20 Jul VAETCHANAN: ASHAMED TO DEFEND THEIR HOME YOSEF, NOT MOSHE, WAS BURIED IN THE HOLY LAND. WHY? A TALE OF TWO LEADERS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO ISRAEL

Yosef Vs. Moshe
“G-d became angry
with me because of
you, and He did not
listen to me,” Moshe
states in the
beginning of this
week’s parsha
(Vaeschanan). “G-d said to me, ‘It is too
much for you! Do not continue to speak to Me
further about this matter.’”
Thus, G-d refuses the pleading of His faithful
servant, Moshe, to be allowed entry into the
Promised Land. Instead, G-d tells Moshe:
“Ascend to the top of the cliff and raise your
eyes westward, northward, southward, and
eastward, and see with your eyes, for you
shall not cross this Jordan.
The Midrash, which transcribes the oral
traditions passed down the generations,
presents a moving dialogue between Moshe
and G-d:
Moshe said to G-d, “Master of the universe,
the bones of Yosef will enter the land, and I
will not?!”
What he meant was this: At the conclusion of
Bereishis, Yosef the viceroy of Egypt, just
before his death, adjured the children of
Israel, that they take his bones with them
when they leave Egypt. More than a century
later, when the Jewish slaves embarked on
their path to freedom, “Moshe took the bones
of Yosef with him, for he [Yosef] had firmly
adjured the children of Israel saying, ‘G-d
will surely remember you, and you shall bring
up my bones from here with you.”
Yosef’s casket wandered with the Jews during
their forty-year sojourn in the desert. When
Yehoshua led the people into the land, Yosef’s
bones were interred in the city of
Shchem, known today also as Nablus. (The
gravesite was burned and destroyed in
October 2000, in the beginning of the second
Intifada. Rabbi Hillel Lieberman, who came
to protect the site, was murdered. Since then,
it has become forbidden for Jews to visit the
site, besides for certain occasions.)
This was the irony hinted in Moshe’s plea to
G-d: I was the one who carried Yosef’s bones
for forty-years; yet these bones that I carried
all this way will enter into the Holy Land,
while I will remain behind!
What perturbed Moshe, according to this
Midrash, was not so much that he wouldn’t be
allowed to enter the Land alive. Moshe could
understand that his leadership was designed
for the generation that left Egypt and that now
it was time for his pupil Yehoshua to take over
the reins. The brunt of Moshe’s hurt was that
G-d would not allow even his body to be
interred in the soil of the Holy Land! The
remains of Yosef, who died 180 years earlier,
can enter the land, while the body of Moshe,
who led the Jews all the way till the border,
cannot enter?

G-d’s response is nothing less than astounding.
It goes like this:
He who acknowledged his land, will be buried
in the land; he who did not acknowledge his
land, will not be buried in the land. Yosef
acknowledged the land; Moshe did not.
The Midrash quotes two episodes
demonstrating Yosef’s loyalty to the land.
The First Episode
At the age of seventeen, Yosef was living with
his father Yaakov in Chevron. The young
handsome lad was kidnapped by his brothers
and sold into Egyptian slavery. There he
acquired the trust of his master, Potiphar, who
put him in charge of the home, while his wife
was unsuccessfully attempting to seduce
Yosef into immoral behavior.
One day when nobody was home, the woman
held on to Yosef, demanding that he betray his
morality. Yosef fled the home leaving his
cloak in her hand. She seized the opportunity
and cried out: “Look! He [my husband]
brought us a Hebrew man to sport with us; he
came to lie with me but I screamed out loudly!
When he heard that I raised my voice and
screamed, he left his garment beside me, fled
and went outside!”
For this, Yosef was sentenced to prison. For
twelve years he remained incarcerated in an
Egyptian dungeon, until he was finally
liberated to interpret a mysterious dream of
the Egyptian emperor, Pharaoh, following
which he rose to become the viceroy of the
country.
How did Potiphar’s wife describe Yosef? As a
“Hebrew man” (“Look, he brought us a
Hebrew man to sport with us.”) This was a
most obvious and conspicuous characteristic
of Yosef’s. Clearly, he never disguised his
origin; everybody was aware that he was
member of the Hebrew tribe, coming from the
Land of Israel.
The Second Episode
The second episode occurs ten years later,
while in the Egyptian dungeon. There, Yosef
interprets the enigmatic dreams of two of
Pharaoh’s assistants, his baker and his butler.
The baker, Yosef predicts, will be executed;
the butler will be set free and restored to his
previous post in the palace.
Yosef asks of the butler: “If only you can do
me a favor, and mention me to Pharaoh, and
get me out of this place, for indeed I was
kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews, and
even here I have done nothing to them to put
me in the dungeon.”
Here again Yosef proclaims his connection to
the Holy Land. “I was kidnapped from the
land of the Hebrews.”
Indeed, when the butler does present Yosef’s
case to Pharaoh, two years later, that is exactly
how he describes Yosef: “There [in the
dungeon] with us was a Hebrew youth, a

