Yosef's Window
On Veyashev and Rabbi Soloveitchik's identification with the Biblical Yosef
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After Yosef is sold into slavery by his brothers, he winds up in the house of Potifar. Every day Potifar’s wife incessantly tries to seduce Yosef. Finally, one day they are alone in the house. Yosef literally has to run away from Potifar’s house in order to avoid her.
What prevented Yosef from succumbing to her advances?
Rashi famously cites the moving imagery from the Talmud (Sotah 36b):
“And she caught him by his garment, saying: Lie with me” (Genesis 39:12). At that moment his father’s image [deyokeno] came and appeared to him in the window. The image said to him: Joseph, the names of your brothers are destined to be written on the stones of the ephod, and you are to be included among them. Do you desire your name to be erased from among them, and to be called an associate [ro’eh] of promiscuous women? As it is written: “But he who keeps company with harlots wastes his riches” (Proverbs 29:3), as he loses his honor, which is more valuable than wealth.
Yosef saw the image of his father through a window, which gave him the strength to avoid Potifar’s wife.
Strangely, Tosafos (ibid.) gets caught up with a seemingly inconsequential detail. How do we know, Tosafos asks, that his father’s image appears specifically through a window?
Why is Tosafos so preoccupied with the fact that the image appeared through a window? Isn’t this just narrative flair? Why is the detail that Yaakov appeared through a window so significant to the story?
To understand this, let’s explore the life and thought of Rabbi Yosef Dov Ber Soloveitchik—or, more classically: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik long identified with the biblical personality of Yosef. Beyond their shared name Yosef, Rabbi Soloveitchik couched his move towards the Religious Zionism of Mizrahi within the paradigm of Yosef. As he explains in his Chamesh Derashot (Five Addresses), Rabbi Soloveitchik, like the Biblical Yosef, departed from his brothers.
Rabbi Soloveitchik was raised in an Agudist home, his grandfather Rav Chaim Soloveitchik was not a Zionist. Still, Zionism was not entirely foreign to the family either. His great-great-uncle, Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan was an early leader of Mizrahi and his father Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik taught in a Mizrahi affiliated school in Warsaw.
There, the young Rabbi Soloveitchik had his first experience with communal isolation. As Rabbi Dr. Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff explains in his article on Rabbi Soloveitchik’s gradual move to Religious Zionism:
The Rav saw how his father was mocked and rejected by his family due to his association with a Mizrachi institution. Furthermore, the Rav saw his father suffering within the school, as his conservative views differed from the more radical and modern approach of certain members of the faculty. The intense sensation of pain a child feels when he sees his father unhappy runs deep, and the Rav’s childhood experiences of watching his father suffer firmly established a negative association with Mizrachi organizations.
Rabbi Soloveitchik remained firmly within the Agudist world, holding off any full embrace of Zionism within his religious life. In 1940, Agudath Israel asked him to deliver a eulogy for their recently departed leader Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzenski. As his grandson, Rabbi Mayer Twersky, recounts, he was asked to give the eulogy because of his breadth and creativity:
In 1926, Rabbi Soloveitchik spent a few years studying at the University of Berlin, where he picked up much of the philosophic language that appears in his later English publications. Throughout his time in Berlin, he corresponded with his father in Torah learning, later published in his collected letters under the title Iggros HaGri”d.
Ultimately, his deliberate move into the world of Religious Zionism was concretized and articulated in his 1956 address, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” and a few years later, in a series of addresses to HaPoel HaMizrachi, later published as Chamesh Derashot.
In his 1962 address, “And Joseph Dreamt a Dream,” Rabbi Soloveitchik most explicitly couched his decision to leave Agudah and join Mizrachi within the personality of Yosef.
As Dr. Deena Rabinovith explains in her detailed essay, “The Five Derashot and the Rav’s Engagement with the Zionist Project,” Yosef’s fight with his brothers was about how to react to the changing landscape of the world. Yosef advocated that it was time for the family to evolve and embrace new circumstances and changing economies, while his brothers did not want to abandon the purity and holiness of their lives that they had built in Canaan.
Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik felt that his rabbinic colleagues, even his own family, were making a similar mistake by not embracing Religious Zionism. Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, now fully inhabiting the role of the Biblical Yosef, writes:
…unconsciously sensed that it was forbidden to rely on a continuation of the status quo, that great changes were about to occur in Jewish life for which we would have to be prepared. He sensed the advent of an era when there would be no yeshivot in Brisk, Vilna, and Minsk; when America would be turned into a place of Torah; and when Israel, the State of Israel, would become the core center of Torah.
Rabbi Soloveitchik knew that his break from his brothers, so to speak, would come at a cost. And even then, he is frank that he is not yet ready to cast away the entirety of his ideological lot. As Rabbi Soloveitchik explains:
I built an altar upon which I sacrificed sleepless nights, doubts and reservations … The Mizrahi must understand that Jews like me … who joined the movement and who draw their nourishment from the ancient Talmudic soil of Abaye and Rava, are in the category of Joseph. They are required to sacrifice on this altar their peace of mind as well as their social relationships and friendships. The Mizrahi must also understand that we do not use the phrase “Zionism plus religious” or “religious Zionism.” For us, there is only one unique noun—Torah. Israel is holy and dear because the Torah sanctified it and because the Torah’s future is tied to it.
