Parashat Vayigash (Genesis 44:18-47:27)

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According to Wikipedia: “Vayigash or Vaigash (וַיִּגַּשׁ‬ — Hebrew for “and he drew near” or “then he drew near,” the first word of the parashah) is the eleventh weekly Torah portion (פָּרָשָׁה‬, parashah) in the annual Jewish cycle of Torah reading. It constitutes Genesis 44:18–47:27. In the parashah, Judah pleads on behalf of his brother Benjamin, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, Jacob comes down to Egypt, and Joseph’s administration of Egypt saves lives but transforms all the Egyptians into bondmen.”

Joseph takes vengeance on his brothers by psychologically torturing them. Is vengeance always wrong? Does not all punishment contain an element of vengeance?

Jews tend to wear their emotions on their sleeve just like other peoples from the Middle East.

Joseph’s brothers show vulnerability to try to deal with Joseph’s machinations. That’s the essence of Jewish shmoozing. It’s very different from WASP networking. When you shmooze, you show vulnerability and develop rapport by showing your soft underbelly.

My friend says:

>the whining in Genesis 44 — is there any symbolic level here where (maybe?) the relationship to the father, to Jacob, recapitulates the relationship between a Jew and hashem itself? ““How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come on my father.”

>45.2 — he sent the Egyptians out so he could be nepotistic with his brothers, but they heard him.

> “But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”
Genesis 45:7 — this is how any race survives. With a subverting infiltrator creating a path for a few of his kind to survive.

>Is Egypt too welcoming in 45.16? Does pharaoh sell his own people out in 45.18?

>45.24 — don’t quarrel along the way. That is, as you leave empire, no infighting. Brundle.

>Jacob’s fam numbered 70 in all. Isn’t this a secret special number? 46.27

>Why is there a town in Indiana called Goshen? What does that indicate about the people who settled there?

>46.33-34 — strategically lying to pharaoh to maximize handouts.

>47.6 — pharaoh specifically invites the Israelites to be managers.

>47.21 — masoretic text?

>do not bury me in Egypt… never was any allegiance. Write “Do not bury me in America” on my tombstone plz

Art Bell comments: -First 10 minutes CIA + mysterious deaths; killing to deal with all who dissent
12:31 Apotex founder worth 4.6 billion, Jewish but non-religious, many lawsuits against family and construction companies, rumor that security cameras off that day, seems to be a crime against both, not suicide. Police searching pipes and plumbing for clues. For Luke, please use better titles for your videos. ‘Truth vs PC’ or somesuch
15:20 Laura Southern discussion, male-female dynamic
26:00 miscegenation issue, dislike of attractive people for their good looks
34:00 Luke says don’t hate success, Hollywood party he attended full of elites, big Actors, Hitchens, poisonous to hate those who excel over you, right wing websites, disclaimer there to cover the effect of the site
39:00 calling something hate speech, the label has it’s own authority which causes distrust, often not earned – like forcing the ‘Yellow Star’ on Jews in 1930s Germany (WTH!)
40:00 Luke carefully watches sites with hate against Jews, killing to deal with all who dissent part2, wants people to listen to objectors of screwed up 2017 culture. Luke endorses staying with hateful content, listen for the non-insulting content. Guest says no, suspects that most hateful content is simply a game being played. Usually not a legitimate gadfly situation. Solutions are dumb, simple-minded. Clarification of all on show, all note the need for a new right, but not hateful right, none on show are National Socialists of 1930s. How is a utopian white ethno state formed, ideals vs fears + concerns for some kind of 4th empire to follow 1930s movement.

‘We are observers more than actors of the scene – feeling segregated somewhat racially, presumed to be reps of majority
Ruined adults commonplace in 2017 America

51:00 discomfort with activism is a luxury in a power struggle, new majority rule, wasp majority not eternal, military types often uneducated warriors, thinkers and fighters, two worlds, two classes, both needed to defend the good ways of the old culture now under threat and attack
58:00 Selma Heyak vs Weinstein, Luke says piece written for her, not by her, spoke of taking one for the team the hidden suggestion perhaps. Embarrassing.

From a previous post:

Gen. 46: 3 “I am God, the God of your father,” he said. “Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. 4 I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back again.”

How would the Egyptians feel that the Israelites are going to become a “great nation” within their midst, simply use their land for a pasture during a famine, and then return to their own land triumphant?

Gen. 46: 31: Then Joseph said to his brothers and to his father’s household, “I will go up and speak to Pharaoh and will say to him, ‘My brothers and my father’s household, who were living in the land of Canaan, have come to me. 32 The men are shepherds; they tend livestock, and they have brought along their flocks and herds and everything they own.’ 33 When Pharaoh calls you in and asks, ‘What is your occupation?’ 34 you should answer, ‘Your servants have tended livestock from our boyhood on, just as our fathers did.’ Then you will be allowed to settle in the region of Goshen, for all shepherds are detestable to the Egyptians.”

Is there any down side to a group developing a tricky and dishonest reputation? Will becoming known for dishonesty and running scams and manipulation serve a group well in the long run? How do you think the Egyptians felt when they realized they had been manipulated or are the goyim too stupid to ever catch on? Might there be a backlash for this trickery? How would Jews feel if an alien group came to live among them and use manipulation and deceit to get what they wanted to keep the majority off balance?

