Parshat Vayigash: Lessons from Yosef’s Foresight and Restraint
Original author - Dr. David Goldblatt, edited by the GrowTorah Summer Inchworms 2021
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Yosef is a paragon of foresight, self-discipline, and concern for the larger community. As we saw previously, in Parshat Miketz, Yosef used prophetic insight to instruct Mitzrayim to make provisions for the seven-year famine. He had sure knowledge of an impending human-ecological problem and gathered grain in the time of plenty as insurance against hard times to come. In this week’s parsha, we see how Mitzrayim benefited from the provisions that Yosef stored. In the years before the famine, the Egyptians were obliged to show restraint — to consume less in return for future welfare, in this case the surety of survival in leaner times.
Pharaoh is the quintessential self-seeker; Yosef is the archetype of self-discipline. Self-restraint, discipline, and making pleasure secondary to the pursuit of Torah are said to be the path to the World to Come. But in this case, Yosef shows how societal restraint and discipline are also the means to secure one’s future material existence in this world. As we will explore below, this is a lesson that still applies to our modern-day societies.
Yosef had two distinct advantages in implementing his plan for safeguarding Mitzrayim that we are lacking today. His knowledge of the future was perfect, having been prophetically told by Hashem through Paraoh’s dreams what would transpire. As second-in-command to Pharaoh, his control of the Egyptian agrarian system was absolute; he had the ability to carry out his plan completely.
Some level of uncertainty is inherent in many current environmental problems. Particularly with climate change, the predictive ability of even the most advanced computers is limited, especially for those events further out in time or for narrow geographical areas. Thus, it is a much greater challenge in today’s day and age to plan and execute wise environmental policies based on predictive knowledge than it had been for Yosef.
Nevertheless, commitment to some basic environmental management principles and values, such as the precautionary principle, should be a guide for environmental planning in the face of uncertainty. The precautionary principle implies “…a willingness to take action in advance of {complete} scientific proof [or] evidence of the need for the proposed action on the grounds that further delay may prove ultimately most costly to society and nature, and, in the longer term, selfish and unfair to future generations.”[1]
In the context of climate change and increasing energy insecurity, this translates into governments, corporations, and civil society spurring innovations in technologies, institutions, business practices, and social norms that will reduce fossil fuel consumption and its CO2 emissions. In addition, developing renewable, carbon-neutral sources of energy for modern society is a necessity. To have practiced foresight, like Yosef, would have implied making these investments in earnest decades ago when the ecological indications of potential anthropogenic climate change were speculative or tentative. (Certain serious energy-related environmental problems, however, were already abundantly clear by the 1970s. As were the merits of certain solutions, such as reducing dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil and gas from politically unstable countries, thus benefiting long-term economic and national security.)
Had we developed such foresight and the ability to act on it, we would not have waited to take the issue seriously now, when the first deleterious effects of climate change are already noticeable, with much worse to come. Even today, when concerned economists emphasize how relatively little sacrifice of the one-time world gross domestic product would be necessary to invest in effective greenhouse gas mitigation, vested interests in well-to-do countries are reluctant to forego even this.[2] Their leaders march to the beat of global financial markets and short election cycles; they cannot judiciously plan for the future because, in an economy where shareholders demand high returns in the current fiscal period and consumers demand instant gratification, future concerns barely matter.
In today’s globalized, highly interconnected world of instantaneous communication, the notion of the community is necessarily much larger than it was even 50 years ago. Can we continue our practices with people in our cities, country, and world suffering from miserable poverty, malnourishment, and life in environmentally degraded conditions? Particularly when this consumption is indirectly accelerating the world’s environmental decline?[3]
The implication today is that in a world in which a large percentage of the population is suffering privation in basic needs, including food and water, and in which rampant consumerism is driving a significant part of the global environmental decline – which impacts the poor disproportionately more than others[4] — the wealthy can still reign in their environmentally significant consumption and not always live to the fullest extent of their economic abilities. We should refrain from overconsumption when others in the world are suffering extreme (financial and ecological) poverty now and when there are mounting indications that today’s ecological recklessness is impoverishing the world for the future.
Channeling more funds into helping the less fortunate, rather than indulging in more energy-consuming goods and leisure activities is tzedakah (charity) for people and tzedek (justice) for the earth. We should replace today’s model of immediate material gratification, as well as conspicuous consumption, with Yosef’s model of foresight, self-discipline, and concern for the common good.
Suggested Actions:
Support and work toward an effective energy policy in your city, state, and country: one that strongly reduces fossil energy use and strongly supports the development of carbon-free energy sources.
Use an online carbon calculator to measure and reduce your energy and carbon footprint in your home and daily activities. One good carbon calculator can be found here.
Original Canfei Nesharim Sponsorships:
The Parsha of Vayigash is sponsored by Canfei Nesharim in honor of the marriage of Jonathan and Shana Neril. May they know only simcha and bracha and many happy years together.
The Sefer of Bereishis is dedicated in memory of Jacob Cohen by Marilyn and Herbert Smilowitz and family.
Click here to sponsor a parsha.
Notes:
[1] Precaution, uncertainty and causation in environmental decisions.
[2] See the Commodity Futures Trading Commission report, “Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System.”
[3] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report
[4]See David L. Goldblatt (2005), Sustainable Energy Consumption and Society: Personal, Technological, or Social Change?, Dordrecht: Springer.
