Being Consoled
When Yosef’s brothers had sold him to the Midianites, they needed to somehow explain Yosef’s whereabouts to their father. They dipped Yosef’s special coat into goat’s blood, and presented it to Yaakov—letting him know that they found it, in order to cause him to assume that Yosef had died.
Upon receiving the coat, Yaakov announced, “[it is] my son’s coat; a wild beast has devoured him. Yosef has surely been torn up.” Yaakov rent his clothes and mourned for many days; however, he refused to be comforted.
Text 11
And all his sons and all his daughters arose to console him, but he refused to be consoled, for he said, "Because I will descend on account of my son as a mourner to the grave"; and his father wept for him.
Bereishis, 37:35
On this verse Rashi explains, that the reason that Yaakov was not able to be comforted was because Yosef was, in truth, still alive and that a person can only be consoled over an individual who is truly dead.
Text 12
No one accepts consolation for a person who is really alive but believed to be dead, for it is decreed that a dead person should be forgotten from the heart, but not a living person.
Rashi, ibid
It is because of this phenomenon that the Torah tells us, Yaakov “mourned for his son many days.” Rashi explains this period of time as the “twenty-two years from the time he (Yosef) left him until Yaakov went down to (meet him in) Egypt.”
Yaakov was in a constant state of mourning from the moment that he learned of Yosef’s death until the moment that he learned that Yosef was alive and well in Egypt.
