Sunday, January 21, 2007

Portion 15 Bo Exodus 10:1-13:16

10:1 Rather, “I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants by placing these signs among them.”

10:2 The purpose of this story is to teach us to leave vengeance to God.

10:3 Why do Moses and Aaron continue to imply that the Israelites will return to Egypt after the pilgrimage festival. What might have happened had Moses and Aaron been honest with Pharaoh?

10:7 Pharaoh’s servants suggest that only the male Israelites go. At the time only males would be permitted to participate in the worship service. Is this a genuine move towards compromise or have they deduced Moses’s true intentions and are just trying to see how he will wiggle out of this one?

10:9 The pilgrimage is the festival.

10:10-10:11 Pharaoh knows that Moses is lying about coming back and accuses him of such. How much does Moses’ dishonestly contribute to Pharaoh’s stubbornness?

10:14 The locust plague does not distinguish between Egyptians and Israelites.

10:23 The darkness plague expands the definition of the Children of Israel to include all who choose to shine a light in the darkness.

10:24 Pharaoh offers to let the people go in exchange for their livestock. God had destroyed all of the Egyptian’s livestock. At the end of the hail plague, the Israelites could have offered to share their livestock with the Egyptian’s in exchange for their freedom. This could have been a fitting non-violent reconciliation, since Joseph had enslaved the Egyptians and taken their livestock for Pharaoh. Why did the Israelites not do this? (See 11:5 below for a conjecture that the Torah holds Israel responsible for harm to Egyptians caused by plagues that could have been prevented had the Israelites been willing to negotiate.) Or did the Israelites share their livestock with the Egyptians and that is the real meaning of the festival sacrifice?

10:28 Moses dies when he sees the promised land. Is Pharaoh’s prophesy correct? Do the Israelites spend 40 years in the wilderness to end up in a new Egypt of their own devising?

10:29 Perhaps God does not permit Moses to enter and live in the promised land to protect Moses from witnessing how the Israelites will slowly come to adopt the domination system.

11:2 Who are “the people” whose neighbors have silver and gold? In 3:22 they are wealthy enough to have lodgers who have silver and gold. Has “the people” been expanded to include all who will follow Moses and worship YHWH? Even Pharaoh’s servants? Does the stripping of Egypt refer to privileged Egyptians who had joined with Moses and stripped themselves of their Egyptian nationality to identify themselves with the Israelites slaves? Or is this from a tradition where the Israelites did not have it so bad in Egypt? Presumably the only reason for bringing precious metals along is for the tabernacle.

In 3:22 God tells Moses that the women will perform this task. In 11:2 God tells Moses to ask each man and woman to do it. Does this mean that all were asked but only the women obeyed? I wonder what the Rabbis had to say about that?

The NJPS uses the word “borrow” while Fox uses “ask for.” If the people are still putting on the pretence of coming back, it is presumably done with the knowledge of those they are “borrowing” from, just as Pharaoh’s daughter knew that Mosses’ nursemaid was his mother, but allowed the pretense to continue. This is alluded to in 11:3.

11:5 Much of the social justice requirements of Israelites to care for the stranger are motivated on the basis that “you were a slave in Egypt and YHWH your God redeemed you from there, therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.” Is this Torah’s way of saying that Israel is held responsible for the injustices done to the Egyptians and must devote itself to making amends?

12:3 It is only during this final plague that the Israelites act collectively as a community in defiance against Pharaoh. The action is non-violent and highly ritualized. It is similar to a union sticker day where workers openly display their solidarity with one another. Pharaoh has refused the Israelites’ request to participate in their pilgrimage festival, so they strike and conduct the festival at their homes instead. The “mighty hand of God” is the people acting collectively and nonviolently for justice.

12:4 The meal could be shared with neighbors. The same neighbors who allowed the Israelites to “borrow” gold and silver from them?

12:13 Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tameret says that the blood on the houses is a sign for the Israelites to stay home and not be tempted to participate in the violence against the Egyptians.

12:16 The Israelites have gone on strike.

12:29 Is this from a different tradition in which the Israelites suffer this plague with the Egyptians?

12:38 Implying that more than just the biological descendents of Jacob are now part of the Children of Israel.

12:48 Israelites and Egyptians (as well as Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, and probably many other groups) could partake of the Passover meal together for they were all circumcised. Jeremiah 9:24-25.

