The Meaning of Joseph’s Coat- Vayeishev 5785
I, like many of us, have a few items of clothing which are important to me and have a lot of history. When I have the (nowadays, rare) occasion to wear my tuxedo, I wear with it my grandfather’s gold cufflinks which are embossed with his first initial – the letter B – which conveniently is also mine.
It’s my custom on Shabbat when I go out to wear the grey newsboy cap that my father years ago gave to me after he himself wore it for many years. It’s comfy and, I think, looks distinguished. I have my favorite jeans and my favorite sweatshirt which are broken in just right, and put on when I just want to be comfortable.
On Shabbat here at Beth Sholom, I wear my all-white Shabbat tallit, which I received when I was ordained from my teachers. During the week when I daven, I wear a different one which I obtained when my wife and I got married.
In parshat Vayeishev this Shabbat, clothing famously plays a pivotal role. At the start of the parsha we learn that, as Jacob’s favorite son from his favorite wife, Joseph receives from him a ketonet pasim as a gift. Ketonet pasim has been translated for us as “a coat of many colors” (and this is the interpretation chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber in the lyrics from his musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”). Imagine how it must have looked; according to the big introductory song:
“It was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange and blue!”
Ketonet pasim, however, literally means “an ornamented tunic”. According to the basic meaning of the text, it may very well have been multicolored, but also displayed designs and craftsmanship beyond that of an ordinary garment.
The word the Torah uses to describe Joseph’s garment- pasim– is itself symbolic. Rashi comments that the word pasim is a term for clothing of fine wool, described in the Talmud in masechet Shabbat. This was no schmatta! He also quotes a famous midrash that the spelling of the word pasim– pay, samech, yud, mem- is an acronym for all of the misfortunes that Joseph will encounter. Pay stands Potiphar, the Egyptian royal official who Joseph is sold to. Samech stands for sochrim– the merchants, who are identified by the following two letters: Yud stands for the Ishmaelites, who purchase Joseph from his brothers, and Mem stands for the Midianites, who in Rashi’s interpretation buy Joseph from the Ishmaelites.
Ibn Ezra, in turn, writes that pasim is related to the Aramaic word for “part” or “fragment”. In his interpretation, Joseph’s garment was stitched together from several embroidered pieces and was composed of many fine pieces of material, not just one.
Another interpretation of Joseph’s ketonet pasim is brought by Chizkuni, a French commentator from the 13th century. Chizkuni sees the spelling of the word pasim to be related to the word payyes, meaning “appease”. In his reading, Jacob gives this ornamented garment to Joseph as an appeasement for being a half orphan, with Joseph’s mother Rebekah having died while giving birth to Benjamin, the youngest of his twelve sons. Accordingly, Jacob tries to compensate for this loss by having a costly garment made for Joseph.
For me, however, the most powerful interpretation of Joseph’s ornamental tunic comes from Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, a work of Midrash dated from around the 8th century C.E. The ornamented tunic, according to the Midrash, is stitched together from the very garments that G-d crafted for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Furthermore, this tunic then becomes the property of Nimrod, a mighty king and hunter mentioned earlier in the book of Genesis, and later becomes the garments of Esau that Rebekah, in her conniving to obtain the firstborn blessing for Jacob, dressed him in when he received Isaac’s blessing.
Rabbi Adina Allen writes that “in [this] reading, the coat is not merely a gift but an heirloom of unresolved stories: exile, anguish, deception, the fracture between brothers repeating across generations.” Jacob, then, at the tender age of seventeen, is laden with all the history, baggage, and conflict that his people have endured since their earliest times. Perhaps all of this being literally “on his shoulders”, in the form of a coat, was burdensome. Or conversely, as the text of the Torah makes clear, it was just the thing to spark enough jealousy amongst his brothers to want to do away with him.
Hanukkah, which begins tomorrow night, is a celebration of light. We light candles for eight nights, increasing the amount of light each evening, as we bring light into the darkest part of the year. The many layers of meaning found in Hanukkah are all symbolic and meaningful, but on this Shabbat I want to juxtapose it with Joseph’s garment.
We are forbidden from deriving any benefit from the light of our Hanukkah candles- we can’t use our hanukkiah as a reading lamp or a flashlight, for example. It’s meant to solely be decorative and symbolic- just like Joseph’s coat.
But light itself, which is so central to the narrative of the Torah and Jewish practice, is decorative itself. When we take a prism and look at white light, we can see all the colors of the rainbow- all those decorative hues which make up the spectrum of visible light. The light itself, which is seemingly colorless, is actually made up of all those colors which Joseph’s coat may have displayed.
Joseph is the bearer- literally- of all the history that his garment has been a part of. The dreams he tells his family, which portend his own greatness, are a source of animosity but are hidden within him. We, too, bear that which came before us and make us who we are- in our clothing, in our personal stories, and in our own dreams for ourselves.
Joseph reminds us to unapologetically live our own lives and hold respect for human dignity while doing so. Hanukkah, too, is about being unapologetically Jewish and living into our full selves. May this Shabbat and this coming Hanukkah be a reminder that there is often more than meets the eye, and that outward appearance is just that. You never know what’s underneath.
