Rabbi Breit's Blog

It can feel impossible to know when is the right time to do something, especially something big or challenging, exciting or frightening. When is the right time to speak up? When is the right time to leave? When is the right time to start?

One of my favorite songs we sang in middle school chorus was about an old man playing the fiddle while rain poured through a big hole in his roof. In the downpour a drenched traveler tells the fiddler to fix the leak. The fiddler replies that he can’t fix it now, it’s raining! The passer-by considers that wisdom and so says to fix it on a sunny day. The fiddler replies: “My cabin doesn’t leak when it doesn’t rain!”

Ignoring the chutzpah of the presumably well meaning passer-by, this song always made me smile because you can always find a perfectly good reason not to do the task you’re avoiding. The best time to do unpleasant tasks is obviously “later”.

In our parhsa you can almost feel Judah’s exasperation when he’s waiting for his father’s permission to go back to Egypt for more grain, a trip his father anxiously forbade because it involves taking Benjamin, when he exclaims, “We could have been there and back twice if we had not dawdled!”

But for many of us, especially the more enthusiastic or achievement-oriented among us, it can feel like the best time to do something big is right away, as soon as you think of it. If you had an exciting idea, may as well act before you forget or the time is no longer right. Strike while the iron is hot! Manifest your dreams!

That seems to be Joseph in last weeks parsha, parshat Vayeshev. He has a thought, he says it. He tattles on his brothers. He brags about his dreams. He tells his master’s wife he doesn’t want to sleep with her while she’s holding his coat in her hands.

Joseph giant leap in wisdom between Vayeshev and Miketz is developing incredible patience - learning to do the thing in its right time.

In the space between the parshiot he sits in jail for two years of days. That’s a long time to be marking the passage of time in days, maybe scratched out one by one on his jail cell wall. And he’s there because the cupbearer has forgotten to tell Pharaoh about him and his dream skills!

But his patience turns out to be a blessing. When the cupbearer finally mentions him, it’s in the perfect set-up of Pharaoh desperately demanding a dream interpreter and the dream itself demanding the appointment of a new vizier.

And when his brothers come to see him in Egypt, Joseph takes great pains not to reveal himself. He waits. He sends them home — twice! He didn’t rush to tell his father he’s alive. The rabbis ask, how could he do that? How could he keep his elderly father bereft for so long? They answer it’s because he knew things had to happen in a certain order and he couldn’t rush it.

Even if he wanted to reunite with his father and brother Benjamin more than anything in the world, he had to wait until the dreams were fulfilled in the order that he’d dreamt them. He had to let his anger go before he revealed himself. He had to forgive them before he reunited with them. He had to understand patience before he could build the world he wanted, everything right in its time.

This holiday and this Shabbat, even as the pressure of family holidays can exacerbate our tendency to rush or to avoid, may we have the patience and the wisdom to do the right thing in its right time. Shabbat shalom!