I’m a sucker for a happy ending. I once convinced my family to watch Shawshank Redemption arguing it was a “feel-good movie.” It’s now a running joke in our family, because Shawshank isn’t really a feel-good movie. It’s a lot of pain, tension, and suffering – with moments of humor and grace. But it has a happy ending – kind of the ultimate happy ending. And that’s what I remembered most.
The beginning of this week’s parasha hints at a happy ending:
וַיִּשְׁלַ֤ח פַּרְעֹה֙ וַיִּקְרָ֣א אֶת־יוֹסֵ֔ף
Joseph is freed from jail and elevated in Mitzrayim. But Miketz itself does not have a happy ending; in fact, it doesn’t have an ending at all. Two years ago, in the midst of the Israel-Hamas War, I gave a sermon on this parasha titled, “A Lament from the Messy Middle,” reminding us that The Empire Strikes Back is, definitively the best Star Wars movie because (in contradistinction to Shawshank) it presents the heart of an ongoing saga. Miketz insists on two paradoxical truths: First, that the messy, painful middle will end, that we won’t be
here forever. How? Because we know that next week Judah will stand up for his brother Benjamin, that Joseph will reveal himself, that the brothers, long estranged, will reconcile at last. And the second truth is that any ending of this chapter of our story is but a beginning of the next. Here’s a bit of what I said a couple years ago:
We meet our protagonist rotting in prison, until Pharaoh has unsettling dreams that no one can interpret… Pharaoh’s dreams and Joseph’s ability to interpret changes everything. He’s cleaned up, given a shave and a haircut and thrust before the king…. he is elevated to vizier and placed in charge of agricultural policy for all of Egypt. And that’s how he comes to encounter his brothers once more…. Joseph spends the remainder of the parasha toying with his brothers. And since this is the messy middle, the portion doesn’t offer resolution….
Our parasha, I said, ends similarly to “Empire” leaving us to wonder: has Joseph become the enemy of the story, adopting a Pharaoh’s malevolence? Has he succumbed to the dark side? Will the brothers repeat their sins, leaving Benjamin for dead and probably destroying their father Jacob for good? Will the old Judah show up, the one who suggested they sell Joseph, who called for his daughter-in-law’s execution? Or will there be a nechemta, a reproachment, a truce, a reckoning, a stable and lasting peace?
That was then, in December 2023, and I was very focused on that Shabbat (throughout that entire year really) on the trauma of Oct. 7, on the horror of rising antisemitism, on the suffering of our living hostages, on the seeming intractability of the War. Since then, some things have changed, some have not.
But though Israel’s plight continues to tug at my heart daily, though I was privileged to spend Chanukah this week at the Embassy in DC as Ran Gvili’s sister lit the chanukiah, today I come not to talk about Israel. I got thinking about happy endings this week for another reason: because of Rob Reiner. My God, folks, what is happening in this country?! In this world?! The beaches of Sydney, Australia, soaked with the blood of our people. Ten-year-old Matilda. 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Marika. Murders at Brown and MIT.
There’s more, and I don’t mean for one moment to minimize any of these, but I got thinking about Rob Reiner and happy endings because of the utterly tragic and so very unhappy end he and his wife Michele met this past week. To me, it was such a counterpoint to so many of Reiner’s own wonderful films. A Few Good Men, The American President, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…. The American President ends with Michael Douglas (nice Jewish boy) growing a conscience and getting the girl. The Princess Bride famously concludes with Peter Falk (another nice Jewish boy) describing the perfect final kiss between Wesley and Buttercup to his grandson played by Fred Savage (yet another nice Jewish boy). Misery ends with the author’s escape. Sally, of course, falls for Harry in the end. Even A Few Good Men has its own version of a happy ending with Jack Nicholson (possibly but probably not of any Jewish ancestry) getting his just desserts from Tom Cruise (definitely not a Jew).
But truth be told, as I began to reflect on the film legacy of Rob Reiner, I began to realize there’s a better way to think about the endings. Some are happy. Some are less so, like Stand by Me, based on the Stephen King story “The Body,” which ends with the group of boys encountering the horror of death for the first time. Yet, I’ve always loved the final line from that film: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Who delivered that line? Richard Dreyfuss. Yup, Jewish. And what I realize about the endings of great and memorable movies, Reiner’s and so many others, is that whether they’re happy, bitter-sweet, or incredibly sad. They’re satisfying. They feel right.
