Come Forward

Yesterday was December 25th. Not my holiday. But it was a workday in Israel, and, for us, we spent it at the Michael Levin Base in Jerusalem cooking a BBQ for lone soldiers. Bringing supplies for them. Visiting with them. Sharing with them

Lone soldiers — chayyalim bodedim — are IDF service members without immediate family in Israel. Some are volunteers from the Diaspora. Many are immigrants. Most are from Israel and don't have a family for one reason or another.

All of them serve without the support structure most soldiers rely on: no parent dropping off home-cooked food, no family Shabbat table to come home to on leave. They are, in a meaningful sense, people who left everything behind to show up.

We are in Israel this week with the Atlanta Israel Coalition. Our friend Cheryl Dorchinsky, who founded the AIC, has been organizing solidarity missions since the war began (and, to be fair, well before that during other crises).

We had been helping her plan this one from Atlanta for months — logistics, outreach, coordination.

We were already coming to Israel on our own, a trip that came together last minute, and once we realized the timing overlapped we said: we should be there in person, not just behind a screen.

So we joined them and added our hands to theirs.

Earlier in the week we drove to an industrial area outside Tel Aviv to drop off sweatshirts to be printed with IDF unit insignia for paratroopers serving on the Golan, where winter hasn't gotten the memo that this is the Middle East.

We visited a PTSD therapy farm in Efrat and planted an olive tree. We toured a children's home in Kiryat Gat that runs a bakery as part of its educational program and bought more baked goods than any group of adults should reasonably carry.

On Monday we met with a Haredi rabbi who recently enlisted in the IDF himself — a man who described himself as "a healthy Jew" and meant it as a complete sentence.

None of this is dramatic. That is the point.

In Parashat Vayigash, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. Twenty-two years of separation — sold into slavery, given up for dead, mourned by their father — and then three words in Hebrew that carry the weight of an entire family's grief and hope:

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יוֹסֵ֤ף אֶל־אֶחָיו֙ אֲנִ֣י יוֹסֵ֔ף הַע֥וֹד אָבִ֖י חָ֑י וְלֹֽא־יָכְל֤וּ אֶחָיו֙ לַעֲנ֣וֹת אֹת֔וֹ כִּ֥י נִבְהֲל֖וּ מִפָּנָֽיו׃

Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still well?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dumfounded were they on account of him.

— Bereishit 45:3

Ani Yosef. I am Joseph. Three syllables. And his brothers — these men who sold him, who dipped his coat in blood, who told their father he was dead — could not speak.

The room went silent. That is what truth does when it finally arrives: it takes your voice away.

Then the next verse. Joseph sees them frozen and says something the Torah renders with a specific verb:

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יוֹסֵ֧ף אֶל־אֶחָ֛יו גְּשׁוּ־נָ֥א אֵלַ֖י וַיִּגָּ֑שׁוּ וַיֹּ֗אמֶר אֲנִי֙ יוֹסֵ֣ף אֲחִיכֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־מְכַרְתֶּ֥ם אֹתִ֖י מִצְרָֽיְמָה׃

Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come forward to me.” And when they came forward, he said, “I am your brother Joseph, he whom you sold into Egypt.

— Bereishit 45:4

Gshu na elai. Come forward to me. The same root as the parsha's name — vayigash, "and he approached." Judah approached Joseph at the beginning of the parsha to plead for Benjamin. Now Joseph says the word back: come closer. The distance between them — geographic, emotional, twenty-two years deep — closes in a single sentence.

Rashi notes that Joseph spoke gently here. He didn't summon them. He asked them to come near. The rabbis read this as an act of intimacy: he wanted to show them something that required closeness, something he could not shout across the room. He was showing them he was circumcised — proof that he was still one of them, that Egypt had not erased what mattered.

And then Joseph does something remarkable. He reframes the entire story:

וְעַתָּ֣ה ׀ אַל־תֵּעָ֣צְב֗וּ וְאַל־יִ֙חַר֙ בְּעֵ֣ינֵיכֶ֔ם כִּֽי־מְכַרְתֶּ֥ם אֹתִ֖י הֵ֑נָּה כִּ֣י לְמִֽחְיָ֔ה שְׁלָחַ֥נִי אֱלֹהִ֖ים לִפְנֵיכֶֽם׃

Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you.

— Bereishit 45:5

L'michyah — to save life. God sent me ahead. Not to punish you. Not to prove a point. To keep people alive. Joseph, standing in a palace in Egypt, tells his brothers that the worst thing they ever did to him was preparation for the most important thing he would ever do.

That reframing takes an extraordinary kind of generosity. It does not erase what happened. It does not pretend the pit never existed or the chains were comfortable. It says: what you meant for harm, God meant for sustenance. And now come closer, because we have work to do.

A few chapters later, Jacob finally arrives in Egypt. Joseph hitches his chariot and rides out to meet him in Goshen:

וַיֶּאְסֹ֤ר יוֹסֵף֙ מֶרְכַּבְתּ֔וֹ וַיַּ֛עַל לִקְרַֽאת־יִשְׂרָאֵ֥ל אָבִ֖יו גֹּ֑שְׁנָה וַיֵּרָ֣א אֵלָ֗יו וַיִּפֹּל֙ עַל־צַוָּארָ֔יו וַיֵּ֥בְךְּ עַל־צַוָּארָ֖יו עֽוֹד׃

Joseph ordered his chariot and went to Goshen to meet his father Israel; he presented himself to him and, embracing him around the neck, he wept on his neck a good while.

— Bereishit 46:29

Od. Still. A good while. Twenty-two years of absence collapsed into one embrace, and the Torah says the weeping went on and on.

Rashi, following the Midrash, says that while Joseph wept, Jacob was reciting the Shema. The rabbis wonder at this: your son, whom you mourned for two decades, is in your arms — and you're davening? The answer the tradition gives is that Jacob was channeling the highest joy he would ever feel into an expression of devotion.

The deepest reunion he could imagine became a prayer.

Thursday, in the kitchen at the Michael Levin Base, we made shniztel, we grilled (outside) burgers and hotdogs, and arranged plates and watched teens and twenty-something-year-olds in uniform line up for a hot meal on an afternoon that many in the rest of the world was spending with their families. These are kids whose families are in Los Angeles or Paris or Johannesburg. They chose to be here. They showed up.

Gshu na elai. Come forward to me. The whole parsha runs on that verb. Judah approaches to plead. Joseph invites his brothers closer. Jacob travels to Egypt.

Everyone is crossing distance — physical, emotional, generational — to stand in the same room with someone they love.

This is what a solidarity mission is, stripped of its brochure language. You cross the distance. You show up. You cook the food. The money stays here, the sweatshirts go to the Golan, the olive tree gets planted at the therapy farm. No, none of it really fixes anything. But. All of it says: we are here. Gshu na — come forward. We came. Many times, that is enough.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham