my fabrengen dvar torah

Additionally, during the fabrengen, the host is expected to speak. So, I prepared a Dvar Torah for the week.

The Torah portion the week of my birthday was Vayigash. In this portion, the saga of Joseph and his brothers was continued. We picked up with Judah and his brothers trying to secure the release of their youngest brother, Benjamin, after Joseph planted his goblet in Benjamin’s bag to frame him.
The portion explains to us that the brothers see all their misfortunes as part of the unending punishment for what they had done to their brother Joseph, their father’s favorite, whom they had 22 years previously thrown into a pit and then sold into slavery. It is explained that all of them these 22 years have been able to think of hardly anything else, continually haunted by Joseph’s memory and concern over what has happened to him, and how they might rediscover him. And yet.
The brothers had now spent countless hours in direct company of Joseph, now second in command only to Pharaoh in Egypt. True, he is in a very different circumstance then they had last seen him, and true, he is speaking now in a different language, but Joseph is still in fact himself. He was 17 years old, very nearly a man, when he last saw his brothers, and so in all likelihood his appearance is not so wholly alien to what his brothers last knew him to be. It seems a bit odd that his brothers, who constantly think on him, would still fail to know him, even after he exclaimed who he is to them, after having spent so much time in his company.
And so this brings me to wonder, why we so easily can find ourselves obsessed with something, thinking of and hoping for just one thing for years and years, and yet when it is right in front of us, even after it has identified itself to us, we fail to see it for what it is.

Too often, we worry so much about finding the forest, we don’t realize we are in the midst of the trees. We are so hardpressed to what we think we are seeking, we don’t even realize when we have found it.