The pull back & return – Vayyeshev
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).
