Forgetfulness and Fruitfulness
The drama of younger and older brothers, which haunts the book of Genesis from Cain and Abel onwards, reaches a strange climax in the story of Joseph’s children. Jacob/Israel is nearing the end of his life. In the only scene involving grandparents and grandchildren in the entire book, Joseph visits him, bringing with him his two sons, Menasheh and Ephraim. Jacob asks Joseph to bring them near so that he can bless them. The Torah describes what follows next in painstaking detail:
Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand toward Israel’s left, and Menasheh in his left hand towards Israel’s right, and brought them near him. But Israel reached out his right hand and put it on Ephraim’s head, though he was the younger, and crossing his arms, he put his left hand on Menasheh’s head, even though Menasheh was the firstborn…. When Joseph saw his father placing his right hand on Ephraim’s head it displeased him; so he took hold of his father’s hand to move it from Ephraim’s head to Menasheh’s head. Joseph said to him, “No, my father, this one is the firstborn; put your right hand on his head.” But his father refused and said, “I know, my son, I know. He too will become a people, and he too will become great. Nevertheless, his younger brother will be greater than he, and his descendants will become a group of nations.” He blessed them that day, saying: “In your name will Israel pronounce this blessing: ‘May God make you like Ephraim and Menasheh.’” So he put Ephraim ahead of Menasheh. (48:13–14, 17–20)
It is not difficult to understand the care Joseph took to ensure that Jacob would bless the firstborn first. Three times throughout his life, his father had set the younger before the elder, and each time it had resulted in tragedy. Jacob, the younger, had sought to supplant his elder brother Esau. In choosing a wife, he had favoured the younger sister Rachel over Leah. And he favoured the youngest of his children, Joseph and Benjamin, over the elder Reuben, Shimon and Levi. The consequences were catastrophic: estrangement from Esau, tension between the two sisters, and hostility among his sons. Joseph himself bore the scars: thrown into a well by his brothers, who initially planned to kill him and eventually sold him into Egypt as a slave. Had his father not learned? Or did he think that Ephraim – whom Joseph held in his right hand – was the elder? Did Jacob know what he was doing? Did he not realise that he was risking extending the family feuds into the next generation?
Why, in any case, did Jacob favour Ephraim over Menasheh? He had not seen his two grandchildren before. He knew nothing about them. None of the factors that led to the earlier episodes were operative here.
We cannot be sure of the explanation. Here, as so often in the Torah, the narrative is undetermined, leaving it to us, the reader, to flesh out the details. In the rabbis’ wonderful phrase: “the text itself cries out: Expound me!”1.Solomon Buber, comp., Tanḥuma, Vayeshev 13; see Rashi to Bereshit 1:1; 37:20.
In this case, we know that Jacob knew only this about his grandsons: their names, Menasheh and Ephraim. This was enough to persuade him to bless Ephraim before Menasheh. For encoded in Joseph’s sons’ names is the story of his years of exile away from Jacob. When Joseph finally emerged from prison to become chief minister of Egypt, he married and had two sons:
Before the years of the famine came, two sons were born to Joseph by Asenat, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On. Joseph named his firstborn Menasheh, saying, “God has made me forget [nasheh] all my trouble and all my father’s household.” The second son he named Ephraim, saying, “For God has made me fruitful [fara] in the land of my affliction.” (41:50–52)
With the utmost brevity the Torah intimates an experience of exile that was to be repeated many times across the centuries. At first, Joseph felt relief. The years as a slave, then a prisoner, were over. He had risen to greatness. In Canaan, he had been the youngest of eleven brothers in a nomadic family of shepherds. Now, in Egypt, he was at the centre of the greatest civilization of the ancient world, second only to Pharaoh in rank and power. No one reminded him of his background. With his royal robes and ring and chariot, he was an Egyptian prince (as Moses was later to be). The past was a bitter memory he sought to remove from his mind. Menasheh means “forgetting.”
But as time passed, Joseph began to feel quite different emotions. Yes, he had arrived; he had achieved the power and greatness of which he had dreamed in his youth. But this people was not his; nor was its culture. To be sure, his family was, by any worldly terms, undistinguished, unsophisticated. Yet they remained his family. They were the matrix of who he was. Though they were no more than shepherds (a class the Egyptians despised), they had been spoken to by God – not the gods of the sun, the river and death, the Egyptian pantheon – but God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who did not make His home in temples and pyramids and panoplies of power, but who spoke in the human heart as a voice, lifting a simple family to moral greatness.
By the time his second son was born, Joseph had undergone a profound change of heart. To be sure, he had all the trappings of earthly success – “God has made me fruitful” – but Egypt had become “the land of my affliction.” Why? Because it was exile. There is a sociological observation about immigrant groups, known as Hansen’s Law: “The second generation seeks to remember what the first generation sought to forget.”2.Marcus Lee Hansen, The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant (Rock Island, il., Augustana Historical Society, 1938), 9.
Joseph went through this transformation very quickly. It was already complete by the time his second son was born. By calling this child Ephraim, he was remembering what, when Menasheh was born, he was trying to forget: who he was, where he came from, where he belonged.
On this reading, Jacob’s blessing of Ephraim over Menasheh had nothing to do with their ages and everything to do with their names. He knew that the stay of his family in Egypt would not be a short one. Before leaving Canaan to see Joseph, God had appeared to him in a vision:
Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back again. And Joseph’s own hand will close your eyes. (46:3–4)
He knew, in other words, that this was the start of the long exile that God had told Abraham would be the fate of his children, a vision the Torah describes as accompanied by “a deep and dreadful darkness”(15:12). Knowing that these were the first two children of his family to be born in exile, knowing too that the exile would be prolonged and at times difficult and dark, Jacob sought to signal to all future generations that there would be a constant tension between the desire to forget (to assimilate, acculturate, anaesthetise the hope of a return) and the promptings of memory (the knowledge that this is “exile,” that we are part of another story, that ultimate home is somewhere else).
The child of forgetting (Menasheh) may have blessings. But greater are the blessings of a child (Ephraim) who remembers the past and future of which he is a part.