How should Egyptians feel about a new group entering their land who made their living as shepherds when apparently the shepherd is detestable to Egyptians and the sheep is worshiped as divine? How would Jews do in the beef industry in India where the cow is sacred?

Gen. 47: 5 Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Your father and your brothers have come to you, 6 and the land of Egypt is before you; settle your father and your brothers in the best part of the land. Let them live in Goshen. And if you know of any among them with special ability, put them in charge of my own livestock.”

So how might Egyptians react to their Pharoah giving the best parts of their land to foreigners? Might there be a backlash? How would they feel about these foreigners getting to run the Pharoah’s livestock? How do they feel about a foreigner (Joseph) being second in power in the land next to the Pharoah? Might they resent this foreign power and intrusion?

Gen. 47: 20 So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them.

Might the Egyptians come to resent Joseph and his people for turning them into slaves?

I blogged then:

* It is a very different experience for me reading Genesis as a Jew vs as a Christian. As a Christian, the people in Genesis were characters in the Bible, religious figures, proto-Christians. As a Jew, these people feel like family, they feel like people I know, they’re the ancestors of my nation, which is an extended family. As a WASP, these characters did not feel close to me. They seemed primitive.

* The Jewish Bible doesn’t try to portray its Jewish heroes as one-dimensional and without flaws. Jews are named after the highly flawed Judah, son of Jacob, Joseph’s brother.

* Deciphering dreams seems to be a Jewish gift. Jews gave us psychology. Gypsies give us fortune telling. Gypsies are like low IQ Jews.

* Judah shows a ton of chutzpah speaking so directly to Joseph. You see classic Jewish verbal intensity. Judah says his father will die if Benjamin does not come home. “You’re killing me!” is a typical form of Jewish overstatement. “I’m dying here!”

* Jacob only loved the children of his wife Rachel. Genes matter. It is possible to love children not your own, just not as likely.

* Joseph sobbed to his brothers. Jews are more open with their emotions than WASPs.

* This clannish world is very different from the individualist WASP world, where WASPs don’t promise to kill their kids if XYZ does not happen. WASPs don’t tend to live through their children, unlike other groups.

* Pope John XXIII (baptized Joseph) greeted Jewish leaders in 1963: “I am your brother Joseph” and he proceeded to apologize for millenia of Christian anti-semitism.

One of the first acts of Pope John XXIII, in 1960, was to eliminate the description of Jews as perfidius (Latin for “perfidious” or “faithless”) in the prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy. He interrupted the first Good Friday liturgy in his pontificate to address this issue when he first heard a celebrant refer to the Jews with that word. He also made a confession for the Church of the sin of anti-semitism through the centuries.[52]

While Vatican II was being held, John XXIII tasked Cardinal Augustin Bea with the creation of several important documents that pertained to reconciliation with Jewish people.

On the one hand, this feels good for Jews, but it may signal a weakness and decline in Christianity.

Both Jews texts and Christian texts express about equal hatred for the other, but I think only Christian texts contain prescriptions for genocides.

* Joseph, after torturing his brothers, says, “Don’t feel guilty for selling me into slavery.”

* Jewish life is intense because it is so communal and genetically linked. It’s not unknown to pray together, work together, socialize together. The most intense Jewish life is in Jerusalem. These intense family feuds remain a feature of Jewish life. Think about Jared Kushner’s father who hired a prostitute with a plan to film the exchange to try to compromise Jared’s uncle. “The witness-tampering charge arose from Kushner’s act of retaliation against William Schulder, his sister’s husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators; Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranged for an encounter between the two to be secretly recorded, and had the tape sent to his sister.” What kind of person would do such an elaborate and vicious thing?

NYMAG:

Jared quickly called his father’s cell phone.

“Dad, are you all right?”

“Well, not really,” Charles Kushner said. “They’re going to arrest me today.”

“For what?” Jared blurted out. “Is it because of the tape? I thought your lawyers knew about that. I thought it’s not illegal.”

“Apparently they’re saying that it is,” Charles said…

Charles Kushner—everyone calls him Charlie—is, by any measure, a remarkable man. The child of Holocaust survivors, he has an engulfing charm and a palpable hunger for attention, and pushed himself to become a gifted businessman and Jersey kingmaker. “He loved being the Don Corleone of the community,” says a family friend. “He loved that when he walks into a synagogue the rabbis run over to him. Charlie saw himself as the Jewish Kennedy.” But beneath the charm there is a coiled aggressiveness. “Charlie’s good points are incredibly good,” a former employee says, “but if you cross him he becomes maniacal. He will crush you.”

* Most Jews through most of history have mostly lived in the diaspora.

* The Egyptians want to eat separately from Joseph’s family. Eating separately is universal, racist and must be overcome, says Dennis Prager.

