He didn’t send a postcard – Vayyiggash
All those years Joseph was away from home he must have known how much his father Jacob was grieving for him, yet apparently he made no attempt to contact the old man and assure him he was still alive and well: as someone put the question to me years ago, why did he not even send a postcard?
There have been many suggestions as to the answer. According to one, it was middah k’neged middah – measure for measure.
When young, Jacob had been away from home for 22 years and did not send his parents a postcard, so now he was being punished for his lack of kibbud av va’em (honouring of father and mother) by suffering the same agony as his parents had.
It is an ingenious answer, but one cannot imagine Joseph deliberately remaining silent simply in order to make his father feel the pain.
A more likely argument is that Joseph realised that if Jacob found out what his sons had done to their brother he would have cast them out and never forgiven them, and that could have been the end of Bet Yisrael, the House of Israel.
To preserve shalom bayit, family harmony, and for the sake of the future generations, Joseph felt that he should wait until he met up again with his brothers and could tell them personally that he forgave them.
