Chanukah and Vayeshev: Hope Before Exile

At the time of Chanukah, I always have very fond memories of Lubavitch Chanukah lights. My favorite was the time my son, daughter, and I were on a tour bus of New York, sitting on the top deck. We were in crawling traffic, and two lanes over was a parked Mitzvah Tank. On the roof were Chabadnik boys. My son, then a teenager, shouted across in Hebrew – “Chanukah Sameach!” In Hebrew, he had a chat with the boys, and when they realized he was Jewish, they threw across a lane of traffic a Chanukiah – a brilliant moment. On the flight back with El Al, someone lit a halachically designed electric Chanukiah, and we all sang Maoz Tzur.

It reminds me of a very famous idea of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, which is related to this week’s Parshah and is one of my favorite ideas. The concept is that the cure is put in place before the affliction.

Before the exile of the Jewish People, the redemption – i.e., the line of the Moshiach – was born. How so?

In Parshah Vayeshev, we have the story of Yosef – his dreams, his journey to his brothers, their hatred of him because of his special status, their conspiracy to kill him, and then his departure for Egypt. Just at the point before we read about his story in Egypt – the point at which you can make a strong case that the exile of the Jews to Egypt began – we cut to a seemingly unrelated chapter which has nothing to do with the theme of the story.

It is a bizarre interruption. It tells the strange story of Yehudah – the brother who was, according to some commentators, punished or at least demoted for the actions of the brothers with Yosef. He loses his children for their sins, and on the road, he meets with and has relations with an apparent prostitute, who turns out to be a heroine, Tamar – his daughter-in-law – who has a prophecy that she needs to have a child with Yehudah. They have twins – another recurring theme in the Torah – and one of them is Peretz. We read later that Peretz is the forebear of King David and the future Moshiach.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe illuminates this pivot with exquisite precision:

“Yehudah’s siring of Peretz reflected how ‘the cure preceded the blow.’ Before the first power to subjugate the Jews [Pharaoh] was born, the [progenitor of the] ultimate redeemer [Peretz, Mashiach’s ancestor] was born.”

While the brothers schemed and Yosef descended, G‑d was quietly “creating the light of Mashiach,” introducing Peretz’s boundless spirit – the power to “break through” all barriers – ensuring that exile’s darkness would birth unbounded elevation.

There remain many questions about the story – why was the Moshiach sired in such an unconventional way – by way of Yehudah and Tamar in the form of her pretending to be a prostitute? Surely there would be more appropriate ways for such a line to be formed. But this is perhaps the point. As the Sforno says on the verse:

וַיֵּ֨ט אֵלֶ֜יהָ אֶל־הַדֶּ֗רֶךְ וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ הָֽבָה־נָּא֙ אָב֣וֹא אֵלַ֔יִךְ כִּ֚י לֹ֣א יָדַ֔ע כִּ֥י כַלָּת֖וֹ הִ֑וא וַתֹּ֙אמֶר֙ מַה־תִּתֶּן־לִ֔י כִּ֥י תָב֖וֹא אֵלָֽי׃
So he turned aside to her by the road and said, “Here, let me sleep with you” – for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. “What,” she asked, “will you pay for sleeping with me?”

The Sforno says: “G‑d has His own agenda; clearly, it was His wish that Tamar bear a child or two children sired by Yehudah, who in His eyes was more acceptable than his son Shelah [whose mother’s antecedents we know little about]. G‑d wanted that the eventual Messiah should have had genetic material dating back to Tamar.”

Why G‑d wanted this, we are not let into this mystery to my knowledge, but perhaps, like Ruth the Moabite who also contributed to the line of David, her tenacity, persistence, and willingness to do what was required to fulfill G‑d’s words were important characteristics in the resilience of the line of kings that would lead, in the past and in the future, the Jewish People.

Therefore, at the exact point at which we could lose hope that we are descending into slavery and exile, G‑d gives birth to the redemption.

What does this mean for us? We all have major challenges in life – some seem more obvious and publicized than others – but there is a lesson here that although we can’t see it and we don’t understand it, the plan has been made by G‑d to end up in our interests and for the good.

This is not easy to accept – in Joseph’s story, he is seduced by his slave master’s wife, put in jail for years, and only then do his fortunes turn around. Yehudah was at his low ebb after losing his children, and he has a child by an apparent prostitute before his fortunes turn around. Bnei Yisrael must go through the pain of 210 years of slavery before being rebuilt as G‑d’s people and crowned at Sinai. In the same way, I need to understand that whilst I don’t have the perspective to see what is happening to me as a positive – it is for some reason only G‑d sees.

I pray we see the coming of the Moshiach soon, and I mean very, very soon.