Thread by @rabbisacks

Here is an idea from my essay on #Vayishlach, "The Future of the Past": 🇬🇧 bit.ly/37nxEXy / 🇮🇱 bit.ly/2MFg1L1 / 🇪🇸 bit.ly/2u3Agvf / 🇫🇷 bit.ly/2tii7cY / Family Edition bit.ly/2F6cj94 / Listen spoti.fi/33Npq9s. #ShabbatShalom

In our parsha, Joseph does something unusual. Revealing himself to his brothers, fully aware that they will suffer shock and then guilt as they remember how it is that their brother is in Egypt, he reinterprets the past.

Previously, it was a story of kidnap and injustice. Now, it has become a story of Divine providence and redemption. It wasn’t you, he tells his brothers, it was God. You didn’t realise that you were part of a larger plan.

And though it began badly, it has ended well. So don’t hold yourselves guilty. And do not be afraid of any desire for revenge on my part. There is no such desire. I realise that we were all being directed by a force greater than ourselves, greater than we can fully understand.

Joseph is helping his brothers to revise their memory of the past. In doing so, he is challenging one of our most fundamental assumptions about time, namely its asymmetry. We can change the future. We cannot change the past.

But is that entirely true? What Joseph is doing for his brothers is what he has clearly done for himself: events have changed his and their understanding of the past.

Which means: we cannot fully understand what is happening to us now until we can look back in retrospect and see how it all turned out. This means that we are not held captive by the past.

Things can happen to us, not as dramatically as to Joseph perhaps, but nonetheless benign, that can completely alter the way we look back and remember. By action in the future, we can redeem the past.