Alienation
But Joseph had recognized his brothers, although they did not recognize him. Genesis 42:8 NASB
Recognized– Moshe Luzzatto points out self-awareness is a function of our interaction with others. We, in fact, owe others for our very existence as psychological selves. According to Luzzatto, this is an infinite debt. After all, it constitutes what we know as life for us. To repay it, we must act with constant compassion and love toward others. But the stories of the patriarchs and their children often expose us to the failure to honor this debt. That is instructive, if we pay attention.
If you’ve read the story of Joseph, you probably had some disturbing questions. For example, “Why does Joseph put his brothers through such anxiety by hiding a divining cup in Benjamin’s sack of grain?” Or this, asked by Rashi, “Why doesn’t Joseph ever make inquires about his father and brothers in Canaan?” Perhaps you’ve thought of this question, “If Joseph recognizes his brothers, why does he hide himself from them?” Avivah Zornberg provides an answer; perhaps not the answer we wanted to hear. It involves the Hebrew verb nākar (to recognize, acknowledge, discern, respect).
“This reflexive verb suggests a more-than-tactical move of self-disguise on Joseph’s part. Within himself, he becomes alien to himself. It is striking that the Hebrew word for ‘self-estrangement’ (va-yitnaker) shares the same root as the word for ‘recognition’ (va-yaker). As Rashi points out, the brothers had not ‘recognized’ him in the pit, had had no compassion for him. The result is that he cannot know himself, cannot relate to his past in compassion for himself. Only through a radical act of self-cauterization can he proceed to a limited experience of memory:”[1]
Joseph is not playing a game with his brothers, as we are apt to interpret the text. In fact, Joseph is reacting to a deep-seated trauma that psychologically prohibits him from revealing himself, because this trauma makes it impossible for him to know himself. Luzzatto is right. Our self-awareness, our identity as persons, depends on others and when others act in ways that annihilate our self-awareness, we survive the trauma by cauterization.
“For Joseph has experienced a primal scene of horror that has, effectively, annihilated him as witness to his own experience. Testimony has become, in a real sense, impossible; where there is no imaginable ‘Thou’ to whom to tell the story, one cannot say ‘Thou’ even to oneself. God Himself falls mute, turns His face aside.”[2]
The trauma of Isaac is reproduced in the life of Isaac’s grandson, Joseph. Isaac’s father, the great patriarch Abraham, fails to “recognize” his son at the Akedah. Isaac’s world is shattered when he sees that his father is willing to kill him to honor a fickle god. Isaac spends the rest of his life fleeing from this event. And as we have discovered, Jacob is not immune to the trauma of the Akedah either. Now we find that the traumatic disruption to self-identity is carried forward to the grandson. As Zornberg comments:
“Ultimately, Joseph’s history raises the question, ‘What does it mean to survive?’ If he has, in some essential way, missed the experience of his own death and survival, how is he to return to life and to language?”[3]
These are not comfortable questions. They raise the specter of generational trauma, passed from father to son to grandson. In fact, the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob remains unresolved until the image of “father” is reestablished. Perhaps that’s our legacy as well. Somewhere in the great human drama of our lives, we became disconnected from ourselves. We lost the love and concern of the father, and as a result, we continue to deal with trauma in the most subtle of ways. Perhaps the story of the patriarchs is a narrated attempt to show us that there is a way to reconnect. At any rate, the story forces us to deal with things we have kept hidden.
Topical Index: nākar, to recognize, self-identity, trauma, Joseph, Genesis 42:8
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. 303.
Skip, you wrote: “Our self-awareness, our identity as persons, depends on others and when others act in ways that annihilate our self-awareness, we survive the trauma by cauterization.”
As a child my soul was terrorized, brutalized and apparently cauterized. But to open those wounds in order to heal sounds not only horrific and harrowing, but hellish and hopeless.
All too common in the stories of our lives, Michael. Salvation is safety, delivery, wholeness, even victory…all found in the one person upon whom we can and must depend…yeshua. Baruch attah.
