Being and Nothingness
Now Reuben returned to the pit, and behold, Joseph was not in the pit; so he tore his garments. He returned to his brothers and said, “The boy is not there; as for me, where am I to go?” Genesis 37:29-30 NASB
Is not there – We looked into the grammatical implications of this verse once before. Perhaps you’ll recall it (CLICK HERE). You’ll remember that the words “is not there” are not in the Hebrew text. What is there is the ey-nenoo. “[The child] is not.” It’s not that Joseph is simply missing from the pit. In Reuben’s view, Joseph has ceased to exist, and Reuben’s intention to rescue him has been dashed to pieces by an evil twist of fate. Now Reuben must live with the fact that his hesitation to act has resulted in the disappearance of his younger brother, and perhaps more importantly, has placed the burden on his shoulders as the oldest to carry this message of grief to his father. Now he must lie in order to hide his hesitation. One failure compounds another.
Reuben’s rhetorical question, “Where am I to go?” is the expression of emotional collapse. We would have expected something like, “What am I to do?” But as a practical matter, there’s nothing he can do. That question is meaningless. The real question is the question of his own existence in the light of this utter failure of nerve. “Where am I to go?” And, of course, the true answer is “exile. . . to nowhere.” What other place will accept a man who has destroyed himself in his hesitation? There is no place safe for him to go. Wherever he goes, the specter of Joseph’s disappearance will haunt him. He has become a prisoner of his own mind. In fact, he must either lie or go to the place where Joseph is, that is, no place.
Sacks comments:
“He knew what was right, but lacked the resolve to do it boldly and decisively. In that hesitation, more was lost than Joseph. Lost also was Reuben’s chance to become the hero he might and should have been.”[1]
“None of us can read the story of our life—we can only live it. The result is that we live in and with uncertainty. Doubt can lead to delay until the moment is lost. In an instant of arrested intention, Reuben lost his chance to change history.”[2]
How many Reuben moments have we encountered? Those single slices of temporal opportunity to act and change destiny. But we did not. We hesitated. We excused ourselves. We procrastinated. We stepped away—for just a minute, but that lost minute caused an entire world to disappear. There is no getting it back, no time machine to do it over. Now we face the loss of a world and ask ourselves, “Where can we go?” The answer is intolerable. More avoidance follows.
Topical Index: ey-nenoo, is not, hesitation, Reuben, Genesis 37:29-30
