December 27, 2023|ט"ו טבת ה' אלפים תשפ"ד Reframe Your Life
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During these extraordinary times for the Jewish people, there have been extraordinary stories, videos, and vignettes emerging. The challenge is to not only watch them, marvel at them, cry with them or forward them, but to be changed by them, to inculcate these extraordinary lessons and examples into our own lives.
Among the moving videos that have been coming out are the ones of soldiers coming home and being reunited with children, spouses, parents, and siblings. It is almost impossible to watch them without tissues nearby. While Baruch Hashem, many such videos have made the rounds, last week a video went viral of a son coming home that stood out among the others.
After long, hard days of fighting, a soldier came home to surprise his father who hadn’t seen him in 73 days. With a look of shock, joy, relief and gratitude on his face, the father jumps up, hugs his son, starts saying lo ma’amin, he can’t believe it, and while still in a tight embrace, proclaims Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad, Baruch Ha’Tov V’hameitiv. He can’t stop hugging his son, looks him up and down and says, “ha’kol shaleim,” you are whole, and then offers a tefilla, asking Hashem for all soldiers to come home whole to their mothers and fathers, and may He protect all of our precious soldiers.
It's impossible to see this video and not be reminded of last week’s parsha when Yaakov Avinu finally reunited with his cherished son Yosef HaTzadik and recites those same words of Shema. The viral video provides an image of our capacity to shower love and affection on a family member while simultaneously channeling the overwhelming feelings into gratitude to Hashem in the statement of Shema.
That particular video and its Parsha connection are heartwarming and they caught the attention of so many. There is a different connection between something that went viral from Israel last week and the Parshios we are reading right now that is also powerful, almost unbelievable, that I think can inspire each of us in our own way.
Yosef was marginalized, dismissed, ultimately sold into slavery, thrown into jail for a crime he never committed, waited twenty-two years to see his dreams realized. In the text of the Torah we don’t find him getting words of encouragement from Hashem, messages or signals from above to stay the course because it is all going to work out.
He struggled, he suffered, he navigated an unfair world all alone, and yet, at the end of it all, when he reveals himself to his brothers, rather than bitterness, resentment, or revenge, he urges his brothers to join him in seeing that everything that happened was part of Hashem’s plan. He doesn’t hold his brothers accountable; he doesn’t seek to make them pay, he isn’t even lukewarm or cold to them. After all that happened, Yosef comforts his brothers, telling them “Al tei’atzvu,” don’t be sad or distressed, don’t blame yourselves, this was orchestrated from Above, from Hashem. He used you to send me here for the good of our greater family, our nation. This was Yosef’s message in last week’s Parsha when he first revealed himself, and continues into this one when Yaakov dies and his brothers feel threatened. Yosef doubles down, says he has no intention of seeking revenge, and repeating to them it is all from Hashem.
Those superhuman words, אַל־תֵּעָ֣צְב֗וּ וְאַל־יִ֙חַר֙ בְּעֵ֣ינֵיכֶ֔ם, don’t be distressed or reproach yourselves, words we cannot believe someone so wronged could be capable of saying, were essentially repeated last week, granted in very different circumstances.
After IDF troops mistakenly identified them as a threat, three hostages, Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samar Talalka, were shot and killed. They had escaped Hamas terrorists and were waving white flags, but instead a videoed reunion with their families set to music, with hugs, kisses and gratitude, these three of our hostages missing since October 7th will not come home.
The circumstances of the incident are still under investigation and suffice it to say none of us can imagine the decision-making in real time, the threats of urban warfare, and the immeasurable challenges of fighting terrorists with zero scruples. The pain of the families is enormous and the pain and guilt of those who made the mistake is also beyond and one would have seen them as contradictory or incompatible with one another.
But last week, Iris Haim recorded a message to those soldiers essentially saying what Yosef said:
I am Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I hug you here from afar. I know that everything that happened is absolutely not your fault, and nobody’s fault except that of Hamas, may their name be wiped out and their memory erased from the earth. I want you to look after yourselves and to think all the time that you are doing the best thing in the world, the best thing that could happen, that could help us. Because all the people of Israel and all of us need you healthy. And don’t hesitate for a second if you see a terrorist. Don’t think that you killed a hostage deliberately. You have to look after yourselves because only that way can you look after us. At the first opportunity, you are invited to come to us, whoever wants to. And we want to see you with our own eyes and hug you and tell you that what you did — however hard it is to say this, and sad — it was apparently the right thing in that moment. And nobody’s going to judge you or be angry. Not me, and not my husband Raviv. Not my daughter Noya. And not Yotam, may his memory be blessed. And not Tuval, Yotam’s brother. We love you very much. And that is all.
