How many
times have you done something to aggrieve another person? How many times have you done something to
aggrieve another person, and later regretted it because your ‘victim’ was able
to return the ‘favour’? How many times
have you reveled at the chance to return the ‘favour’ to someone who had
aggrieved you? If you’re like
nine-tenths of humanity, chances are you’ve been on both sides of this
equation. Because even when we’re not trying,
we can easily aggrieve another person.
How much more so, when we want to! And the person who has never wanted to hurt
another, in some way, has not been born.
So one person aggrieves another. And that person, in turn, delights when he
can respond in kind. Either the next
day, the next week, or many years down the line. I’m guessing that, when you were young, you
were taught not to aggrieve other people.
But chances are, your parents did not teach you so on ethical
grounds. No, their instruction was more
likely backed by the well-known proverb:
What goes around, comes around.
Everybody knows this saying. It means that a person’s actions will
ultimately have consequences. And that
applies to both positive and negative actions, although the maxim is usually
used as a warning against negative actions.
Don’t mess with someone else, because ultimately, they may be in the
position of messing with you. So you can’t
find it within yourself to treat others well just because? Then treat them well because, sooner or
later, they may in turn be in a position to treat you poorly.
It’s an important principle. It should be a motivator to keep
people treating one another well. But
since there has been no recent pandemic of people treating one another well, we
have to assume that it’s an imperfect motivator at best. And the reason is really not that hard to
intuit. Poor treatment that is
inadvertent or a result of a passing bad mood aside, people who habitually
treat others poorly, simply feel superior to others. They can’t believe that the ones they treat
poorly will ever be in the position to treat them poorly. Their contempt for the other makes them
believe they are immune to others’ poor treatment.
Perhaps that’s what Joseph’s brothers
thought of their younger brother, the full-of-himself kid who dreamt of his
older siblings bowing down to him. When
they saw him approaching them out in the middle of nowhere, where they were
pasturing their father’s flocks, their contempt for the Dreamer was such that
they couldn’t imagine their actions against him would ever bring serious
consequences. Well, in today’s Torah
reading we see the brothers realizing otherwise. And they don’t even yet know that Joseph himself
is their tormentor. They only
know that they are being accused, by the ruler of Egypt, of being spies. And they say to one another: We deserve to be punished because of what
we did to our brother. We saw him
suffering when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen. That’s why this great misfortune has come
upon us now.
The brothers have come to the
realisation that what goes around, comes around. And this, without even knowing that it is
Joseph himself who is tormenting them.
They realise that their sin against Joseph was so severe that anything
bad happening to them, whoever might be making it happen, is well-deserved. After all, they sold Joseph into slavery and
told their father that wild beasts killed him.
In this version of what goes around, comes around, it isn’t
necessary for the aggrieved party himself to be the one meting out the
punishment. The fact that they are being
punished at all, is proof enough that they deserve what they are getting. This is what our Hindu friends call ‘karma.’
I like the principle of karma. It
seems right and just. Imagine that, when
I commit an act to aggrieve someone else, that that lets loose some force which
disturbs the equilibrium of the universe.
And that equilibrium will be restored only when something equally
aggrieving happens to me. No matter who
the actor might be. We sometimes joke
that No good deed goes unpunished. In
other words, it seems that when we do good things for others, there’s always
someone waiting to hurt us. But the
principle of karma says the opposite and actually appeals to our sense of
fairness. The Jewish sources do not
repudiate the idea of karma being part of the natural order. But in our tradition, karmas decree is mitigated
by our ability to repent. Repentence
trumps karma.
Joseph’s brothers, as we read in
today’s reading, are terrified that they are being punished for their earlier
misdeeds. And because their misdeeds
were pretty bad, they understandably think that terrible things are in store
for them. As we’ll see when we read from
the Torah next week, that isn’t exactly the way things will turn out. Oh, they’ll get a big scare. But then Joseph will restrain himself and not
send around, when came to him. And
why? Because Joseph will see his
brothers as repenting. And he will
relent in his anger.
If you can’t be motivated not to
aggrieve your brother just because, then what goes around, comes
around is probably a good principle to keep in mind. Perhaps it will remind you to treat others
well, even when you don’t want to.
Because what goes around, usually does come around. Not every aggrieved party is like a
Joseph. It’s something to think
about. Shabbat shalom.
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