Joseph Wept Alone When Benjamin Walked Into the Hall

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The Hall Went Quiet

Eleven men came in out of the sun and stood on the stone floor waiting to be told what the ruler of Egypt wanted with them. Ten of them had sold their brother to a caravan. Joseph sat above them in linen and paint with an interpreter at his elbow, because they still did not know he understood every word they said.

Then he looked past the ten and saw the youngest one.

Benjamin was grown. He had been a small boy in a tent the last time. He was the only other person alive who had come out of Rachel, and he was standing there in a travel-stained cloak among men who had gone home and told their father a lie.

Joseph got out an order about slaughtering an animal and preparing a meal, and his voice did what it was supposed to do, and then he stopped speaking.

Every Brother He Could Have Been

There was no shortage of models for what he might do next.

Cain took Abel out to the field and killed him there. Ishmael hated Isaac. Esau hated Jacob and worked out the arithmetic of it out loud, counting off the days of mourning for their father as the date when he could finally do it. And the ten men breathing on the floor in front of Joseph had looked at their father's favorite and been unable to say one civil word to him.

That was the family record. A brother is the person best placed to destroy you, and every one of them had proved it.

Joseph had the whole room under his hand. He could have called the guard and had the ten of them in irons before the meat came off the fire, and there was not a court in Egypt that would have asked him why. He had rehearsed it. He had had twenty-two years to rehearse it.

Behind the Door

He got up and left the room, which a ruler of Egypt can do without explaining himself.

There was a chamber off the hall. He went into it and shut the door and it came out of him all at once, with his hands on his knees, the way a man cries when he has held something down for twenty-two years and then watches it walk in through a door wearing his own mother's face.

He could not kiss Benjamin. That was the whole trouble. Kiss him in that hall and the disguise is finished, the ten know, the story of Egypt's second-in-command collapses, and whatever he still needed to do to those ten is over before it starts. So he did the crying behind a door, alone, on a floor nobody else was allowed to walk on.

Then he washed his face and went back out and said, "Set on bread."

Out Where Nobody Is Watching

There is one place a man can grab his brother and not pay for it, and it is not a palace.

Years later Moses came back from Midian and walked into the desert country east of everything settled, and Aaron came out from Egypt to meet him at the mountain of God. No court. No interpreter. No ten men watching to see what it meant. Aaron reached his brother and kissed him, and there was nobody standing there to make anything of it, because in the wilderness there is nobody standing there at all.

The Sister Who Ran to Meron

Long after both of them, a house in Meron caught fire.

The man who lived in it got out. His sister lived an hour's walk away in Gush Halav, and she saw the smoke over the ridge and understood whose roof was under it, and she ran the whole way in the open, in daylight, past everybody.

She found him standing in the street covered in ash, with his eyebrows gone and his hands black, and she took hold of him and would not stop kissing him, in front of the neighbors, in front of the men still throwing water at the walls.

Somebody must have looked at her, because she answered it without being asked.

"This does not shame me," she said. "My brother was in trouble and he has come out of it."