true? What Joseph is doing for his brothers is what he has
clearly done for himself: events have changed his and their understanding of the past.
Which means: we cannot fully understand what is happening to us now until we can look back in
retrospect and see how it all turned out. This means that we are not held captive by the past.
Things can
happen to us, not as dramatically as to Joseph perhaps, but nonetheless benign, that can completely alter
the way we look back and remember. By action in the future, we can redeem the past.
A classic example of this is the late Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford
University, that has now been seen by more than 40 million people on YouTube. In it, he described three
crushing blows in his life: dropping out of college, being fired by the company he had founded - Apple,
and being diagnosed with cancer. Each one, he said, had led
to something important and positive.
Dropping out of college, Jobs was able to audit any
course he wished. He attended one on calligraphy and this
inspired him to build into his first computers a range of proportionally spaced fonts, thus giving computer
scripts an elegance that had previously been available only to professional printers. Getting fired from
Apple led him to start a new computer company, NeXT, that developed capabilities he would eventually
bring back to Apple, as well as acquiring Pixar Animation, the most creative of computer-animated film
studios. The diagnosis of cancer led him to a new focus in life. It made him realize: “Your time is limited,
so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Jobs’ ability to construct these stories – what he called “connecting the dots” – was surely not
unrelated to his ability to survive the blows he suffered in life. Few could have recovered from the setback of being dismissed from his own company, and fewer still could have achieved the transformation he did
at Apple when he returned, creating the iPod, iPhone and iPad. He did not believe in tragic inevitabilities.
Though he would not have put it in these terms, he knew that by action in the future we can redeem the
past.
Professor Mordechai Rotenberg of the Hebrew University has argued that this kind of technique,
of reinterpreting the past, could be used as a therapeutic technique in rehabilitating patients suffering
from a crippling sense of guilt. If we cannot change the past, then it is always there holding us back like a ball and chain around our legs. We cannot change the past, but we can reinterpret it by integrating it into
a new and larger narrative. That is what Joseph was doing, and having used this technique to help him
survive a personal life of unparalleled ups and downs, he now uses it to help his brothers live without
overpowering guilt.
Three of the most significant post-war psychotherapists were not merely Jewish by birth but profoundly Jewish in their approach to the human soul. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, developed on the basis of his experiences there an approach he called Logotherapy, based on “man’s search for meaning.” Though the Nazis took away almost every vestige of humanity from those they consigned to the death factories, Frankl argued that there was one thing they could never take away from their prisoners: the freedom to decide how to respond.
Aaron T. Beck was one of the founders of what is widely regarded as the most effective forms of psychotherapy: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Among patients suffering from depression, he found that their feelings were often linked to highly negative thoughts about themselves, the world and the future. By getting them to think more realistically, he found that their mood tended to improve.
Martin Seligman is the founder of Positive Psychology, which aims not just to treat depression but actively to promote what he calls “authentic happiness” and “learned optimism.”. Depression, Seligman argued, is often linked to pessimism, which comes from interpreting events in a particular kind of way that he calls “learned helplessness”. Pessimists tend to see misfortune as permanent (“It’s always like this”), personal (“It’s my fault”) and pervasive (“I always get things wrong”). This leaves them feeling that the bad they suffer is inevitable and beyond their control. Optimists look at things differently. For them, negative events are temporary, the result of outside factors, and exceptions rather than the rule. So, within limits, you can unlearn pessimism, and the result is greater happiness, health and success.
What links all three thinkers is their belief that (1) there is always more than one possible interpretation of what happens to us, (2) we can choose between different interpretations and (3) the way we think shapes the way we feel.