* The brother sold Joseph for 20 pieces of silver, Joseph puts a silver goblet in the brothers’ possessions so he can blame them for stealing. Tricky legal reasoning! Not so much a WASP thing. Jews are known for trickery. Someone close to me bought a beautiful wool coat in the shuk in Jerusalem, but when the merchant wrapped it up, he substituted something far inferior. The outrage on our part was severe and clearly remembered almost 50 years later.

* This tricky reasoning shapes what we can discuss publicly. Steve Sailer wrote:

The last thing, however, that non-Jews are allowed to do in the U.S. is to objectively discuss the kind of psychological and sociological patterns that help explain why the quality of Jewish political and social decision-making has, on average, not always been as strong as their IQs, work ethic, argumentative skills, interest in public affairs, and self-confidence in their own judgment might suggest. The first President Bush understood this, but the second didn’t seem to have learned this lesson before the Iraq Attaq (although he seems to have learned a little in the aftermath, with Feith gone, Wolfowitz kicked upstairs, and Perle out of fashion).

What are some of these common self-debilitating Jewish tendencies? Off the top of my head, I’d suggest:

– Utopianism: Bombing Iraq into an America-loving democracy is only the latest disastrous project

– Cult-Worship- of- the-All-Knowing-Scholar-Sageism: Marxism, Freudianism, Randism, Straussianism, etc.

– Ethnocentric nostalgiaism: vividly seen in the current immigration debate, where Ellis Island-worship is substituted for facts and logic

– Be-Like-Meism: e.g., the common suggestion by Jewish pundits that all Mexican illegal immigrants have to do is act like the Jewish immigrants of 1906 and everything will turn out fine. Well, swell …

– Pseudo ethnic Humilityism: few Jews actually believe that Mexicans are just like Jews — they think Jews are much smarter — but they don’t want anybody else to notice that Jews are smarter so they advocate immigration policies that depend for their success upon Mexicans being just as smart as Jews. That this immigration policy is obviously bad for the country is less important than keeping up the charade that nobody mentions in the press that Jews are smarter than everybody else on average.

– Rube Goldbergism: overly complicated plans and analyses with too many moving parts to work reliably (e.g., the neocon plans for fixing the Middle East through invasion)

– Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: I am a huge fan of enlightened self-interest, so I don’t object to this on principle

– Rube Goldbergian Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: This could also be called He-Who-Says-A-Must-Say-B-C-D-E-Q-W-and-Zism. Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms.

– Missing-Piece-of-the-Puzzleism: One obvious problem with this tendency is that you can’t make a Rube Goldberg analysis work in the real world if you’ve banned the use of crucial moving parts, such as IQ

– Pay-No-Attention-to-that-Man-Behind-the-Curtainism: The biggest unmentionable, as the Mearsheimer-Walt brouhaha demonstrated once again, is also one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle for understanding how the modern world works: the influence of Jews.

– Enemy Nostalgiaism: Difficulty identifying current and future enemies because of emotional obsession with past enemies: e.g., the obsession with “The Passion of the Christ” combined with the inability to identify growing Latin American populism as a future threat due to immigration, etc.

– Faux Sabraism: as Francis Fukuyama pointed out to Charles Krauthammer, American neocon thinking about Iraq was motivated less by hardheaded is-it-good-for-Israel analysis — Sharon’s government was only modestly enthusiastic about the Iraq Attaq — than by What-Would-the-Israelis-Do emotions. Armchair warriors like Douglas Feith are particular susceptible to this kind of Let’s Pretend thinking..

Ironically, Jewish writers themselves are obsessed with Jewish influence, even in fields where Jews have virtually no influence, such as soccer.

* That Joseph had a divination cup indicates he was highly assimilated into Egypt, but when his brothers arrived, he was triggered back into Jewish identification.

* Do you believe in free will? I often feel in the control of forces greater than myself. Joseph tells his brothers not to feel bad about selling him into slavery. He says it was God’s will. Perhaps it is also God’s will that Jews run Hollywood and the Federal Reserve?

* The Pharoah was glad that Joseph would bring more Jews to Egypt, in contrast to the next pharoah (beginning of Exodus). Joseph gives his family pragmatic and honest advice — say you are cattlemen because Egyptians hate that work. When the Pharoah says to Joseph’s family, “The land of Egypt is before you — in the best part of the land settle your father and your brothers”, I wonder how the Egyptians felt about that? (Gen. 47:1-5)

* Joseph didn’t force the Egyptians to sell themselves into slavery (Gen. 47:15). He simply offered them a way to survive. Jews who’ve sold cheap loans, cheap liquor, cheap refis, didn’t force the goyim to become enslaved to them. They just made it easy. I am not sure the Torah is anti-slavery. It is anti-slavery when it comes to Jews being slaves, but it seems OK with the Egyptians selling themselves into slavery in a plan organized by Joseph.

Artscroll commentary on Gen. 47:20: “In practice, Joseph took possession of the land, but not of the people. According to Haamek Davar, the reason Joseph did not make them slaves was for the welfare of the state: He wanted them to remain self-supporting and not become wards of the government. Malbim emphasizes that a ruler must always feel responsible for the sustenance of his subjects; and it would have been wrong for Joseph to have made them slaves in return for bread.”

So the Jewish commentaries seem to tell a different story than the text.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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