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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Shechem: Re-Examining the Sale of Joseph
At first, the story of Joseph and his Brothers seems like the perfect Biblical bedtime story, complete with sheep, dreams and multi-colored coats. But that impression dissipates quickly. Before you know it, Joseph, favored son of Jacob, is ambushed by his brothers, stripped of his special coat-of-many-colors, and unceremoniously thrown into a pit and sold as a slave. The brothers, smear blood over Joseph’s coat and present it to their father – implying, but never quite actually saying, that somewhere in the desert, Joseph must have met a terrible, violent end. For decades, the brothers keep silent, as Jacob perpetually mourns the loss of his beloved son.
What were they thinking, these brothers who tossed Joseph into the pit? What was Jacob thinking, who, as it turns out, was the one who sent Joseph to check on the brothers – just after becoming aware of the roiling tensions in his family? And, as he was being carted off to Egypt -- and for decades thereafter – what was Joseph thinking? How did he make sense of what happened to him? In this seminar, Rabbi Fohrman ponders these questions and others, as he sifts through the original Biblical text in search of hidden layers of meaning. What emerges in the end is a profound, new reading of perhaps the most shocking crime in the Bible – the Sale of Joseph.
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