The Jacob Syndrome

And he said, “Surely I will go down to Sheol in mourning for my son.” So his father wept for him.  Genesis 37:35b  NASB

Mourning – What happened to Jacob when he thought his son Joseph was dead?  By carefully examining this narrative in Genesis we discover a lot about psychological trauma, family dynamics, and unconscious influences, much more than a simple “historical” reading suggests.

Avivah Zornberg offers important insights.  Beginning her remarks with Genesis 37:13[1], she writes:

Jacob ironically sends Joseph to the place of his dismemberment, to Shechem, out of anxiety for his sons in that place of violence.  Their constant references to blood indicate a primal instinct—the necrophilous instinct—that they themselves unconsciously recognize, when they kill the goat and dip Joseph’s coat in its blood.  This becomes a symbolic utterance of their guilt, of the radical meaning of their act. . . .  the goat that was substituted for Joseph remains a symbol of hatred and violence in the consciousness of the whole people. . . . This enigmatic midrash treats the sale of Joseph and the slaughter of the goat as the paradigm for all violence from the beginning of human existence to messianic times. . . . For this blood . . . comes to represent the human responsibility for suffering . . .[2]

She points out that Jacob’s mourning, a mourning that finds no relief except in his own death is . . .

. . . a psychotherapeutic encounter in which the leader helps his followers to ‘recognize what they have lost.’  There is no finding without that sense of loss.  The leader-teacher helps the seeker to identify the hollowness, the absence, that will move him to a passion of quest.  A primal ‘forgetting’ (the neo-Platonic notion of anamnesis) leads to a process of approximate reconstructions, of ‘makings and matchings,’ to which the teacher-tzaddik can hold up therapeutic mirrors—but only, as R. Nahman says, if the seeker is genuinely the loser, if there is no inauthenticity in the search.  Such a genuine awareness of loss is the only basis for hope of recovery.[3]

Jacob, on some subconscious level, knows that Joseph is alive; while, consciously, he thinks him dead.  That is why he cannot accept comfort for him.  The point is obviously paradoxical; normally, one might imagine that a mourner who refuses to be comforted is overinvolved in the despair of death.  The midrash shifts the reader’s perspective: the willingness to be comforted becomes a mode of despair at the finality of death—it is a ‘decree’ that allows the dead to recede from the heart of the living, a kind of treachery to the loyalty of memory. Conversely, the refusal to be comforted is a refusal to yield up the dead, to turn one’s mind to other thoughts.[4]

This is tied to her comments about the necessity of brokenness (shever) before hope (sever).

What Jacob sees is a dialectical vision of shever/sever.  When things fall apart, the opportunity for sever arises.  Before such a crisis, in a condition of wholeness and security, hope is irrelevant.  After it, some plausible reconstruction of the shards becomes essential . . . “Happy is he . . . whose hope [sever] is in the Lord his God”. . . [Psalm 146:5] is intimately related to the idea of shattering, of crisis.  It is also related to the notion of ‘thought,’ of ‘plausible opinion.’  Sevara . . . is a plausible interpretation.  It is the conventional talmudic expression for thinking: for speculation, ingenuity in constructing a pleasing hypothesis.  Thinking is an act of trust; there are no guarantees that one is right in one’s interpretation.  Savoor is often used, in fact, to describe a mistaken opinion . . .[5]

What do we learn?  Hope is the child of loss, not the cousin of expectation.  To experience genuine hope one must first encounter genuine loss . . . and refuse to accept it!  Jacob will not accept the death of Joseph.  In fact, he will die before he reconciles himself to the loss.  That declaration keeps hope alive.  If Jacob were to bear the death, to live as though this death is a thing of the past, receding from conscious memory, then hope dies with Joseph.  Hope is born from rebellion against reality.  Zornberg cites Rabbi Nahman:

‘As wisdom grows, vexation grows’ (Ecclesiastes 1:18).  R. Nahman comments: the greater the sensibility, the greater the pain.  There is no acquiring knowledge, or understanding, without a sense of enlarged dimensions of the world.  This sense R. Nahman calls yirah—fear; and from this kind of fear comes pain.[6]

Blessed is the man who willingly endures suffering.  Hope will be born through him.

Topical Index:  mourning, hope, death, Jacob, Zornberg, Genesis 37:35

[1] Israel said to Joseph, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock in Shechem? Come, and I will send you to them.” And he said to him, “I will go.”  Then he said to him, “Go now and see about the welfare of your brothers and the welfare of the flock, and bring word back to me.” So he sent him from the valley of Hebron, and he came to Shechem.  Genesis 37:13-14  NASB

[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, pp. 271-272.

[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 297.

[4] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 300.

[5] Ibid., p. 302.

[6] Ibid., p. 329.