The soldiers sent her back a voice note, “We received your message, and since then we have been able to function again. Before that, we had shut down.” She sent back, “Amazing, that is what I wanted.” The next day, the opportunity came and the soldier from the battalion that had made the mistake visited Iris. She continued to repeat the same message Yosef told his brothers, אַל־תֵּעָ֣צְב֗וּ וְאַל־יִ֙חַר֙ בְּעֵ֣ינֵיכֶ֔ם, don’t be distressed or reproach yourselves, this was Hashem’s plan.
How? How did Yosef so long ago, and Iris in this war, find this superhuman strength and perspective?
When Yosef first reveals himself to his brothers, he tells them: וַיֹּ֗אמֶר אֲנִי֙ יוֹסֵ֣ף אֲחִיכֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־מְכַרְתֶּ֥ם אֹתִ֖י מִצְרָֽיְמָה׃, I am your brother Yosef, he whom you sold into Egypt. The Sfas Emes highlights Chazal’s (Shabbos 87) interpretation of the expression Hashem uses to Moshe regarding the Luchos: “asher shibarta, that you broke – Yasher Koach she’shibarta, good job for breaking them.” So too, the Sefas Emes says, here Yosef tells his brothers, “asher Machartem osi, that you sold me” - Yasher Koach she’machartem osi, shkoyach for selling me!
In that moment, Yosef made a choice. He could focus on their actions, remain deeply injured and wounded, see himself as a complete victim, or he could zoom out the lens, see a bigger, more complete picture, choose what to do now and be the arbiter of his destiny. He chooses the latter by employing something cognitive therapy calls reframing. Reframing means that just like we can have a painting or picture and when we change the frame, it looks different, we see it differently even though the picture remains the same, so too in life, events and experiences can happen but we choose what frame to put around them and with that reframing, how we see them and how they make us feel.
Rabbi Lord Sacks points out that while Yosef may have been the first to employ the reframing technique, it is what has enabled and empowered us to navigate nearly impossible circumstances since then. He writes:
Viktor Frankl showed there is another way – and he did so under some of the worst conditions ever endured by human beings: in Auschwitz. As a prisoner there Frankl discovered that the Nazis took away almost everything that made people human: their possessions, their clothes, their hair, their very names. Before being sent to Auschwitz, Frankl had been a therapist specialising in curing people who had suicidal tendencies. In the camp, he devoted himself as far as he could to giving his fellow prisoners the will to live, knowing that if they lost it, they would soon die… Frankl writes that he was able to survive Auschwitz by daily seeing himself as if he were in a university, giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp. Everything that was happening to him was transformed, by this one act of the mind, into a series of illustrations of the points he was making in the lecture.
In his Tanya, the Alter Rebbe, Rav Shneur Zalman of Liadi, emphasizes that if we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel and if we change how we feel, we will transform how we behave. Rav Shlomo Wolbe points out that the Rambam places the topic of Middos, character, in Hilchos De’os, the Laws of Mindsets, because our actions are all rooted in our mindset.
Yosef was trying to get his brothers to see their situation and their picture with the new frame he had placed on it. He had made the choice to no longer see himself as a man wronged by his brothers. Instead, his life was framed by a mission from Hashem. Reframing allowed Yosef to live and function without anger, without outrage or a thirst for revenge. Framing the picture this way enabled him to forgive his brothers. As Rabbi Sacks says, the frame transformed negative feelings about the past into a focused mission about the future.
The video of the father hugging his son and saying Shema is amazing, but the voice note of the mother who will never see her son again saying don’t blame yourselves is truly extraordinary.
If Iris can reframe the accidental killing of her son, what can we reframe in our lives? How can we choose to interpret something or the behavior of someone differently? How can we see the picture of our lives, not as victims of the past, but the arbiters of our future?