This rupture from his familial tradition had enduring costs—most notably Rabbi Soloveitchik’s standing among the yeshiva world. Of course, there were other reasons for this distancing—a topic for a different time—but this divergence created a particularly invective wedge between Rabbi Soloveitchik and his Brisker cousins in Israel.
As many have noted, Rabbi Soloveitchik identified with the biblical character Yosef. Normally, this is associated with Rabbi Soloveitchik’s classic approach to religious Zionism couched in the story of Yosef’s dreams. But there is actually an earlier work that much more subtly evokes his personality. If you don’t read carefully you might miss it.
In 1983 Rabbi Soloveitchik published Halakhic Man, an English translation of an earlier Hebrew work first published in 1944. Professor Lawrence Kaplan, who translated the work, published a special edition for the 40th anniversary of its publication.
The epigraph to Halakhic Man reads as follows:
At that moment the image of his father came to him and appeared before him in the window (Sotah 36b).
It is a curious opening to a work that otherwise deals with the inner worldview of someone who lives within the Halakhic system. Why does he invoke this story of Yosef and the wife of Potifar?
Many, such as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, understand this line as referring to the temptation of Western philosophy during Rabbi Soloveitchik’s time in Berlin and how the legacy of his father anchored him to the world of Torah. As Rabbi Sacks writes:
There can be no doubt as to Rav Soloveitchik’s meaning. He is reassuring the spirit of his father who had recently died that he would not be seduced by the ‘strange woman’ of Western philosophy. Yet the quotation suggests the doubt and tension he felt.
Professor David Shatz takes issue with the connection drawn between Western philosophy and the wife of Potifar. Instead, he emphasizes that what can be definitely drawn from Rabbi Soloveitchik’s choice to have this passage as the introduction to his work is the role his father played as the actual “Halakhic Man”. “The critical point about the passage which Rabbi Soloveitchik cites,” explains Shatz, “is the substance of what is occurring in the passage. Ish ha-Halakhah is a demut deyokno shel aviv, a portrait of the image of his father.”
As Professor Kaplan concludes his introduction to the new edition of Halakhic Man:
Soloveitchik prefaces Halakhic Man with the Talmudic statement, “At that moment the image of his father came to him and appeared before him in the window” (Sotah 36b). Indeed, Soloveitchik once remarked to me that he wrote Halakhic Man with the images of his father (who died in 1941, three years before the essay’s publication) and grandfather constantly before his inner eye. And yet I dare say that the luster of Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik’s first great essay, his first major philosophical statement, a luster that has not diminished since it first appeared in Hebrew in 1944 and in English translation in 1983, ultimately derives from fact that in the essay we see reflected not only the faces of his father and grandfather, but the face, the image, the personality, and the creative spirit of Rabbi Soloveitchik himself.
When the chaos of life emerged, both Yosef and Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, found solace through the image in the window.
Temptations shrink our world.
When the outside world beckons, all you can see sometimes is the moment, the temptation, the opportunity in front of you.
This is why, Rabbi Moshe Einstadter explains in his work Yesodos, the window was so crucial to Yosef’s story. The temptations of Potifar’s wife shrunk his world. All he could see was the woman in front of him.
A window, however, opens up the most important possibility: the future.
As Rabbi Einstadter writes:
A room is a closed and limited environment. The four walls that surround me are the extent of my present world. This is what I see, and this is where I live. The larger world without does not exist for me it does not determine my thoughts or my actions.
But a window is an aperture that opens up the limited enclosure. Through it I may perceive an enormous breadth and an unlimited horizon. This great world now becomes my world; I live in it and not in the confines of my little room. This magnificent vision liberates me from the confinement of my own smallness. I breathe in the pure air and I feel the blood coursing through my veins. I peer into the distance and it seems to me that I can see further than I have ever seen before. And there I behold a vision of unequalled splendor, my אבן האפוד (stone on breastplate). It is more real to me than my present surrounds, and it takes entire possession of me. What would I not give in order to possess it! I feel that the meaning of my life is inextricably bound up with the object of this vision. I vow not to rest until I have gained possession of it.
Yosef needed a window. It was only through a window that he could see beyond the confines of Potifar’s home and be reminded of the legacy of his father Yaakov. It was through the window that Yosef could see his own future.
Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned
The Rav Speaks: Five Addresses on Israel, History, and the Jewish People, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
The Religious Zionism of Rav Soloveitchik: A Synthesis of Worlds, Rabbi Dr. Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff
A Glimpse of the Rav, Rabbi Mayer Twersky
The Five Derashot and the Rav’s Engagement with the Zionist Project, Dr. Deena Rabinovich
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Early Zionism, Rabbi Dr. Seth Farber
A Haredi Attack on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik: A Battle over the Brisker Legacy from 1984, Rabbi Pini Dunner and Professor David Myers
A Framework for Reading Ish ha-Halakhah, Professor David Shatz
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