Alienation. February 6, 2019.
Why we are the way we are is much more complicated
than anyone can imagine. Physically altered. On top of that, confusion is our enemy. Brainwashed ideas and lies affecting us from birth on. Then we have life experiences while not knowing what is the root of the problem and how decisions made by others for us affected us. Then we affect others not knowing what’s wrong with us and around and around it goes. And there are people who could care less about how they affect others for the same reasons. Life is hard!
I looked up Frederick Buechner after you mentioned him Michael in one of the TW’s and I really got a melancholy vibe from him so I looked to see if he was or had been dealing with depression. His father’s suicide at such a young age and his mother being the greatest mother on earth at times and then a monster at other times must have been harder than hard. One thing that I thought was interesting was from ‘Telling Secrets’ which seemed to also fit with what Brett was talking about in this TW post which is why I am mentioning him. It was on Mr. Buechner’s fb page on November 8, 2018. ‘I do not believe that such groups as Alcoholics Anonymous are perfect any more than anything human is perfect, but I believe what goes on in them is far closer to what Christ meant His church to be and what it originally was, than much of what goes on in most churches today.’ I agree.
Sadly to say so many people in the Christian world or any religious world that is dominated by inherited lies is really screwed up in their thinking. It’s only part of the problem but it definitely makes it worse like expecting spouses to stay in abusive marriages. Christians overall definitely have a hard time with anything like Guardian Angel, divorce, the Trinity, the Sabbath, the law, Ha Satan etc. Seems like it’s very easy for people to act religious which has always been a big turn off for me not being raised Protestant but Catholic because of my mother’s Polish background. Hard to be around people like that! Not reality.
Thankfully we can say we were wrong and are sorry (not everyone can) but some mistakes just can’t be reversed. A lifetime of grief and regret for most of us. Someday it will be different but maybe not in our lifetime. Just need to keep learning and sharing the truth and trying to make the world a little better by doing what we are able to do even if it just means not being silent on issues.
Jeanette, thanks for the Beuchner refresher. I shared his AA reference here a long time ago with Laurita in mind, as I recall she contibutes much of her healing, wisdom and victory from her participation in Al-Anon. I have read several of Beuchner’s books (and will read more) and he doesn’t try to hide that he was greatly traumatised in his childhood and suffered from bouts of depression all his life as a result. Maybe that is why his work so resonates with me, that plus, he writes with a simple elegance, passion and humor. A stranger once told him after he gave his personal testimony:
“You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it.”
I agree and I respect him for the same reason. I hope to get to that place of being a ‘good steward of my pain’ someday rather than being as he says like “the one-talent man… somebody who buried the richest treasure he had, not just pain, but the most alive part of himself, buried it in the ground. He was never able to become who he might have been. I think the outer darkness the Master casts him into is not to be thought of so much as a punishment, as it is to be thought of as the inevitable consequence of what it means to bury your life. If you bury your life, you don’t leave your life. You don’t meet other people who are alive. You are alone; you are in the dark.” Beuchner is my shovel, Skip is my spade.
Too many nails on the head for me; this commonality of the human experience observation you are making, Skip.
I have wondered sometimes why we even think we can hide from each other; we humans with the same wiring: where does the ability to live that fiction come from? Apparently, it comes from the fact that, to the extent we are wounded/fractured from our elemental identity with ourselves, we ARE ‘hiding’, whether we like it or not: hiding to the extent that we do not know ourselves.
I think the most elemental knowing: the basis for all other knowing: is the design that we were created to share with our Designer: our heavenly Father/Source, as a child/derivative. Because we were designed to ‘learn’ love: because love was not hardwired in us – even if the design FOR love was (which I have decided must be the basis for our hardwired do-as-we-are-done-by, anyway), then we are screwed – fleshly speaking, anyway – if what was done by us was not true love. At that beginning point – the learning-love point – we imprint like little birds. The first thing to come along and stuff something in our mouths – even if that something was abuse, neglect or abandonment – we still take it to be love, for that is our design. So we ‘become’ that identity; that way we were treated. By design. Because we needed it to be love. (Just so you know, I hated God for a long time because of that design, y’all.)
