Maidenhead, Parashat Vayeshev
13 December 2025 / 23 Kislev 5786
It is a coincidence of the Jewish calendar that Parashat Vayeshev almost always coincides with Chanukkah. At first glance, these two narratives seem to pull in opposite directions. Chanukkah is a story of triumph, light, and national sovereignty. Vayeshev is a story of tragedy, the darkness of a pit, and the beginning of exile.
However, when we read both stories, we find a profound overlap. Both Vayeshev and the history of Chanukkah are not primarily about external enemies; they are rigorous warnings about the dangers of internal fracture.
In Vayeshev, the threat to Jacob’s family does not come from the Canaanites or the Egyptians. It comes from within. Genesis 37:4 describes the breakdown of the family unit with shocking brevity: “And when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.”
The Hebrew phrase lo yachlu dabro l’shalom (they could not speak peaceably) implies a total breakdown of communication. The house of Jacob is not destroyed by a foreign army; it is destroyed by silence and resentment between brothers. When Joseph is thrown into the pit, it is an act of fratricide in all but name.
We see this exact pattern occurring in the history of Chanukkah.
We often teach Chanukkah as a simple morality play: the wicked Greeks against the righteous Jews. But the historical record, specifically in the First Book of Maccabees (an extra-canonical biblical source essential for understanding the period), paints a more complex picture. The conflict did not begin as a war against the Greeks; it began as a civil conflict between Jews.
1 Maccabees 1:11 records: “In those days lawless men came forth from Israel and misled many, saying, ‘Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us.'”
The Jews of the second century BCE fought over the definition of Jewish identity. The Hellenisers wanted to assimilate; the Traditionalists (the Maccabees) wanted to remain distinct. The “darkness” of Chanukkah was not just the oppression of Antiochus; it was the darkness of a society tearing itself apart, brother against brother, much like the sons of Jacob.
This brings us to a fascinating detail in our Parasha.
When Joseph is thrown into the pit, Genesis 37:24 states: “The pit was empty; there was no water in it.” Rashi, troubled by the redundancy (if it is empty, of course there is no water), cites the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 22a: “There was no water in it, but there were snakes and scorpions.”
The pit is never truly empty. If there is no “water”, which is often a metaphor for Torah and wisdom, then the void is filled with “snakes and scorpions”. In the context of Vayeshev, these snakes represent the toxicity of jealousy. In the context of Chanukkah, they represent the hatred of internal division.
So, where is the hope?
The miracle of Chanukkah is that we light a candle in the darkest time of the year. But the connection to Vayeshev teaches us that the darkness we must illuminate is not just the gloom of winter, nor the oppression of the outside world. The true darkness begins in the pit of family dysfunction and communal strife.
Joseph eventually rises from the pit. He does so not by defeating his brothers but, years later, by feeding them. He breaks the cycle of hatred that pushed him in the pit in the first place.
Similarly, the light of the Chanukkiah serves as a correction to the darkness of Vayeshev. We place the menorah in the window or the doorway, the boundary between the private home and the public street. We proclaim that, despite our internal fractures and the “snakes and scorpions” of history, we still possess the potential for continuity that is implied by the oil in the story, a flask that was supposed to last one day only and which was enough to last eight.
The lesson of this Shabbat is clear and honest. The greatest threat to our survival has rarely been “Greeks” or “Egyptians.” It has been our own inability to “speak peaceably” to one another.
As we light the first candle tomorrow evening, we are not just celebrating a military victory from 2,000 years ago. We are defying the pit. We are asserting that unlike the brothers in Genesis, we will not leave each other in the dark. We will choose, instead, to be the source of one another’s light.