Freedom, Mastery, and Joseph: Whom Do You Serve? |
Thomas Mann’s magnificent retelling of the Joseph saga captures something the Torah hints at but never states explicitly.
In one unforgettable scene, Mann imagines Joseph asking the Ishmaelite slave trader a question that seems, at first, absurd coming from a newly enslaved seventeen-year-old. After the Ishmaelite informs Joseph that he will deliver him to a noble household, Joseph asks:
“And to whom belongeth the house?”
“Yea, to whom? To a man—and a man he is, or rather a lord. A great among the great, gilded with gold of favour, a man good, stern, and holy, for whom his grave waits in the West, a shepherd of men, the living image of a god. Fan-bearer on the right hand of the king is his title…”
“What king is that,” asked Joseph, “whose golden rewards the master beareth?”
“And to whom belongeth the house?”
“Yea, to whom? To a man—and a man he is, or rather a lord. A great among the great, gilded with gold of favour, a man good, stern, and holy, for whom his grave waits in the West, a shepherd of men, the living image of a god. Fan-bearer on the right hand of the king is his title…”
“What king is that,” asked Joseph, “whose golden rewards the master beareth?”
Mann explains or really explicates his own version of the story:
[Joseph] wanted to learn whither he was being taken, and where the house lay for which the old man destined him; but it was not this alone made him ask. He did not know it; but his thinking and asking were controlled by traditions which worked hither from the beginnings and the times of the forefathers. Abraham spoke out of him; he who in his arrogance toward........