02 Jan REFRAME YOUR LIFE

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.
אַל־תֵּעָצְבּ֗ו ו ְאַל־ ,words superhuman Those
reproach or distressed be t’don ,י ִחַר בְּעֵינֵיכֶם
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,
be t’don ,אַל־תֵּעָצְבּ֗ו ו ְאַל־-י ִחַר בְּעֵינֵיכֶם
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
ו ַיֹּ֗אמֶר אֲנִי יֹוסֵף- :them tells he ,brothers
am I ,אֲחִיכֶם אֲשֶׁ ר־מְכַרְתֶּם- אֹתִי מִצְרָי ְמָה׃
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?