“And Yosef harnessed his chariot, and he went up to meet Israel, his father, to Goshen; he appeared to him, and he fell on his neck, and he wept on his neck for a long time.” Bereishis 46:29
The long-awaited reunion between Yaakov and Yosef is most unusual in one regard: Yosef cries; Yaakov does not.
Through all the years of Yosef’s absence, Yaakov mourned. The few sentences recorded in the Torah during this time show the grief that occupied his heart and mind. Yosef, on the other hand, led a most eventful life in Egypt. We do not see him mourning his own loss. In naming his first child, Yosef seems to evidence even gratitude for his losses: he names his first child Menasheh — “for Hashem has ‘nashani’ all of my troubles and all of my father’s house.” This verse is ordinarily translated as “Hashem made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s house.”
Rav Hirsch, however, shudders at the suggestion that Yosef is grateful for the ability to forget his aged father and his entire father’s family. That rendition could lead us to conclude that Yosef was a heartless man who took no interest in his father’s fate. Instead, Rav Hirsch understands the word nashanai in its alternate sense — to be a creditor — rendering the statement as “Hashem has turned all of my trouble and all of my father’s household into my creditors.” Misfortune and tragedy was transformed by Hashem into an instrument to shape my happiness, so that I find myself deeply indebted to my trouble and to my family.
This attitude accompanies Yosef throughout his travails in Egypt, and upon the first opportunity he expresses this to his brothers:
“Do not be troubled... that you sold me here, for Hashem sent me ahead of you, to preserve life... Hashem sent me ahead of you to establish for you a remnant in the land, to preserve it for you, for your great deliverance. So it was not you who sent me here but Hashem! And He has appointed me as a father to Pharaoh, master of his entire household and ruler of the whole land of Egypt.” (Gen. 45:5-8)
But here, in our verse, Yosef weeps. We see his pent-up sadness pouring out as he surrenders completely to the pain of separation from his father. Only now, in his father’s embrace, did he feel all the pain of the separation, reliving the more than twenty years that had passed.
§ Sources: Commentary Bereishet 46:29; 41:51
