vayeshev

                         The broom that sweeps also gets dirty

This piece of Torah was taught to me by Chacham Grossman.

1. This week's parshah discusses the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph is the blueprint for Jewish history. Everything Joseph goes through the Jewish people also go through. Sometimes we are servants or middle class as Joseph was, sometimes we are in Jail or persecuted as Joseph was at the end of the parshah and sometimes we are second to the king. In 2000 a Jewish man was running for vice president, his name was Joseph.  

1. Joseph tells his brothers about dreams involving his brothers bowing down to him. These prophecies greatly upset the brothers and they eventually threw him into a pit and sold him because of them.

2. Why does Joseph tell his brothers the dreams if he knows they will only upset them and cause him problems?

3. Joseph did not have a choice about telling over his prophecies. Prophets can not escape their mission. We learn this lesson from the book of Jonah. No matter how hard Jonah tries to escape his mission he can’t. The Jews are a nation of prophets and we must spread the ethical message of the Torah we have no choice, we are the conscience of mankind.

Here is what Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

  "It is true we Germans are barbarians; that is an honored title to us.  I free humanity from the shackles of the soul; from the degrading suffering caused by the false vision called conscience and ethics. The Jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind: circumcision on its body and conscience on its soul. They are Jewish inventions. The war for the domination of the world is waged only between these two camps alone, the Germans and the Jews.  Everything else is but deception.”