Who’d Have Thunk?

George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson didn’t go around saying how fascinating it was to live in the past. They just, well, lived. Historian David McCullough notes that the founders “were living in their present.” The Avot had a similar existence: sure, they spoke with God, but they were also just people. They didn’t think of themselves as the Avot with a capital “A.” 

The school of Tanakh study called begova ha-eynayim, “at eye level,” contends that we can better learn from Biblical characters if we see them as real people, rather than as unrelatable, angelic beings. And indeed there are some wonderfully human moments in this week’s parasha of Vayechi: when Yaakov made a heartfelt speech about how his grandsons Efraim and Menashe were as dear to him as his own children – and then didn’t recognize them as they stood there. Or when Yosef shifted his father’s hands from one grandson to another because he thought the old man was confused (as indeed he had been minutes earlier).  

Then there is the remarkable moment when Yaakov paused to marvel at his good fortune: right before blessing his grandsons, Yaakov turned to Yosef and said re’o panecha lo pilalti, “I never thought I’d see your face again.” The commentators grapple with the meaning of the strange formulation pilalti (it is a hapax legomenon: this is the word’s only occurrence in Tanakh). For Rabbi Adin Steinzaltz, it means that seeing Yosef again was unbelievable to Yaakov; for Chizkuni, it means that it was beyond any prayer Yaakov could ever have uttered; and for Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, it means there’s nothing Yaakov could have done, no plan he could have executed, that would have brought Yosef back. Who’d have thunk it possible?

We have all had moments when we can’t believe we’re here, or that this can’t be happening, or that this can’t be happening to us. We feel like we are watching a movie of ourselves. These can be, God forbid, moments of tragedy or loss; but they also can be moments of great joy, like a wedding or a birth. I had many such small moments this week visiting in Israel. Lo pilalti that I would see kids I had taught mentching out and telling me their favorite divrei Torah. Lo pilalti that I would reunite with a former semikha classmate who now is the maggid shiur, the teacher in a semikha class. And lo pilalti that I would hug a friend whose wounded son was in a coma a few weeks ago – a young man who is now recovering and rushing to finish his school semester and ace his exams.  

Rabbi Asher Wasserteil explains that this verse teaches us that we must thank God for every good that He does for us. Psychologist Adam Grant noted this week that “If one couple in our whole family tree didn’t survive, meet, mate, and get a 1/400 quadrillion sperm-egg match, there would be no us.” He adds that “A sustainable source of gratitude is appreciating that the odds were stacked against coming into being.” What are the lo pilalti moments in our own lives? And what do we do with such moments when they occur?

Shabbat Shalom.