12:49 An explicit denunciation of preferential treatment based on ethnicity.

13:16 Israel is to annually remind itself, when it is in Canaan, to leave vengeance to God.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Portion 14 Va-Era 6:2-9:95

6:3 “In Genesis, the name [El Shaddai] is most often tied to promises of human fertility (see 17:1); a possibly related Hebrew word means ‘breasts.’” – Everett Fox. God, by using the name YHWH, is emphasizing to Moses that God is liberating the Israelites not because they are descended from Jacob but because they are oppressed. Everett Fox’s translation “by my name YHWH I was not known to them [the patriarchs],” I believe captures the intention of the Torah better than the NJPS “I did not make myself known to them by my name YHWH.” In Genesis God is continuously telling and testing the patriarchs that the covenant is for spiritual and moral progeny. But after momentarily seeing this truth, the patriarchs always revert back to equating God’s covenantal promise with God’s blessing of fertility. It is hard to recognize that the demands of justice go well beyond caring for our biological kin and even harder to live it.

6:4 -6:8 God’s promise to rescue the Israelites is compared to earlier covenantal promises. Just as the prophets compare God’s promise to rescue Judah from impending Babylonian invasion (provided its leaders and people stay true to the covenant and focus on caring for the orphan, the stranger, and the widow instead of placing its faith in an idolatrous military alliance with Egypt) to the ancient story of God’s mighty arm bringing about the exodus from Egypt.

6:9 The Israelites do not believe Moses. Likewise most Jewish leaders today do not believe that God will be their warrior provided they uphold the covenantal promise to be a blessing and to leave cursing for God. Throughout the centuries, as Jews have experienced oppression and God did not act militarily, they have developed other ways of thinking about God that moved the warrior aspect of God into the distant future, but still retained, as an essential element, that the people should not take vengeance into their own hands. One example is the prophetic idea of the suffering servant, in which the suffering of the Jewish people, caused by their refusal to take vengeance into their own hands, contributes to the redemption of the world. Another is the related rabbinic idea of the female aspect of God that chooses to go into exile with the Jews to suffer alongside them.

The idea that refusing to take vengeance into our own hands is covenentaly required of us, used to be widely accepted amongst Orthodox Jews, and after WWI was gaining adherents among some “rational” Reform and Conservative Jews too, although in shallow secular form that melted into air with the coming of WWII. It was practically wiped out by the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Since 1948 a form of just war theory has been “normative” in Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox Judaism. Chaim Potok’s wonderful novel “The Chosen” is a moving account of how these changes impacted the lives of two orthodox boys whose fathers take opposite sides in this religious debate. I believe that it should be possible to revive the pacifist interpretation of Judaism in a way acceptable to liberal Jews by incorporating insights of Gandhi and King into the Jewish biblical and rabbinic pacifist tradition. That is the purpose of this commentary.

6:11-6:13 God tells Moses to speak to Pharaoh. Moses objects to speaking to Pharaoh without the Israelites’ support. Perhaps “foreskinned lips” is Moses’s way of saying that his lone voice will be of no effect if not backed by the people. God agrees with Moses and instructs him and his brother Aaron, an elder of the Sons of Levi, in organizing skills to speak to both the Children of Israel and to Pharaoh.

7:3-7:4 God tells Moses that the plagues will harden Pharaoh’s heart and to expect backlash. The purpose of the plagues is to duplicate the effects of a war without the violent participation of the Israelites. Like war, the plaques inevitably cause the opponent to respond violently and deceitfully, and to resist surrender when given no opportunity to save face. The point of this story is to convince people, who just like us are devoted to war and violence, that God can fight our battles for us. The idea that there is a way to resolve conflict without war at all, is covered elsewhere in the Torah, particularly in Genesis.

7:5 The point is for the Children of Israel to learn that God is YHWH so that in the future they will rely on God for deliverance instead of taking vengeance into their own hands.

7:22 “Changing water into blood was easy for the magicians. For that is a well-known practice, to drown humankind in rivers of blood.” Itture Torah, Vol III, pp 66-67, quoted in Plaut.

8:9 Good leverage against an adversary requires the ability to turn it off when a settlement is possible.

8:19 Up until now the Israelites have suffered through the plagues with the Egyptians.