slave…. The first characteristic by which he
defines Yosef is his being “a Hebrew youth.”
Why Risk Your Freedom?
In Egyptian society, to be a Hebrew was a
badge of shame. That may be the reason why
Potiphar’s wife when seeking to gain
credibility for her version of the story that
Yosef attempted to violate her, defined him
first and foremost as a “Hebrew man.” She
knew that this would help her case. When
people will hear that he is a Jew, they will
believe all the ill behavior attributed to him.
The Jew is capable of all…
And Yosef made it known that he was a
Hebrew, a resident of Israel. Disguising it
would perhaps allow him to integrate into
Egyptian society, but that would mean lying
to himself and to the world. What type of life
is that?
Years later, while suffering in prison,
attempting to seek the Egyptian ruler’s grace
to set him free of his misery, it would have
been even more logical for him to underplay
his true identity. Why did he tell the butler, “I
was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews”
and put his entire freedom at risk?
Furthermore, how can Yosef define the land
as “The land of the Hebrews”? At the time,
the land was home to 31 kingdoms, consisting
of large and powerful tribes, while the
Hebrews were comprised of fewer than 70
members, and lived in part of one city,
Chevron?
An Organic Connection
What is the connection between the Jewish
people and the Holy Land, both in the past
and in the present? Is it merely a national one:
Jews reside in Israel they are citizens of the
country, so they are naturally connected to it.
No! For the last 2000 years, Jews have been
exiled and dispersed all over the globe, yet
they still spoke of Eretz Israel as their home;
they cried for it as their spiritual epicenter. It
was the core of their longings, dreams, and
aspirations.
For 2000 years, Jews have prayed three times
a day in the direction of Israel; they have
beseeched G-d to return them to their
homeland; they have concluded every Seder
and Yom Kippur service with the declaration,
“Next year in Jerusalem!” they have fasted
each year, without fail, on the day their exile
from Israel began.
Why? If it were merely a nationalistic
obsession, it should have diminished with the
two millennia of living elsewhere.
The answer to this enigma has been articulated
in countless works of Jewish philosophy and
mysticism: Each and every Jew—secular and
observant alike—is organically linked to the
land of Israel. Israel for the Jew is not merely
a nationality; it is the home of the Jewish
inner consciousness: The Jewish soul is
rooted in the energy vibrating in the

atmosphere of Eretz Israel.
The 10th century Jew thriving on the Rhine,
the 16th century Jew walking the streets of
Krakow, the 20th century Jew struggling in
communist Moscow, and the Jew of 21st
century sipping coffee in a Soho Starbucks—
each of them was and is aware, on a conscious
or subconscious level, that his or her soul is
inherently interconnected with Eretz Israel.
He may have never visited the physical
territory, but it is still home. How? Because
his or her soul originated there, and was
merely grafted to the Diaspora, in order to
imbue it with the sanctity of Eretz Israel.
Yosef was a slave, then a prisoner. He was
living in Egypt and was powerless to change
that. Ultimately, he would become the prime
minister of the country. But that was only his
body; his soul was still living in Eretz Israel.
Thus, he was never ashamed to remain loyal
to himself and declare the truth: I am residing
in Egypt, but a part of me has never left the
Holy Land. I may one day come to love
Egypt, but Eretz Yisroel will always remain
my home. Because it is home.
One with the Land
Now let us shift our attention to Moshe.
Following his escape from Pharaoh’s sword,
Moshe spent time at the well of Midyan.
There, the Jewish boy who grew up in the
Egyptian palace rescued Yisro’s seven
daughters from the shepherds who were
harassing them, and he gave water to their
sheep. When the daughters came home and
their father asked them how they managed to
make it home so quickly, they replied, “An
Egyptian man saved us from the shepherds
and he even draw water for us and for the
sheep.”
“An Egyptian man” was the way they
described Moshe. In other words, Moshe
allowed them to get the impression that he
was Egyptian. Moshe did not necessarily tell
them he was an Egyptian; he merely didn’t
protest their impression of him as such.
Yosef, concludes the Midrash, embraced his
land, hence he was interred there; Moshe did
not, hence he remained outside of it.
This was not a punishment. Moshe, we can be
sure, had good reason for his behavior.
(Moshe stood up to the superpower of his

time, so he clearly suffered not of Jewish self-
hate, nor was he fearful of sounding “too

Jewish.” The reason he behaved so is beyond
the scope of this present essay). Nevertheless,
to be worthy of the Land of Israel, you need to
be one with it.