If our earthly father/countenance was not turned toward us: did not reflect to us “I love you: I am proud of you: I am happy you were born”, we, in a very real sense, do not – cannot – at least starting out, anyway – know ourselves. But, that’s over 95% of us! Guaranteed! The result of this cradle-switch is that the baby we end up holding, that we CALL love, is not love, but, like love, it still has the power to make us afraid of everything it imprinted us to be afraid of.
Made in this new, unholy image, we run from true love as from a monster. We hide in spiritual, mental and physical closets of false religions, modalities and life habits that promise oblivion – fracture from what we believe will hurt or even kill us, but, most of all, SHAME us by revealing our horrible identity – a bush to momentarily, at least, die in a little, in the dark, because the light looks like death to those of us made in the image – the very identity – of that death/fracture. This is not some of us: all of us start out on this continuum, I am convinced, because none of us start out without baggage.
The Father/identity issue is real for all of us, for that is our design that has been hijacked by an enemy. Now we all cast around for substitutes for the identity we must have, but to the extent we have imprinted on lies, we cannot discern them. To that extent, we put something/someone else in the Father place and kneel to receive the blessing. I, too, chose to put my grandfather in the place of blessing, because I was getting none from his son. I, too, need to start over with the father thing. Completely over. I am tired of following lying sin around like a duck, all the while running from who I really am: the image of the great I Am. Scary as it is, the reality of trying to identify with an identity that is not my heavenly Father is even scarier. Time to face some more fear!
Thanks so much for these words. Laurita. I have been reflecting more and more on how a parent may see things in the child that they don’t like about themselves. Those parts of themselves that their parents made them feel shame about. Or it could be from their own sense of wanting to be different. So in a sense it is not intentional that a parent may not be able to love their child. As you mentioned, it is a form of imprinting. I heard many times as a child that I was sensitive. This is something that is not just handed down through our family but it is also cultural. What I believe now is that all of us are all sensitive. Some are just better at hiding it as they were told and taught to do. But that is the wrong message and it is very much a shame message. So that stuff gets imprinted as well. Or as someone mentioned about men having feminine characteristics that they are shamed for and not accepted. Or people calling other people wallflowers. Introverted people are shamed a lot in our society. Or even in marriage as I talked about yesterday. I am really surprised there are any marriages out there that are authentic. Because all of us were taught to be inauthentic. We don’t let someone know when they hurt us. We don’t tell someone those things we struggle with. It really all comes back to vulnerability. And now I realize that my parents and my grandparents concerns were really about love and protection. They didn’t want me to be hurt. They were trying to prepare me for the cold, cruel world like they were taught. But it is the wrong message. We have to change this message through our words and our actions. This was a great daily word. It makes us realize how powerful and pervasive this dysfunctional stuff is.
I have been thinking very hard lately on the aspect of believers, there is a split. Those who have Victory and those who do not. Is it due to this very aspect. Not identifying with your hold you and the change of becoming a new creation in Christ. Thoughts please.
I looked for the ‘two sides’ folks were ‘on’ for years. Then I read Solzhenitsyn who says he looked, too, until he realized that the split was right down the inside of everyone. He said sometimes the line between light and dark was more on one side, then the other, but it was when he realized that that he could quit hating and blaming the people who put him in the Gulag and kept him there. That was the day he saw that there was no real difference between himself and them. He had a line, too. That truth became the basis for my forgiveness too, as well as the first real ability for me to identify with those around me. We are all on Gilligan’s Island together. Things got real simple after that.
I am not that good of a writer as our Laurita, but Brother Brett,I am having trouble understanding what is it exactly that you’d like opinions about. Not all of us share the same religious philosophies, though. Does that make one a ‘non-believer’? I don’t like putting people in boxes and I don’t put people in them either. One can “have victory” and still struggle with depression and PTSD and so on. Is that what you were asking?