8:22 Israelites sacrifice for God by freeing themselves and others from slavery and oppression.

9:7 Why doesn’t Pharaoh confiscate the livestock of the Israelites and distribute it to the Egyptians whose livestock had died? Is it because he knows that the Egyptians realize that the only way to be free of the plagues is for Pharaoh to release the Israelites? Or are we to assume that the redistribution of livestock did occur because more are killed in the hail plague?

9:16 The purpose, as in 7:5, is reiterated.

9:20 Pharaoh’s courtiers are given the option of bringing their livestock and slaves inside to protect them from hail. Was there an attempt by Moses or Pharaoh to give other Egyptians a warning?

9:35 The portion ends with Pharaoh as stubborn as ever. The Torah tells us that Moses had emotionally prepared the Israelites for the length and hardships of the campaign and inoculated them to the certainty that Pharaoh would remain stubborn.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Portion 13 Sh’mot Exodus 1:1-6:1

1:10 Pharaoh equates earthly wisdom with the need for coercive means to bring about his desired ends. This is the primal transgression from the Garden of Eden, to do evil so that perceived good may come.

1:11 A few generations after Joseph makes serfs of the Egyptians, Pharaoh makes slaves of the Israelites.

1:17 If the Israelite population is as large as Pharaoh claims, then the two midwives that Pharaoh speaks to could be the heads of two midwifery guilds. In that case, the success of their coordinated civil disobedience campaign is even more impressive. Pharaoh could also be greatly exaggerating the size of the immigrant population to shore up nativist support and to deflect blame for economic hardship away from Pharaoh.

1:19 Using a tactic that Saul Alinsky would be proud of, the midwives use Pharaoh’s racist beliefs about the Israelites to evade blame for failing to carry out Pharaoh’s genocidal commands.

1:22 Pharaoh now stirs up nativist sentiment and orders a pogrom against Israelite male children. Pharaoh does not fear women but it is his own daughter’s defiance of Pharaoh’s order that will lead to the liberation of the Israelites.

2:5 Is Pharaoh’s daughter’s presence at the Nile a premeditated plan to defy her father’s order? Tradition assumes that Pharaoh’s daughter is aware that the nursemaid is the baby’s mother and that there is an unspoken understanding between Pharaoh’s daughter and Moses’s sister and mother.

2:12 Why doesn’t Moses use his authority, as Pharaoh’s daughter’s son, to order the Egyptian to stop? Instead he uses physical violence.

2:14 I would like to propose a Midrash that the speaker is Moses’s older brother Aaron. Perhaps this speaks to a long term resentment that Aaron feels about Moses’s royal status. Perhaps Moses has taken advantage of his status in the past in his relations with his older brother Aaron. This would fit with the sibling rivalry stories in Genesis, especially the Joseph cycle, where Joseph’s older brothers are resentful that Joseph is their overseer.

2:15 Moses is guilty of the sin of Cain and suffers Cain’s punishment of exile from his community.

2:17 Why would shepherds be so disrespectful of the priests daughters?

3:13 Moses does not yet fully identify with the Israelites. He refers to the “God of your fathers” instead of “our fathers.”

3:15 Why does God not correct this in his answer to Moses?

3:18 God tells Moses to approach Pharaoh with the Elders of Israel.

3:22 Those slaves who must stay behind will support those who leave by offering what they have, even if all that they have is just the clothes off there backs.

4:18 For the first time, Moses acknowledges his kinship with the Israelites. Moses’s father-in-law urges him to use peaceful means to achieve the liberation of his people.

4:19 Apparently Moses must have been stalling so God, for the second time, commands him to go to Egypt.

4:24 Moses again stalls. Moses has a confrontation with God similar to what Jacob experienced before his reconciliation with Esau. Perhaps, in addition to his fear of confronting Pharaoh, Moses is also fearful of asking forgiveness of his brother Aaron. Perhaps Moses had used his royal status to mistreat Aaron in the past.

4:26 The Midianites are descended from Abraham through Keturah. Circumcision, in addition to any other meaning it has, would also symbolize the blood relationship between Israelites and Midianites. Zipporah is reassuring Moses that their marriage is within the bloodlines of the children of Abraham. Egyptians also practiced circumcision. Perhaps, just as Jeremiah does in 9:24-25, Zipporah is also making the point that circumcision symbolizes the brotherhood between all peoples and, like her father, she is urging Moses to be peaceful towards his Egyptian brothers and to leave vengeance to God.

