Child: “Johnny hates me and is always so mean to me!”
Mom: “He doesn’t hate you; he’s just jealous of you.”
This dialogue seems to come straight out of Parenting 101, an explanation designed to make your child feel better about a negative peer relation, right? Well maybe, but recently I’ve come to believe that it’s not just a rationalization, but actually true more often than not.
In Parshat Vayeishev, we learn about the family dynamics in the Ya’akov household. Jacob, himself a victim of parental favoritism (his father’s directed towards Esau and his mother’s towards Jacob), has had to flee his ancestral home to get away from his fratricidal brother. He is now settled in with his own family, but has clearly not learned the lesson that favoritism is a bad idea and a fomenter of poor sibling relations, to wit the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat he gives his favored son Joseph. (And in case you don’t think the coat was such a big deal, consider what the Talmud says about it: “See the consequences of favoring one child over another. Because of those few ounces of wool, our people were enslaved in Egypt.”)
Joseph himself doesn’t help much either. He’s an obnoxious, know-it-all who torments his older brothers with his dream analyses, which always place him above them in some cosmic order. To be fair, though, Joseph never seems mean-spirited, merely clueless. He’s a typical little brother, annoying to his elders, but actually probably wishing he were part of their chevrah/group.
Although we may not know exactly how Joseph feels about his brothers, the text is unequivocal when it comes to how they feel about him. Put simply, they hate him. Indeed, the text tells us at the beginning of the story that they hate him, then later recounts that they come to hate him more and then again even more. That’s a lot of hate – no wonder they were prepared to kill him, though fortunately ended up merely selling him into slavery.
What captured my interest the most this year reading the parsha again was what the text says after it asserts strongly three times that his brothers hate Joseph (using the Hebrew word ????); on the fourth time it says not that they hate him, but rather that they are envious or jealous of him (????). One letter different only, but a world of difference really in emotional terms. The order of these statements though, seems somehow backwards. Should it not be that we first learn that the brothers are envious of Joseph, and that ultimately their jealousy grows into hatred? Doesn’t this seem the logical order of things? Perhaps, but as a psychologist I should know that emotions are not typically logical. Strong emotions like hatred (or love for that matter) can be experienced without understanding the reason(s) for them. Indeed, it often takes a lot of effort for our conscious/cognitive minds to fill in or figure out our motivations for feeling (hence the marketplace for psychotherapy). In this case, it is quite possible that Joseph’s brothers had a more immediate disdain for their brother and that only after the fact understood that their feeling was really about jealousy, coveting the love that their father Jacob had for his favored child.
So if what our mothers always told us about hatred and jealousy actually turns out to be true — namely that more often than not when someone has strong negative feelings about us it is due to their wishing they were more like us or had something that we already did –, what exactly are we supposed to do about it? For me, this is where the work comes back to our mission at MWJDS.
The nafka minah (take-home message) to my mind is promoting acceptance, self-appreciation and empowerment. As educators who often find themselves in loco parentis, it is our job to help students realize that although a peer may be better than they are in some quality or dimension (e.g., math ability, gymnastics), they themselves possess qualities that are also extraordinary and worthy of envy. So often we take for granted the things we are naturally good at, relegating them to the ordinary (since after all they are ordinary for us); instead we covet what others come by naturally, wishing we had that instead. (As an aside this reminds me of my desire for straighter hair as a teenager, growing up in an environment that favored the Saturday Night Fever hair of John Travolta, while others were going to the salon to get perms. Of course now I find I’d take my hair anyway, straight or curly, if I could just have more of it back, but that’s fodder for a later blog I think.)
Understanding ourselves and our strengths leads naturally to creating a context for appreciating what others have without envying them. Had Joseph understood how much his brothers wished they shared Jacob’s love, he might have held back a bit in his pronouncements to them of his superiority. Conversely, if his brothers had understood how desperately he wanted to be accepted by them, they might have cut him a break, and literally changed the course of our history as a people.
Head of School Rav-Hazzan Scott M. Sokol Ph.D.