Chevre, this week’s parsha is Vayigash (ויגש). The parsha starts with the brothers (most of them) standing in front of Yosef, who is the manager of Egypt. And we see Yehuda, have some backbone and disagree with Yosef. He tells Yosef that they did everything he asked. And he reflects to Yosef what will happen to Yaakov if they return without Benyamin. This is the same Yehuda that killed the people of Shechem and that threw Yosef in the pit and that sold Yosef into slavery and that was comforted by a harlot that was his daughter-in-law that he didn’t give to his 3rd son like he was supposed to. This is the Yehuda after dong teshuva or repenting, improving himself. And it is this Yehuda that breaks through the mask of Yosef causing Yosef to reveal himself.

I can only imagine the emotions going through each of the brothers at this time. For Yosef, I expect he was relieved, all the anger he had all those years washed away. His father was still pining for him and his brothers now took responsibility for their actions. Yehuda and the others have found their brother, who they never expected to see again.

How many times have you been working on a problem, trying to get something to work, trying to figure out why something isn’t working. The configs look right, the logs don’t show any errors, what could be going wrong. Finally, finally, you find some small thing, probably a missing punctuation mark and suddenly everything is right in the world again. The system works, connects up, everything is happy. You take a sigh of relief. You still have a lot of work to do, to document the issue, to ensure everything starts up, to tell the rest of your team about the problem so they can not stumble on it. Maybe to fix a linter or automatic verification to look for this problem to catch it before it shows up next time. But the problem is solved, you have discovered the secret. And your heart is lifted up.

This is what I imagine happened to Yosef and the brothers. Am I’m happy to take that feeling into Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom.