Behind the Mask
Joseph is now the ruler of Egypt. The famine he predicted has come to pass. It extends beyond Egypt to the land of Canaan. Seeking to buy food, Joseph’s brothers make the journey to Egypt. They arrive at the palace of the man in charge of grain distribution:
Now Joseph was governor of all Egypt, and it was he who sold the corn to all the people of the land. Joseph’s brothers came and bowed to the ground before him. Joseph recognized his brothers as soon as he saw them, but he behaved like a stranger and spoke harshly to them…Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him. (42:6–8)
There is something familiar about this situation. Once more we are in the realm of disguises and mistaken identities which so define the early history of Jacob and his family.
Here we encounter what Robert Alter defines as a type-scene, a drama enacted several times with variations. These are particularly in evidence in the book of Genesis. There is no universal rule as to how to decode the significance of a type-scene. One example is boy-meets-girl-at-well, an encounter that takes places three times in the Torah: between Abraham’s servant and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and the daughters of Jethro. Here, the setting is probably not significant (wells are where strangers met in those days, like the water-dispenser in a New York office). Rather what we must attend to in these three episodes is their variations: Rebecca’s activism, Jacob’s show of strength, Moses’s passion for justice. How people act toward strangers at a well is, in other words, a test of their character.
In some instances, however, a type-scene seems to indicate a recurring theme. That is the case here. If we are to understand what is at stake in the meeting between Joseph and his brothers, we have to see it in the context of three other episodes, all of which occur in Genesis.
Scene one takes place in Isaac’s tent. The patriarch is old and blind. He tells his elder son to go out into the field, trap an animal and prepare a meal so that his “soul may bless him” (27:4). Surprisingly soon, Isaac hears someone enter. “Who are you?” he asks. “I am Esau, you firstborn,” the voice replies. Isaac is not convinced. “Come close and let me feel you, my son. Are you really Esau or not?” He reaches out and feels the rough texture of the skins covering his son’s arms. Still unsure, he asks again, “But are you really my son Esau?” The voice replies, “I am.” So Isaac blesses him: “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field blessed by God.” But it is not Esau. It is Jacob in disguise.
Scene two: Jacob has fled to his uncle Laban’s house. Arriving, he meets and falls in love with Rachel, and offers to work seven years for her father in order to marry her. The time passes quickly: the years “seemed like a few days because he loved her” (27:20). The wedding day approaches. Laban makes a feast. The bride enters her tent. Late at night, Jacob follows her. Now, at last, he has married his beloved Rachel. When morning comes, he discovers that he has been the victim of a deception. It is not Rachel. It is Leah in disguise.
Scene three: Judah has married a Canaanite woman and is now the father of three sons. The first marries a local girl, Tamar, but dies mysteriously young, leaving his wife a childless widow. Following a pre-Mosaic version of the law of levirate marriage, Judah marries his second son to Tamar so that she can have a child “to keep his brother’s name alive” (38:8). Onan is loathe to have a son who will, in effect, belong to his late brother so he “spilled his seed” (38:9), and for this he too dies young. Judah is reluctant to give Tamar his third son, so she is left an aguna, “chained,” bound to someone she is prevented from marrying, and unable to marry anyone else.
The years pass. Judah’s own wife dies. Returning home from sheep-shearing, he sees a veiled prostitute by the side of the road. He asks her to sleep with him, promising, by way of payment, a kid from the flock. She asks him for his “seal and its cord and his staff” (38:18) as security. The next day he sends a friend to deliver the kid, but the woman has disappeared. The locals deny all knowledge of her. Three months later, Judah hears that his daughter-in-law Tamar has become pregnant. He is incensed. Bound to his youngest son, she was not allowed to have a relationship with anyone else. She must be guilty of adultery. “Bring her out so that she may be burnt,” he says. She is brought to be killed, but she asks one favour. She tells one of the people to take to Judah the seal and cord and staff. “The father of my child,” she says, “is the man to whom these things belong.” Immediately, Judah understands. Tamar, unable to marry yet honour-bound to have a child to perpetuate the memory of her first husband, has tricked her father-in-law into performing the duty he should have allowed his youngest son to do. “She is more righteous than I,” Judah admits. He thought he had slept with a prostitute. But it was Tamar in disguise.
This is the framework within which the meeting between Joseph and his brothers must be understood. The man the brothers bow down to bears no resemblance to a Hebrew shepherd. He speaks Egyptian. He is dressed in an Egyptian ruler’s robes. He is called Tzafenat Pa’neaḥ, an Egyptian name. He wears Pharaoh’s signet ring and the gold chain of authority. They think they are in the presence of an Egyptian prince, but it is Joseph – their brother – in disguise.
Four scenes, four disguises, four failures to see behind the mask. What do they have in common? Something very striking indeed. It is only by not being recognized that Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph can be recognized, in the sense of attended, taken seriously, heeded. Isaac loves Esau, not Jacob. Jacob loves Rachel, not Leah. Judah thinks of his youngest son, not the plight of Tamar. Joseph is hated by his brothers. Only when they appear as something or someone other than they are, can they achieve what they seek – for Jacob, his father’s blessing; for Leah, a husband; for Tamar, a son; for Joseph, the non-hostile attention of his brothers. The plight of these four individuals is summed up in a single poignant phrase: “Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him.”
Do the disguises work? In the short term, yes; but in the long term, not necessarily. Jacob suffers greatly for having taken Esau’s blessing. Leah, though she marries Jacob, never wins his love. Tamar had a child (in fact, wins) but Judah “was not intimate with her any more.”1.To be sure, there is one view in the Talmud (Sotah 10b) that holds that Judah was intimate with her again, in effect taking her as his wife, under the laws of aguna as then practiced (and reading the phrase velo yasaf to mean not “and did not do so again” but “and did not cease to do so.”) However this is a distinctly minority interpretation.
As for Joseph – his brothers no longer hate him, but now they fear him. Even after his assurances that he bears them no grudge, they still think he will take revenge on them after their father dies. What is achieved in disguise is never the love sought.
But something else happens. Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph discover that, though they may never win the affection of those from whom they seek it, God is with them. That, ultimately, is enough. A disguise is an act of hiding – from others, and perhaps from oneself. From God, however, we cannot, nor do we need to, hide. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (i Samuel 16:7). He knows our thoughts, hears our cry, answers our unspoken prayer. He heeds the unheeded and brings them comfort.
This is a matter of immense consequence when we compare Jewish and (Hellenistic) European thought. Strikingly, biblical Hebrew lacks a term with the precise range of meanings and resonances as the word “person.” The Hebrew words adam, ben-adam, ish and enosh roughly translate as “human being, mortal, man, member of the species Homo sapiens.” Often the precise meaning is given by context. There is however no exact equivalent of “person,” with its senses of having a certain status within society, a bearer of legal rights (so that a rightless individual can be called a non-person), a body (“weapons concealed on his person”) and so on. So, for example, the phrase “a personal God,” which in English is a description of the God of Abraham, is almost impossible to translate into Hebrew without changing the meaning entirely.
The reason, as I mentioned in the essay, “A new Kind of Hero” (above, pp. 73–75), is that the word “person” entered English via the Latin “persona,” meaning “a mask.” It originally signalled the part played by an actor on the stage, in a culture – Hellenism – in which the theatre played a central part in the portrayal of the human condition. It then became a role played by the individual within society, because of the metaphor of society-as-theatre. It was then generalized to mean any individual within society. But it still bears traces of its theatrical origins (“He was one person at work, another at home”). We speak, in English, of the roles we occupy, the “games people play,” the masks we wear (Jews wear masks only on Purim, as a parody of the non-Jewish phenomenon of courtly society, its dances and deceptions). It therefore becomes deeply problematic in Western philosophy, especially in Existentialism, as to what remains of “the self” once all the social roles have been subtracted.
Biblical Hebrew has no word for “person” precisely because it rejects the metaphors of society-as-theatre and self-as-part-played-upon-the-stage. This is no mere rejection: it goes to the very heart of Genesis’s conception of the individual and the human condition. We are not the masks we wear; we are the individuals whose innermost thoughts are known to God. We are what lies behind the mask. That is one reason why the Torah systematically devalues sight in favour of sound, the voice and listening. We are not what others perceive us to be; we are what God knows us to be. The drama of the self is not played out on the stage of society; it is transacted in the inner dialogue between the individual and God.
Hence the centrality of these four narratives – of Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph – in Genesis, the book of first principles. It is as if “appearances” – identities as the masks we wear – stand to genuine relationship as idolatry does to worship of the living God. Genesis has surprisingly little to say about idolatry (we only encounter it en passant, for example, when Rachel steals Laban’s terafim) but a great deal to say about human interaction. It is as if it were preparing us for the larger biblical theme, the battle against idolatry, by signalling what is at stake in human terms. Just as idolatry involves worshipping an image of God instead of God Himself, so inauthentic human relationships involve mistaking someone’s appearance for what they truly are, mistaking the mask for the self.
In the aftermath of the disguises of Jacob, Leah, Tamar and Joseph, there is no healing of relationship but there is a mending of identity. That is what makes them not secular narratives but deeply religious chronicles of psychological growth and maturation. What they tell us is simple and profound: those who stand before God need no mask, no disguise to achieve self-worth when standing before humankind.