The Kitchen in Someone Else's Apartment

On Tuesday night we stood in the kitchen of an Airbnb near Levinsky Market in Tel Aviv and made it ours. It took about longer than we wanted, but now we had a homebase for a couple weeks. After, we walked to the bakery around the corner — kosher, because this is Israel and finding kosher is massively easier here than the South — and bought challah and rugelach and a bag of pita that was still warm.

Tonight we light Shabbat candles in a stranger's apartment. Just the two of us. The challah is store-bought. The kitchen is borrowed. And Shabbat will be Shabbat.

Parashat Vayeshev opens with one of the most deceptive sentences in the Torah:

וַיֵּ֣שֶׁב יַעֲקֹ֔ב בְּאֶ֖רֶץ מְגוּרֵ֣י אָבִ֑יו בְּאֶ֖רֶץ כְּנָֽעַן׃

Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had sojourned, the land of Canaan.

— Bereishit 37:1

Vayeshev. And he settled. The word suggests permanence — a man finally at rest after decades of running. He fled Esau. He worked fourteen years for the wrong wife and then the right one. He wrestled an angel. He buried Rachel on the road. Now, at last, he is home.

Rashi saw it differently. "Jacob sought to dwell in tranquility," he writes, "and the troubles of Joseph pounced upon him. When the righteous seek to dwell in tranquility, the Holy One says: Is it not enough for the righteous what is prepared for them in the World to Come, that they also wish to dwell in tranquility in this world?"

The parsha called "And He Settled" is the one where everything falls apart. Joseph is his father's favorite. His brothers know it. Jacob makes him a ketonet passim — an ornamented tunic, or a coat of many colors, depending on who you ask — and the gift becomes a target. Joseph dreams that his brothers' sheaves bow to his. He tells them about it. They do not take it well.

By the end of the first aliyah, Joseph is stripped of his coat, thrown in a pit, and sold to a caravan heading south.

The pit is empty. The coat is soaked in goat's blood. Jacob mourns a son who is not dead. And Joseph — seventeen years old, dragged across borders to a country where he knows no one — lands in the house of an Egyptian officer named Potiphar.

Here is where the text does something worth noticing:

וַיְהִ֤י יְהֹוָה֙ אֶת־יוֹסֵ֔ף וַיְהִ֖י אִ֣ישׁ מַצְלִ֑יחַ וַיְהִ֕י בְּבֵ֖ית אֲדֹנָ֥יו הַמִּצְרִֽי׃

GOD was with Joseph, and he was a successful man; and he stayed in the house of his Egyptian master.

— Bereishit 39:2

God was with Joseph. Four words. No explanation of how — no miracles, no visions, no angel visits. Joseph lands in a foreign house and gets to work. He manages well. Potiphar notices. Everything Joseph touches prospers, and so Potiphar hands him the keys.

Then Potiphar's wife lies about him, and Joseph goes to prison. And the Torah repeats itself:

וַיְהִ֤י יְהֹוָה֙ אֶת־יוֹסֵ֔ף וַיֵּ֥ט אֵלָ֖יו חָ֑סֶד וַיִּתֵּ֣ן חִנּ֔וֹ בְּעֵינֵ֖י שַׂ֥ר בֵּית־הַסֹּֽהַר׃

GOD was with Joseph — extending kindness to him and disposing the chief jailer favorably toward him.

— Bereishit 39:21

Sold. Enslaved. Slandered. Imprisoned. And at every station: God was with Joseph.

The phrase is not a promise that things will work out. Things are terrible. Joseph has lost his family, his freedom, and his coat.

What he has not lost is the capacity to show up wherever he lands and make it function. To settle — even when nothing about the situation is settled.

On Wednesday — two days before this column goes up — Syria officially registered its first Jewish organization in the country's history. The Jewish Heritage in Syria Foundation, chartered on December 10, is led by Rabbi Henry Hamra, the son of the last rabbi to leave Syria. Hamra and his son read Torah in the Faranj synagogue in Damascus, the only one of the city's twenty-two synagogues still largely intact. Most of the others are rubble. Fewer than ten Jews remain in the country. The community once numbered in the tens of thousands.

A son came back to the place his father left, walked through a door that had been sealed for decades, unrolled a Torah scroll, and read.

Vayeshev does not mean "and he found peace." It means "and he dwelt." The act is the point. Jacob did not find tranquility in Canaan — he found Joseph's bloodied coat. Joseph did not find safety in Egypt — he found a jail cell. But in each place, something was built. Joseph ran the household. Joseph ran the prison. The dwelling was not in the walls. It was in the person.

We did not build this kitchen. The challah came from a bakery whose name I cannot yet pronounce properly. Tonight we will not have our own table or our own chairs (though we have our own travel candlesticks). We will have two candles, a borrowed countertop, and each other.

Chanukah starts Sunday night — and we will light those candles here, too, in someone else's apartment, in someone else's window, in a land that feels more like home than home does.

Vayeshev Yaakov. And Jacob dwelt. Not because the world was quiet. Because he was there.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham