Vayigash / ויגש

This is a weekly series of frum, trans, anarchist parsha dvarim [commentaries]. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns or, worse, is Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make it more comfortable for us) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

Content note: famine and starvation in Gaza (donate if you can)

Hasidus posits that the stories we read in the parsha are not only historical(if they happened historically at all, which Hasidus assumes they did) but they're spiritually happening now, again/still, as we read them, at the same time every year. Every moment that passes is etched forever in time. There is famine across the land. Yosef is weeping with his brothers right now, as they betray him, as he forgives them, as the whole Jewish people move from Kna'an into Mitsrayim. Hashem is speaking to Yakov right now, telling him to worry not, that in Mitsrayim He will make us into a great nation. We are also always enslaved in Mitsrayim, and always leaving it, and always remembering to always remember it.

Time is a spiral. Every moment is pregnant with the possibility for moshiakh, for redemption (Walter Benjamin). But moshiakh will not come before we merit him. He won't come when we need him; he will only come after we have already/still built/brought redemption ourselves.