I must acknowledge tonight that there is something weird for me about the beginning of today’s drashah. Twenty-eight years ago, today, my father, Avraham Noach ben Yitzchak ve’Rachel z”l, passed away. And today, the drashah will reflect on what happened after another of our fathers, Yaakov, died.
When a father dies, something may shift. Old wounds resurface. Questions that were kept quiet suddenly demand answers. The presence that held things together, however imperfectly, might be gone. And in that absence, we discover what was actually holding us in place—was it love, or was it fear?
When the text, at the end of Parashat Vayehi, tells us that Yaakov had died and been buried, it explicitly lets us know also that Yaakov’s sons, Yosef’s brothers, are terrified. For years, they have lived under the fragile peace of their father's presence. Now that he is gone, they fear Yosef will finally take his revenge.
They send a message claiming Yaakov's dying wish was for Yosef to forgive them. In his commentary, Rashi doesn’t believe them and suggests they invented it for the sake of peace.[1] Whether true or fabricated, what matters is Yosef's response. In just one verse, the Torah gives us layers of theology to unpack:
"Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people."[2]
Yosef refuses the role of judge. He acknowledges his brothers' intent was evil, yet insists God's intent was good. The harm and the blessing somehow occupy the same event. This is not moral relativism; Yosef does not say "it's all okay now." He says something far stranger: you chose evil, God chose good, and both were real.
This is where we hit the wall. If God intended the outcome, were the brothers really free to choose otherwise? If their cruelty was part of a divine plan to save Egypt and the whole region from famine, how can we hold them accountable?
Consider an earlier moment in Genesis. In Parashat Lech Lecha, God tells Avraham: “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years.”[3]
So the arc was foretold. Long before Yosef's brothers sold him, long before Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites, God spoke of exile and oppression. Egypt's cruelty was predicted. Does this mean the Egyptians had no choice? Does it mean the brothers had no choice? If the outcome was guaranteed, where is the space for human freedom, and how can we speak of justice, reward, or punishment?
The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot gives us the classic Jewish formulation of the dilemma: "All is foreseen, yet freedom is given."[4]
It is a maddening sentence. It refuses to resolve the tension. Instead, it holds both truths at once, like Yosef himself, refusing to collapse the paradox into an easy answer.
One way our tradition tries to navigate this is by distinguishing between the decree and the details. Yes, God may have foretold that Avraham's children would be enslaved. But who enslaved them, how they enslaved them, and how far they went—those were human choices. Rambam, in Hilkhot Teshuvah, argues that a decree about history does not force any particular person to become its agent. Egypt was not punished for "playing a role," but because real people chose oppression.[5] Ramban adds that they also exceeded the decree, turning servitude into cruelty.[6] The Torah can foretell exile without drafting villains.
But even this explanation leaves us uneasy. Because the deeper question remains: if I am inside circumstances I did not write, in what sense am I free?
And this matters because providence-language cuts two ways, both of them dangerous.
On one hand, it can lock people into suffering, making oppression feel divinely ordained. If slavery was "decreed," then the enslaver bears no guilt. If exile was "foretold," then the one who exiles can claim to be an instrument of heaven. History is filled with this theological move. In Genesis, Noah curses Canaan, the son of Ham, to be "a servant of servants."[7] For centuries, this verse was twisted to claim that Africans—said to be descendants of Ham—were cursed by God to servitude. Slavery, then, was not a crime but the fulfilment of scripture. Providence became a permission slip for unspeakable cruelty.
On the other hand, providence-language can be claimed by those who hold power after suffering. "God raised me up from the pit," becomes "therefore my use of power is beyond question." Past victimhood becomes present entitlement. The suffering I endured purifies whatever I do next.
Yosef refuses both moves. To his brothers, he says: "You intended harm"—your choices were real, not excused by any decree. And to himself, he says: "Am I in the place of God?"—my suffering does not give me the right to play judge. Providence may have brought me here, but I am still accountable for what I do with this power.
This is the ethical tightrope the Torah walks. It acknowledges that God works through history, yet insists that human beings remain responsible. Neither oppressors nor survivors get to hide behind divine plan.