4:27 Although God told Moses that he would be acting as a god to his brother Aaron, it is Aaron, who through his forgiveness and reconciliation, is God’s third call for Moses to go back to Egypt.

5:1 Moses and Aaron have their meeting with Pharaoh, but not with the elders of Israel. Why are they not part of the delegation?

5:4 Because Moses and Aaron do not have the elders with them, Pharaoh is able to portray them as a couple of trouble makers.

5:6 Pharaoh imposes much harsher labor than ever before to enlarge the division between Israelite elders and foreman on the one hand and Moses and Aaron on the other.

6:1 In the face of this defeat, only faith that God will prevail can keep Moses and Aaron on their nonviolent course and away from the temptations of submission or violence.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Portion 12 Va-Y’Hi Genesis 47:28-50:26

48:7 Jacob is still of the opinion that God’s promise is about biological instead of moral and spiritual prodigy.

49:5 The Levites, who will become a privileged class, have already been associated with the rape of Shechem, are criticized for their anger, violence, and lawlessness.

49:11 Judah, the tribe of royalty appears to be associated with opulence and conspicuous consumption.

50:7 Joseph secures an elaborate state funeral for Jacob.

50:21 Joseph’s brothers are concerned that Joseph was only kind to his brothers for their father’s sake and now that their father is dead they will suffer Joseph’s wrath. Joseph’s wrath is to keep his brothers entirely beholden to him for their livelihoods.

50:25 Towards the end of Joseph’s life, he appears to loose favor with Pharaoh and is unable to protect the Israelites as he had promised. This is suggested by the phrase “when God has taken notice of you” and the fact that there is no mention of a state funeral for Joseph.
Portion 11 Va-Yiggash Genesis 44:18-47:27

44:33 To save his father from grief from loss of his favorite son, Judah offers himself as a slave in Benjamin’s place. Judah is fulfilling the covenant obligation to be a suffering servant. It causes Joseph to end his deception and reveal himself to his brothers.

45:1 However Joseph is still unwilling to reveal his humanity to those outside his family. Joseph is still enslaved by the domination system to keep up appearances.

45:7 Joseph attributes his holding of a powerful position to divine right.

45:11 He justifies his exploitation of others on the grounds that he will save his family from famine and poverty.

45:18 Pharaoh likewise justifies the unjust social relations from which he benefits by the charity that he bestows on those he favors.

46:3 God will make Israel into a great nation, not by being coddled at the expense of others, but by undergoing the experience of national slavery that Joseph sets into motion, and overcoming it through faithfulness instead of vengeance.

46:34 Joseph prepares his family for its meeting with Pharaoh. Is Joseph, aware of his plan for national enslavement, scheming to keep his family outside the area where the expropriation will occur? Or, as Etz Hyim suggests, is the point of this preparation Joseph’s coaching his brothers to refer to a shepherd as a breeder of livestock (like referring to a garbage man as a sanitation engineer)? The latter is consistent with Joseph’s recurrent concern about keeping up appearances.

47:6b Pharaoh gives patronage positions to some of Joseph’s sons to further ensure their loyalty and dependence on him for their livelihood.

47:14 As the famine worsens, Joseph makes the Egyptians buy back the food that they were forced to give to Joseph during the years of prosperity. Joseph, who is chief tax collector, state grain salesman, and overseer of Pharaoh’s personal estate, deposits the proceeds in Pharaoh’s palace.

47:16 The next year Joseph expropriates the peoples’ livestock in return for the food he taxed from them .

47:20 The year after that, he expropriates all of their land in exchange for the food he had stolen from then years before. It is pointless at this point to continue the fallacy that Joseph had collected the food as a tax to distribute back to the people later. He stole it to sell it back to them at the highest of all prices to strengthen Pharaoh’s hold over the people. Rashbam considers Joseph’s actions ruthless.

47:21 Joseph embarks on a forced mass migration program, to distance people from their ancestral land and strengthen Pharaoh’s hold on it.

47:22 Joseph preserves the lands of the priests (his wife’s family!) for them just as he does for his brothers. In this way Joseph secures religious support for the national enslavement project.