The next couple weeks of our Torah cycle finds our ancestors gathering in Egypt. Joseph’s story comes to an end, and his end is satisfying if not entirely happy. It’s the beginning, after all, of a terrible story of hundreds of years of slavery, of trauma, and suffering. But it’s the right ending because it sets us up for the theophany, the revelation at Sinai and the continuing and revelatory relationship between our people and God through engagement with our most cherished book. It’s satisfying because of the iterative redemption that comes with yetziat mitzrayim, our arrival to Eretz Yisrael, the thriving of Jewish life across the globe over millennia, the upbuilding of Medinat Yisrael in our ancestral homeland.
Torah and our Jewish interpretative tradition offer a constantly unfolding Jewish story. One of my favorite lines from Pirkei Avot (5:22) is Ben Bag Bag’s comment,
הֲפֹךְ בָּהּ וַהֲפֹךְ בָּהּ, דְּכֹלָּא בָהּ.
Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein.
וּבָהּ תֶּחֱזֵי, וְסִיב וּבְלֵה בָהּ, וּמִנַּהּ לֹא תָזוּעַ,
Look into it; And become gray and old therein; And do not move away from it,
שֶׁאֵין לְךָ מִדָּה טוֹבָה הֵימֶנָּה:
for you have no better portion than it.
The paradox of Torah is it is both circular and linear. We read this parasha last year and two years ago. Our people have read it over thousands of years. Our descendants will continue to do so. We literally roll Torah back to the beginning as we stand on the banks of the Jordan. We begin again and again and again, learning, growing, hopefully progressing in each subsequent generation through our encounter with those first generations of our people.
But our history within and beyond Torah, within and beyond Tana’kh is decidedly more linear. In fact we Jews more or less invented the concept of linear time, not only that our own people has an origin story and a destiny, but that history moves inexorably forward from a starting point toward some distant future, that unlike the Greek gods or those of the Sumerians and others before them, lords of the ever-turning Wheel of Time, our God is a God of history and of justice.
Thomas Cahill wrote about this in his 1998 book The Gifts of the Jews. “All evidence points to there having been, in the earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was profoundly cyclical. The assumptions that early man made about the world were, in all their essentials, little different from the assumptions that later and more sophisticated societies, like Greece and India, would make in a more elaborate manner….. Jews saw time differently,” says Cahill. “It isn’t an endless circle; it’s linear moving towards a triumphant destiny. And every generation – every person – is contributing to writing and shaping the story…. Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible, and an individual life can have value…. “The Jews, he says, “were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world.”
This is true. So yes, I’m a sucker for a happy ending, but too often, I think, we get suckered by happy endings. We focus so much on the conclusion we yearn to see, we forget that endings, themselves, are iterative and additive. There’s a quote I like often misattributed to John Lennon: “It will all by ok in the end. If it’s not, it’s not the end.” The line’s true source seems to be Fernando Sabino’s 1988 Brazilian Portuguese book The Checkerboard. My point though is that Parashat Miketz reminds us that to be a Jew is to contend with a world in which we are open to endings to come. Joseph’s satisfying ending becomes our people’s sojourn and then suffering. Our suffering gives way to salvation and revelation. Our wanderings bring us from the wilderness to the Promised Land. Our exiles from there in 586 BCE, in 70 CE are not permanent either. And our current struggles in the world and within Israel will yield new endings – may they be redemptive and restorative.
I’ll close with this. Recently, I had the opportunity to stay in a Best Western. It had been some time, and I was reminded of a wonderful song by the singer-songwriter Richard Shindell. This week, having rediscovered it, I found myself playing it on repeat. It’s the tale of a hapless trucker who flips to a Christian radio station in the middle of the night on I-80 East. While the preacher gives a fire and brimstone sermon, the truck driver struggles both with his ebbing faith and his own weariness at 4 am. Nevertheless, he offers a modest prayer: to make it safely to his destination – by way of the next motel, one leg on a continuing journey across a vast network of highways. I’ll sing you the middle verse and the chorus:
Did he who made the lamb
Put the tremble in the hand
That reaches out to take my quarter?
I look him in the eye
But there isn’t any time
Just time enough to pass the tender.
The highway takes its toll
The green light flashes go
And it’s welcome to Ohio.Whoever watches over all these truckers
Show a little mercy for a weary sinner
And deliver me, Lord, deliver me
Deliver me to the next Best Western
Joseph in jail might have sung something similar. Our ancestors in bondage too. And our people under the thumb of one repressive regime after another. Today, in the messy middle of Parashat Miketz, amidst the interlocking circular and linear journeys of our people, Jewish faith means we know that despite false starts, flat tires, or wrong turns, there will be rest and restoration for us weary travelers, a satisfying ending just over the horizon. Or just beyond the next bend in the road.
