Avodah Mailing List

Volume 42: Number 81

Sun, 15 Dec 2024

• 1. Yaakov refused to be comforted? (Akiva Miller)

.
After Yosef's brothers went to Yaakov, and presented him with the
fabricated evidence of Yosef's death, pasuk 37:35 tells us (according to
most translations) that Yaakov "refused to be comforted". That be accurate
IF the Torah's text was "l'hinachem", in the Nifal form, "to be comforted".

But that's not what the Torah says. The word in the Torah is
"l'his'nachem", with the letter tav, in the Hitpael form. He did not merely
refuse to accept the comfort that others were offering to him. The Hitpael
concerns what a person does to *himself*. There is something that Yaakov
might have done to himself, but the Torah tells us here that he refused to
do it. My copy of ArtScroll's one-volume Hebrew-English Tanach reads more
accurately: "but he refused to comfort himself."

I suspect that this letter tav may be the source for the idea that  Yaakov
knew, deep down, that Yosef was still alive. He did not merely refuse the
consolation that others were offering, he even refused to accept the
situation as it appeared to everyone else. [This is not to suggest, of
course, that because he knew Yosef to be alive, he was therefore able to
carry on as usual. Whatever he knew or didn't know, he missed his son
terribly, and that's enough to upset any loving father terribly, and "he
refused to comfort himself" with the fact that Yosef was still alive.]

Akiva Miller
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