Rebecca sat by her supper table with her parents and siblings, Michelle and Daniel, but her mind was far away. She was thinking about her Parsha lesson at Hebrew school that day where they had learned about the story of Joseph and his brothers, who had thrown him in a pit and sold him to merchants as a slave. 'What's on your mind?' asked her father.
'Well I was just wondering, how could the children of Jacob, who was such a great man, do such a terrible thing, to their very own brother?'
'You mean when they sold him to the merchants as a slave?' her father asked. 'Yes,' said Rebecca. 'It was terrible!'
'They were jealous of him', said her brother Daniel. 'Joseph told them his dream how they would all bow down to him one day'. 'Yes,' said Michelle, 'and also Jacob favored Joseph, and made him a special coat, so they were jealous of him because of that'.
'But that still doesn't explain it', said Rebecca, almost emotionally.
'You are right', said her father. 'But,' he continued, 'in order to understand how G-d should let such tragic things happen you have to look at the big picture'.
The three children waited for him to explain what he meant by 'big picture'.
'You see, if the brothers had not sold Joseph to the merchants as a slave, then he would not have ended up in the land of Egypt - which you will probably learn about the next time - and then Joseph would not have been appointed as second to the king, and he would not have been able to warn Pharaoh about the famine, and then Jacob and all his brothers would not have come down to Egypt later on, because Egypt would not have stored up all the food in time for the famine…And we would have not been redeemed from Egypt to receive the Torah...'
'Wow,' said Daniel, drumming his fingers on the table, 'We could learn from this when things look dark it may at the end be good, like with the Jews going down to Egypt.'
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