Grief and Resilience

Resilience is essential to the Jewish experience. As a nation, we have endured unparalleled tragedy and setbacks, yet - like the righteous man described in the proverb – even if we may fall seven times, we get back up. Yosef personified this quality, cast away repeatedly but always rising again.

Key to his resilience was his readiness to act on every opportunity to make things better. Yosef correctly understood that the butler’s impending release was the pathway to gaining his own freedom, even though he should not have placed his trust in the butler. Similarly when a bit of liberation came, he turned Pharaoh’s dreams into a sketch of his own future role. He may have grieved, but he would not be paralyzed by that grief. To quote one of our own modern-day heroines, Hadas Lewenstern, “ani almana; ani lo miskeina, I am a widow but I am not helpless.”

The Imrei Emes of Ger and Rav Aharon Belzer were two of the great Chasidic masters who had survived the Holocaust. When they saw each other for the first time after the Holocaust in Eretz Yisrael in 1947, they broke down in tears.

After their emotions subsided, Rav Aharon Belzer asked the Imrei Emes about a Rashi in our parsha. When Yosef and Binyamin were reunited, the verse states, “he fell on the necks of Binyamin his brother and he wept, and Binyamin wept on his neck.” Rashi shares a midrashic interpretation to explain why the Torah refers to Binyamin’s neck in the plural: Yosef wept over the destruction of the two Batei Mikdash that would be located in the tribal portion of Binyamin. Binyamin, on the other hand, cried over just the one destruction of Mishkan Shiloh, the Temple which for more than 300 years was in Shiloh within the portion of Yosef. Asked the Belzer Rebbe, why did each of them cry over what would happen in the other’s portion rather than cry over what happened in their own?

Rav Aharon Belzer was trying to understand not only the reactions of Yosef and Binyamin of long ago, but also his own actions and those of the Gerrer Rebbe. Why did they cry so intensely over each other but could not express the same emotions over their own losses and pain?

The Imrei Emes responded that over somebody else's losses, over the task of rebuilding that lies ahead of them, we cry.  Over one's own losses, one doesn't cry, one is moved to act, acknowledging the loss and then starting the work of rebuilding. That is key to our resilience.