The pull back & return – Vayyeshev

Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife, by Philipp Veit c.1816
Joseph, who is central to this week’s reading, is called Yosef HaTzaddik, Joseph the Righteous One.
At first sight it seems strange. How could Joseph be a tzaddik when he was almost guilty of a grave sin with Potiphar’s wife?
True, he refrained at the last minute from sinning with her because, according to the sages, he saw a vision of his father Jacob and knew that succumbing to temptation would be completely wrong and an insult to his father’s memory.
The Maharal of Prague says that a tzaddik is a person who has sinned (or almost so) but has truly repented. The tzaddik is a person who has risen above his wrongdoing.
The pull back and return from wrongdoing made Joseph a great man and maybe that’s why when the Israelites eventually left Egypt it was Joseph’s bones that they took with them (Ex. 13:19).