Jewish guilt: It’s optional

I would like to talk today about guilt, a subject that we Jews are self-proclaimed experts on. Why is that?  “Jewish guilt” is something that we all joke about, something that we all feel bonded over. There are many theories as to why we are so good at guilt. One of my favorites is that we, more than many peoples of this world, feel the particular weight of our history. For us, the past looms large — in the Torah, in our wandering through the world; through our struggles with Crusaders and Cossacks and Nazis through the centuries, we have more than our share of baggage to lug through the generations. We also know that we’re a part of a very special people, with very high expectations of ourselves — and that alone is enough to make us quite neurotic.
It’s clear from the Torah that guilt was around even in the earliest days. As we finish the Book of Genesis today, we find the brothers of Joseph burdened by their past mistreatment of their brother, and full of fear of Joseph's retribution. We are told that once their father, Jacob, has died, the brothers are particularly terrified of Joseph.  They join together and plead with Joseph, they even fib, saying that before he died, their father Jacob had said that he wanted Joseph to forgive his brothers. Hearing his brothers talk this way, the Torah tells us, “Vayevk Yosef b’dabram eilav” — "And Joseph wept hearing them talk like this.”

Why did Joseph cry?  Most of us hear this story, and we think that Joseph is crying because, even after all these years since he revealed himself to his shocked brothers, they still don't trust him. They still think that Joseph has been bearing this grudge against them all these years, and the only reason he didn’t attack them was that his father Jacob was still alive. Now, with their father dead, the brothers feared that they had no more protection.  And so Joseph cried because he saw how they never believed that Joseph had forgiven them.
But in the Midrash, there’s a hint that Joseph’s tears are not just his hurt that his brothers still don’t trust him.  The Midrash says, “Vayar Achei Yosef,” “And the brothers saw that their father had died...”  What did they see now that caused them to fear? They saw that when they returned from the funeral of Jacob, Joseph stopped at the pit that they had thrown him in to say the blessing that one is obligated to say at a place where a miracle happened to him... When they saw this, they said, “Now that our father is deceased, we fear that Joseph will hate us and avenge all of the evil that we did to him.”

So this Midrash is pointing us to something very interesting: It’s not that they didn’t trust that Joseph had forgiven them before. But now, says the Midrash, the brothers saw Joseph looking down at that pit that they threw him in all those years ago, and this, just after he buried his father Jacob. And what are the brothers feeling at that moment? Guilt. Horrible guilt. They felt guilt because they knew that their past travesties shortened their father’s life. They felt guilt because they all remembered what Jacob had said to Pharaoh when he first met Pharaoh. Jacob had said, “M’at ura’im hayu shnei y’mei chayay,” “Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the span of my fathers during their sojourns.”  They all knew that Jacob died younger than his forefathers. He died younger because he lived for so many years with a broken heart — broken because he thought he had lost his beloved son Joseph. At that moment, standing at the pit, the brothers panicked because they realized that the final consequence of their dastardly act all those years before had come to pass: Their father died too soon. And Joseph knew it. Joseph knew that if the brothers hadn’t been so cruel, they would not be burying their father. In short, the brothers were wracked with guilt. And it was in seeing this guilt that was so destroying his brothers, in seeing that, Joseph cried.