The Targum catches a small pastoral detail. Joseph asked the chiefs of Pharoh who were with him in the custody of his master's house, saying, Why is the look of your faces more evil today than all the other days that you have been here? (Genesis 40:7).
Notice what Pseudo-Jonathan is preserving. Joseph did not simply glance at the men. He had been watching their faces day after day, and had built up enough of a baseline that he could see the change this morning. These were not his friends. He was not obliged to ask. He was himself a prisoner, wrongly imprisoned, with every reason to sit with his own sorrow. But the face of another man had shifted, and he asked.
Bereshit Rabbah 88 treats this as one of the decisive moments in Joseph's life. If he had walked past the troubled faces — if he had thought, my own troubles are larger; let them sit with theirs — he would never have heard the dreams, never have interpreted them, never have been remembered by the chief butler two years later, never have stood before Pharaoh. The road to the second chariot of Egypt passes, without exception, through one morning question asked of two strangers.
The Sages call this quality nosei be-ol im chavero — bearing the yoke with one's fellow. It is not about solving other people's problems. It is about noticing that the problem has changed. Joseph sees the faces before he hears the story.
The Targum, redacted in the Land of Israel in the early common era, preserves the exact phrasing of the question — why is the look of your faces more evil today than all the other days? — because the rabbis wanted readers to memorize it. It is the template for the question the righteous person asks when they walk into a room and something is wrong. It costs nothing. It takes fifteen seconds. And it is the hinge on which whole destinies turn.
The takeaway is unadorned. Ask. The smallest attention — you look different today — can be the opening line of the conversation that changes your life and theirs.