Lesli, I do apologize for the way that you interpreted that oh, but I am the one stuck. It seems in the non Victorious lifestyle. I do consider myself a believer in Yeshua yet it is always the downside of things. Always about war, and fighting the good fight. Reaching those who are like me. Just a step over the line and no further. Some say I’m quite the evangelist.. and a calling to be be a missionary in my life.. I really try not to be judgmental. But so many Believers are. That’s why I left the congregation that I was in. Off the backbiting and arguing. It said if you look for the perfect Church leave it alone, because you’ll ruin it. I really like that. The famous j i Packer wrote a book called knowing. God it runs off the context of another writer Mark Twain people walking in the woods. It’s the context. Each one sees things differently. Foundational to Christianity. By the way I was a leader in the congregation I left. The other leaders were upset. Because I let a lot of people do that congregation. And what’s good in bonding people together. It is all about togetherness in unity. No one is perfect not even the believer. That’s why we are called to be holy as he is Holy and let the joy of the Lord be our strength. I usually don’t write such a long comment., along with it being a day old just clarifying some things in my current status. Hope it was helpful for someone
It helped me understand you better, Brett, and blessed me, too. You are a blessing here, for sure.
BB…. my brother. Thank you…we are seeing the same sadness and struggle. I agree with Laurita – you are a blessing here (and on this Earth).
Hmmmm. This one. I’m not sure about who is ‘right’ but the example sure is compelling. It makes me sad (huge Empath here) to think that the humans in this narrative are seemingly the exact same as us and that humanity has always been and here it is for our example. As if the story HAD to be for us to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ and ‘relate’ to us TODAY…… in THIS time.
So, are we taking the story apart, bit-by-bit or uncovering deeper insight and revealing an almost ‘nakedness’?
I feel like I project words and feelings that I have onto these characters in order that I may make sense of it and it doesn’t so that I why I don’t understand myself. Clearly, I relate regarding the father issues (Laurita, excellent imagery and content) and that makes me feel ‘better’ {knowing that I am not the only one who is a major f-up}. Self-flagellation is all I know. Creeps me out about myself and further pushes me away from trying.
This story does a whole lot more than forcing me to deal with things I have kept hidden…. it creates yet ANOTHER doorway to yet ANOTHER cluttered hoarding situation I seem to have in myself. This must be the week of vulnerability. I am cringing about hitting the post comment button because it REVEALS…. oy.
Lesli….Oh how I can relate! Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being vulnerable. It’s the only way for us to be healed. Little by little we come out of the darkness, find a little more light and then seemingly retreat to the dark again. Little by little and always covered by the love and kindness of God. It’s interesting how we can read the stories of peoples lives and not have a sense of what they went through, it’s almost like we take their soul away. Stories like Isaac being strapped to the altar and Joseph being tossed in a pit as a young kid by his brothers who were supposed to be his protectors. Thanks Skip, for bringing the soul back!
I have experienced the kind of trauma that Joseph experienced. This violent trauma that rips your world apart. In my life experience, my trauma and fracture of self-identity started for me when I was a child. And it was a more subtle form of trauma. As I reached my teenage years and began to search for my sense of identity, I tried to emulate those I admired. I think it was at this point I began to disconnect from myself. I truly reached a point where I felt total alienation from others but primarily from myself. I had no idea who I was. I really love this word today. The themes of disconnection and reconnection. The generational dysfunction that we are still dealing with today. Very profound.
And what I know today is that YHVH has given me my true identity. I don’t fully possess it at this point. I think this is what restoration means. Perhaps on an individual level. 🙂
Generations & generations of trauma into the present day of my own life . I wish I could get a glimpse of breakthrough & victory , like my Abba Father sees ..
I always thought of Joseph as a fictional character because of the “games” he was playing. Now he is a real person and I can identify with him.