We learn in this week’s reading that when Yosef had prophetic dreams about ruling over his family, his brothers resented it. Thinking that he was a threat to them and the nation they were to build, they contemplated killing him. Reuven, though, convinced them to throw him in a pit, in order to rescue Yosef later.
The Torah says that “the pit was empty, it had no water in it” [37:24]. Rashi asks the obvious question: if I know the pit is empty, do I not already know that it had no water? He answers from the Medrash that although there was no water, there were snakes and scorpions in the pit.
The Medrash also tells us that Torah is likened to water. The oceans go from one end of the earth to the other, water is always alive and moving, water comes from the Heavens, and water purifies the body—and these things are all true of Torah as well. So what do we learn, metaphorically, from the absence of water indicating the presence of snakes and scorpions?
We know that “nature abhors a vacuum.” Create a vacuum, and things will get sucked into it. Something must fill the void. Rabbi Elisha Prero explained, from his teacher Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik zt”l, that a spiritual void works the same way.
If there is no Torah, he said, do not imagine that there can be nothing in its place. On the contrary, something must fill the void. What will that something be? It will not be neutral, it will be negative. It will not be no morals, but rather immoral. It will be the spiritual equivalent of snakes and scorpions.
This is something which we sadly see around us today. The American “separation of church and state” led to a refusal to teach morality in school. Did that lead to a generation with no morals? No, much worse, it led to a generation that uplifts immorality. It led to people believing that mass murder is justifiable “resistance,” and that rendering children permanently infertile is a “moral” good.
We must ensure that our children have Torah, because without it, the very opposite ideas will rush in to fill the void!
Image credit: A literal pit of vipers by Carol Highsmith on Rawpixel.
