Here's a short d'var torah I gave tonight. (I got a call a few hours in advance, so I basically worked this out during the drive home.)

This week we read the beginning of the Yosef story and the difficulties that the favored son had with his brothers, leading them to almost kill him and then sell him into slavery. Many talk about the lessons we can learn from Yosef's behavior -- lessons of the "what not to do" variety. Tonight I find myself thinking more about his brothers and the lessons we can draw from them.

You can almost understand the brothers' point of view. Here's this kid who gets all the extra goodies from dad, who really does love him best. And what does he do with that position? He tells his brothers how they're all going to bow down to him; he dreamed it so it must be so. He does this more than once. He does other things too, like spread stories about them. He sounds really frustrating to live with.

The brothers respond to this with anger, violence, and ultimately deceit (to their father). They are upset by their brother so they try to get rid of him. This doesn't work out so well for them, and it's not a model we should follow.

We all have Yosefs in our lives -- coworkers, classmates, family members, or others. We can't get rid of them; even if you do manage to drive one away (I hope no one considers murder or slavery an option), another one will be along soon. And you usually can't reform the Yosefs either; if we're very lucky we can strive to set a good example and inspire them to change themselves, but we can't count on that. There will always be Yosefs. So it is far more productive for us to figure out how to cope with our Yosefs instead of trying vainly to make them go away.

How do we do that? Partly by recognizing that we own our feelings and behavior, and are not responsible for others'. I can be mad at the person who got the undeserved-in-my-eyes recognition, or I can make sure that I do my part in recognizing the contributions of those I feel are deserving. I can be mad and have it eat away at me, or I can decide that the Yosefs usually get what's coming to them eventually and I don't need to arrange for that personally. It's hard; these comments are inspired by a Yosef who has recently emerged in my life, and I'm struggling. But it seems the best way to cope, and maybe it will strengthen me in the long run.

Wednesday night I taught a last-minute class on liturgy at my synagogue. (A different person had been scheduled to teach a different topic but got sick; in exchange for pulling a class out of nowhere in one evening I got to pick the topic. :-) ) I've been thinking of trying to arrange something like this in the spring, perhaps one evening per major chunk of the service (amidah, kriat sh'ma, etc). The way I envision the class, we'd do some text study with lots of commentaries rather than this being a lecture. In the I-don't-have-time-to-prepare-materials version, this was a short lecture on the structure of the overall service followed by a somewhat-rambling discussion.

After my opening comments I had proposed breaking up into a few smaller groups so people could focus on the parts they were most interested in; most people didn't have specific interests so we stayed together. (There were ten of us, so that's feasible in a way that wouldn't have been had the class been well-advertised and popular.) One attendee wanted to discuss the r'tzei (one prayer in the amidah), so we started there. I asked someone to read it, asked the group to name themes in just that one paragraph (there are several), and then we talked about each of those in turn, going down a few side paths along the way. Then I suggested that -- since ours is a congregation where weekday prayer is largely unfamiliar -- we step through the weekday intermediate blessings, where we ask for things like wisdom, foregiveness, rain for our crops, and so on. I think this opened some eyes; these are broad communal petitions, not individual ones. One student requested a follow-on class on the Sh'ma and its blessings and some others suggested that they would be interested in that too.

I thought the class went ok; I am not a particularly proficient teacher and I think that showed, but the students also knew that this was a last-minute offering and were being forgiving. Three people told me later that they had really enjoyed it, which I hadn't been able to read in all of their faces during the class, so I guess that's a good sign. One of the three, who is an experienced teacher and the person who requested the session on the Sh'ma, asked about working together on it, which I will certainly take her up on.

I had brought, but did not use in class, the few volumes I own of My People's Prayer Book by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman. These are excellent; they go through the liturgy in detail, with a range of commentaries, presented well. I plan to use these in future classes on this topic. (I also plan, someday, to buy the volumes I don't yet have.)