47:25: There is a political cartoon showing a couple people discussing two campaign posters. One poster reads “Vote for Smith. “I’ll chop off your leg!”” The other poster reads “Vote for Jones. “I’ll only chop off your foot!”” The caption reads “I’m leaning towards Jones.” When people are forced to choose between death by starvation and slavery, they might be grateful for the option of slavery given the alternative.

47:27 Israel prospers under Joseph’s "discernment and wisdom."
Portion 10 Mi-Ketz Genesis 41:1-44:17

41:4 Etz Hayim suggests that what disturbed Pharaoh so much about his dream was his suspicion that it predicted a revolution of the poor against the rich. Pharaoh’s magicians could have suspected the same thing and either interpreted the dream that way, incurring Pharaoh’s displeasure, or withheld that interpretation fearing the consequences of what they believed to be the truth. Information provided from lower to higher ranks in the domination system is often distorted or missing to conform to what the teller of lower rank believes the higher rank wants to hear.

If this interpretation is valid then how ironic that Pharaoh would turn to a jailed foreign slave for an interpretation of his dream that will greatly enhance instead of threaten his power.

41:33 Joseph could have advised Pharaoh that news of the seven years of prosperity followed by seven years of famine should be widely distributed. He could have advised a system where local communities take charge of their own granaries and work out collection and distribution on the basis of need. Instead the system he suggests is designed to enhance Pharaoh’s (and Joseph’s) power. The position that Joseph creates for himself is the epitomy of everything that the Torah has described as transcending the boundaries between heaven and earth. Where Torah tells us that the image of God is in people working together as equals, Joseph now places himself above all others, extracting their labor from them and distributing it as he sees fit.

41:40 In addition to placing Joseph in the position of overseer of the agricultural tax and distribution system, Pharaoh also places Joseph in the position of overseer of Pharaoh’s personal estate (according to the interpretation in Etz Hayim), where the proceeds from the sale of food, supposedly collected from the people for their later benefit, will find its way.

41:56b The Torah tells us that the famine extends over the whole world. Neither here, nor in the other famine accounts mentioned in the patriarchal narratives, does the Torah make any connection between extreme weather and people’s sinfulness. The only exceptions are the primordial flood, which the Torah describes as a one-time-only occurrence that God regrets, and the destruction of Sodom, which is purposefully described in a way that does not resemble any natural phenomena, and is probably an alternative flood tradition transferred into the patriarchal narrative.

42:9 Joseph recalls his dream to dominate over his brothers. He rubs his power into his brothers’ faces without letting them know who he is.

42.14 Joseph deceitfully calls his brothers’ spies, while it is he who does the interrogating. As a youth, he spied on his brothers to gain favor from his father. Perhaps Joseph never thought of himself as a spy, was hurt when his brothers accused him of being one, and is now playing this game to teach his brothers a lesson that not everyone who appears to be a spy is one.

42:20 After discerning the favored status of Benjamin, Joseph plays God by testing his brothers. Joseph’s game endangers the emotional and physical health of his father.

44:16 Judah tries to lift the punishment off Benjamin’s shoulders by placing it on all the brothers equally. Joseph refuses. This is the only Torah portion in Genesis that ends in the middle of a conversation. How Judah responds to Joseph in next week’s portion is the culmination of everything that Torah has been leading up to, and the break at this point is designed to emphasize its significance.
Portion 9 Va-Yeishev Genesis 37:1-40:23

Judah and his brothers sell Joseph into slavery
Joseph squeals on his brothers and is appointed overseer by his father. The coat with long sleeves that his father gives him indicates class distinction. It would be difficult for him to perform the manual labor that his brothers do in such a getup. Joseph sticks his high position in the face of his brothers by recounting his dreams of domination to them. He even recounts such a dream to his father, which shows the same desire to transgress the boundaries between heaven and earth and dominate over his father and brothers that has been a recurrent theme since Ham’s attempt to dominate his brothers by displacing his father Noah.

Joseph’s brothers neglect their pasturing duties and head towards the city of Dotham. They are probably less motivated to work hard since, given family history and the dreams that Joseph recounted, they have good reason to presume that Joseph, perhaps with the help of their father, will conspire to steal their birthrights and blessings.

Joseph’s brothers see him spying on them and Like Cain’s murder of Abel, conspire to kill him because of his favored status. However Rueben intervenes, and planning to rescue him later, convinces his brothers to cast him in a pit instead of directly murdering him. They strip him of his overseer’s garb, symbolically stripping him of overseer status. But the fact that they are not drawing blood themselves does not make the sin any less severe. They are still guilty of the sin of Cain, of playing God and taking vengeance into their own hands. Rueben is also guilty of deception because he did not openly work for reconciliation. Could it be that several of Rueben’s brothers, perhaps a majority, were contemplating similar thoughts to rescue their brother but none dared to speak up? How much evil is done by people who rationalize their participation in immoral structures, convinced that they are waiting for the right moment or waiting for when they will have achieved enough power, to make things right? But that moment is always pushed off into the future as they continue to benefit from the privileges of their positions today. How many votes for the Iraq war were made from this kind of reasoning?

Upon seeing Ishmaelite traders, Judah comes up with the idea of profiting by selling Joseph into slavery. He even rationalizes it because it is better than leaving his brother to die of starvation. Institutions and people are often able to justify their wicked actions by comparing them favorably to actions that are even more wicked. I once heard an Israeli consulate spokesman in Chicago justify Israel’s bombing of a village on the grounds that it was a restrained response compared to the U.S fire bombing of German cities and the atomic bombing of Japan during WWII. Joseph will later make precisely the same rationalization as his brother Judah when he will rationalize his participation in the enslavement of the Egyptian population to Pharaoh because it is better than leaving the population to die of starvation.

Just as Jacob deceived his father Isaac by impersonating Isaac’s favorite son Esau by means of a goat, Joseph’s brothers now deceive their father Jacob by impersonating Jacob’s favorite son Joseph by means of a goat.

Jacob indirectly accuses his sons and himself when he says “a savage beast devoured him! Joseph was torn (from his family) by a beast.” The beast is both Joseph’s brothers’ desire to take vengeance into their own hands and their father’s impositions of inequitable social relations onto his family that engendered jealousy and resentment.

Judah and Tamar
Judah marries a Canaanite. Given the racist attitudes of the Israelites, as demonstrated by their rape of Shechem, how did Judah treat his wife, who isn’t even deserving of a name?

Although it is not stated, it is probably assumed that Tamar (an ancestor of King David) is Canaanite as well. Could it be that Er is extremely abusive to Tamar and that is why God takes his life?

The social tradition in this story is believed to predate Levirate marriage requirements in Deuteronomy. So we are somewhat free to guess what the operative rules are on the basis of context and social relations of other societies.

In certain African polygamous societies, a young man’s first wife can be the wife of a deceased older brother. In this marriage the woman is not expected to have intimate relations with the brother and is effectively the leader of the household and gets to choose her husband’s other wives. If the older brother died before leaving heirs it is possible that the younger brother would have been required to provide them, but that sexual intimacy would not have been required of the wife afterwards.

Could it be that Onan, Shelah, and Judah object to the equality with Tamar that the obligations of marriage to the widow of a deceased relative would have required of them? Is this refusal to accept a woman as equal what God was displeased with Onan about?

Perhaps, under the social rules of the time, Judah was obliged to marry his son to Tamar or to marry Tamar himself. When Judah refuses the former, Tamar uses Judah’s lustfulness and disregard for women to trick him into the latter.

While Jacob impersonated his older brother, to appropriate higher status for himself, Tamar impersonates someone of lower status to achieve equality.

Judah, after selling his brother into slavery, is now required to accept marital equality with a Canaanite woman, whom he had previously treated like a slave.

Joseph the overseer

Joseph rapidly rises in the house of Potiphar, to overseer. A midrash says that Joseph was vain and was flirtatious with his master Potifar’s wife. This is consistent with Joseph’s dreams of domination and the sin of Ham, the primary way that Genesis has expressed this desire for domination. Again Joseph is sent into the pit (the dungeon) because of his overseer’s garb.

Joseph becomes the overseer of the other prisoners. Prisons are houses of scarcity. When one prisoner gains power over others, the temptation is very great to take advantage of one’s position to meet one’s dire needs at the expense of others. Could it be that the reason that the cupbearer forgets Joseph is that Joseph had fallen victim to these temptations and had not left a favorable impression on the cupbearer aside from his ability to interpret dreams?