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The Office of Rabbi Sacks

5778 - Vayeshev - Improbable Endings And The Defeat Of Despair

The Office of Rabbi Sacks

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Religion & Spirituality

4.8601 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2017

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What is Judaism? It is a way of thinking, a constellation of ideas: a way of understanding the world and our place within it. Judaism contains life-changing ideas. Each week as part of his Covenant & Conversation series for 5778, Rabbi Sacks will explore a single life-changing idea in the Hebrew Bible. You can download a written version of his commentary from www.RabbiSacks.org. Covenant and Conversation 5778 is kindly supported by the Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation in memory of Maurice and Vivienne Wohl z”l.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Improbable endings and the defeat of despair.

0:06.3

We live life looking forward, but we understand it only looking back.

0:11.6

As we live from day to day, our life can seem like a meaningless sequence of random events.

0:17.7

A series of accidents and happenstances that have no shape or in a logic.

0:23.5

A traffic jam makes us late for an important meeting.

0:26.2

A stray remark we make.

0:28.0

Offends someone in a way we never intended.

0:30.8

By a hair's breadth, we fail to get the job we so sort.

0:34.9

Life as we experience it can sometimes feel like Joseph Heller's definition of history,

0:40.3

a trash bag of random coincidences blown open in a wind.

0:45.3

Yet looking back it begins to make sense.

0:48.3

The opportunity we missed here led to an even better one there.

0:52.3

The shame we felt at our unintentionally offensive remark

0:55.9

makes us more careful about what we say in the future. Our failure seen in retrospect,

1:01.7

many years later, turn out to have been our deepest learning experiences. Our hindsight

1:08.4

is always more perceptive than our foresight. We live life facing the future, but we understand life only when it has become our past.

1:20.1

Nowhere is this set out more clearly than in the story of Joseph in this week's Parachet begins on a high note. Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his

1:28.5

sons because he was a son of his old age and he made him a ketanet pasim, a richly embroidered robe.

1:35.2

But with dramatic speed, that love and that gift turn out to be Joseph's undoing.

1:41.5

His brothers began hating him when he told them his dream they hated him even more.

1:45.8

His second dream offended even his father later. When he went to see his brothers tending their

1:50.6

flocks, they first plotted to kill him and eventually sold him as a slave. At first,

...

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