Here is where Viktor Frankl becomes essential. Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote Man's Search for Meaning after his liberation from Auschwitz. In it, he describes the radical insight that saved his life in the camps:
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."[8]
Frankl is describing precisely what Yosef discovered. Yosef could not choose whether his brothers would sell him. He could not choose whether Potiphar's wife would frame him, or whether he would spend years rotting in an Egyptian dungeon. Those were the decrees of his life, the circumstances imposed on him. But he could choose what kind of person he would become inside those circumstances.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik offers us language for this distinction. In his essay Kol Dodi Dofek, written in the shadow of the Holocaust, he speaks of goral and yi'ud—two different relationships we can have with our lives.[9]
Goral means "fate" or "lot." It is what happens to us, the circumstances we do not choose. It is the accident of birth, the trauma inflicted by others, the historical moment we inherit. Goral is passive. We are its object, not its subject.
Yi'ud means "destiny" or "purpose." It is what we do with those circumstances. It is our response, our choices, the meaning we create. Yi'ud is active. Here, we become the subject of our own story.
Think of it this way: you did not choose your parents, but you choose what kind of parent you will be. You did not choose the body you were born into, but you choose how you will inhabit it. The circumstances are goral. The response is yi'ud.
The pit, the prison, the palace—those were Yosef's goral. Slavery, exile, and loss were imposed on him by his brothers. But his response, his refusal to become bitter, his decision to use his power to save rather than destroy—that was his yi'ud. He could not rewrite the past, but he could choose what kind of future he would build from its ruins.
This is what Yosef is teaching his brothers at the end of Vayehi. He is not absolving them. He is not saying their choice did not matter. He is saying: you chose to harm me, and that was real. God chose to use your harm for good, and that was also real. I could not control what you did to me, but I could control who I became because of it. You gave me goral. I chose yi’ud.
And yet, we must be honest. Last week, I stood here and criticized Yosef's policies during the famine—how he used the crisis to consolidate Pharaoh's power, how he reduced free Egyptians to servitude in exchange for grain. Yosef's yi'ud was real, but it was not perfect. He transformed his fate into a destiny of leadership, yes, but that leadership had costs, especially for those with no power.
This matters. Because the call to choose yi'ud over goral is not a call to moral perfection. It is not a guarantee that we will always get it right. Yosef fed the hungry and created an oppressive system. Both are true. He chose compassion toward his brothers and made decisions that harmed others. The freedom to choose our response does not mean we will always choose well.
Perhaps this is why the Torah gives us Yosef whole—his mercy and his mistakes, his transformation and his blind spots. The call is not to be Yosef. The call is to keep choosing, to keep asking, to refuse the comfort of saying "I had no choice."
So where does this leave us?
If we are honest, we all live in the tension Yosef names. Some of the circumstances of our lives were set before we arrived. We did not choose our parents, our genetics, the country or century we were born into, the traumas that shaped us, or the privileges we inherited. These are our goral, the unchosen facts of our existence.
And yet, we are not puppets. Inside those constraints, we still choose. We choose whether to forgive or nurse a grudge. We choose whether to hoard power or share it. We choose whether to let bitterness harden us or crack us open into compassion.
The rabbis refuse to resolve the paradox between divine plan and human freedom because life does not resolve it either. Every day we wake up inside circumstances we did not choose, and every day we are asked: what will you do with this?
Yosef's brothers intended harm. That was their choice, and the text never pretends otherwise. But Yosef refused to let their choice be the final word. He chose something else. He chose to act rather than to simply react with revenge. His choices were imperfect—as we have seen, some caused real harm. But the choice itself, the refusal to be defined only by what was done to him, that was his yi'ud. He chose not to become his brothers, even if he could not always avoid becoming like Pharaoh.
And perhaps that is the answer Parashat Vayehi offers. Not a philosophical solution, but a lived one. The question is not whether we are inside circumstances we did not choose. The question is: what will we do with the part we have been given?
This week, as we close the book of Genesis, I invite you to ask yourself: where in my life do I feel stuck inside circumstances I did not write? Where do I feel that the situation is fixed, the outcome inevitable, and my freedom an illusion?
And then ask the harder question: inside those circumstances, what choices do I still have? What kind of person am I becoming because of what has been done to me? Am I using my pain as an excuse, or as a doorway?
Yosef could not change his brothers. But he could change himself. He could not rewrite the past. But he could choose the future.
All is foreseen. And yet, freedom is given.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Rashi on Genesis 50:16.
[2] Genesis 50:19–20.
[3] Genesis 15:13.
[4] Mishnah Avot 3:15.
[5] Rambam, Hilkhot Teshuvah 6:5.
[6] Ramban on Genesis 15:14.
[7] Genesis 9:25.
[8] Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 66.
[9] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Kol Dodi Dofek: Listen—My Beloved Knocks, trans. David Z. Gordon (Jersey City: Ktav Publishing House, 2006).
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