Sermon: Being a good ancestor

Written by Rabbi Josh Levy — 4 December 2021

Of course, Joseph has something of an unfair advantage over most makers of public policy.

Faced with the great crisis of his time, Joseph has been granted by God the gift of knowing exactly what is going to happen and exactly when – the gift of true ‘Superforecasting’.

But even allowing for the advantage of divine foreknowledge, there is still something quite extraordinary in the text that Natasha just read for us.

Joseph and Pharaoh are presented with a crisis that hasn’t started yet.
One, indeed, that will not happen for years to come.
Pharaoh’s dream has revealed a cycle of 14 years – this in an age when life expectancy, if you made it past childhood, was only into one’s early thirties.

Yes, Joseph knows – truly knows – that it is coming.
But at that moment, as he stands before Pharaoh, it is still a problem that sits firmly in the distance.
In that moment, Joseph must ask for a present day response to a problem that only he can really see, from which many will not personally benefit – planning for the needs of future generations.

It is interesting to imagine what the ordinary Egyptian may have thought when that first edict came down.
When he was told he couldn’t enjoy the full fruits of his labour because of a royal dream. Because someone in the court says there will be a famine a few years in the future? And even more than that, that they are asked to put away enough food so that people from beyond their own borders would be able to come to eat, too.

How might we respond today, with our short-termist culture that demands immediate consumption, instant gratification – in which we all want to eat the marshmallow now, with limited concern for the future?

It is certainly hard to imagine Pharaoh getting such a policy through a modern day electorate.

Nearly three hundred years ago, the philosopher David Hume wrote that “men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote.”

His understanding of government was that its fundamental purpose is to do this for us – to be Joseph – to think long term.
But in our world, the electoral cycle imposes a much shorter time-horizon on our governments. Joseph can plan ahead – but, then, he does not need the consent of the people with the might of Pharaoh on his side.

But plan ahead Joseph does.
And this, the rabbis, recognise is significant.
A few verses on from the section Natasha read for us, Joseph is renamed by Pharaoh – he is now to be known as Tzaphenat-paneah.

In a third century midrash, the rabbis suggest that this is an acronym – each of the eight letters corresponding to one of Joseph’s virtues. Three of them are about future – it is this that he brings, this that makes his leadership special.

The first letter of his new name they say stands for the word Tzofeh – an odd word which means one who is able to look across distances of time or space.  The letter nun in his new name, according to this midrash stands for Navi –a prophet.
Importantly, these are not to be understood simply as an ability to predict the future. The task of the prophet in the bible was not simply to tell the future but to critique the present with an eye to the future – to think about consequences, to encourage those in power to look ahead.

This ideal – thinking long term – is found elsewhere in our tradition too.

Often, in our texts, it is associated with planting – especially planting trees – many of which have a long ‘lead time’ until they are useful – so provided a tangible example of planning for the future from which you may not benefit.

According to one midrash, the patriarch Jacob planted trees during his journeys – and it was those trees from which the Israelites would make the tabernacle in the wilderness hundreds of years later.

More famous is the story of the First Century BCE Sage Honi the Circle Maker. The Talmud relates that he was walking on the road when he saw a man planting a carob tree. He asks why the man is bothering when it will be 70 years until it gives fruit. To which the man replies, “When I was born into this world, I found a world of carob trees planted for me by my ancestors. Just as they planted trees for me, so I am planting trees for my descendants.”

This story came to mind when reading the work of the Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric – who has coined the idea of ‘The Good Ancestor’.
Honi’s planter was seeking to be a good ancestor.
Krznaric’s question is what will it take for future generations to look back and say of us that we were the good ancestors that they deserved? How can we create structures, how can we change public discourse in such a way that we can think beyond the immediate?

So many of the fundamental issues of our day ask that we do this. Climate change, the challenges of social care, national infrastructure planning, international migration – the great public policy issues of our time – like Joseph’s famine – ask that we respond long term in a short term world.  We may not, unlike Joseph, know the exact details of what is to come, but we know that these are long term challenges – ones that ask that we speak about the needs of future generations as well as our own; ask that we step out of the artificial political cycles in which we are caught. Ask that we, like Joseph, like Honi’s tree planter, become the good ancestor.

I’ve referred predominantly to politics – Joseph’s is, after all a story of power at the highest level. But these challenges do not apply only at the national sphere, but also more locally in our lives too.

What does it mean to be a good ancestor in our Jewish communities? When the former chief rabbi of the United Synagogue, Jonathan Sacks, asked the question ‘will we have Jewish grandchildren’, I disagreed with much of his diagnosis and a lot of his prescription – but it was absolutely the right question.
Or rather, how do we create synagogues, forms of prayer and learning, approaches to issues of modernity, identity, law that our grandchildren will want to be part of? As communal leaders, we are answerable not only to our current members, but also to those who come after us.
Of course, this demands of us that we ask different questions – Not what do I want, now in this moment, but what might future generations need from us? A willingness to look beyond ourselves, our narrow needs or preferences to the future.

More broadly, the need to think for the long term is true of our personal lives as well. In this sphere, so many approach religious life looking to be entertained, looking for a short term fix, or drop in expecting it to ‘work’ somehow without the investment that it requires. Like so much else it requires planning, a longer term view. The tree must be planted well before it can give fruit; the times of famine – which are there in all our religious lives – can be survived because of the investment we make in the times of plenty.

So yes, Joseph has a serious advantage. Unlike him, there are limits to our predictive powers – limits that are not surmountable. Our desire to see into the future will always exceed our foresight.

But his powers of prediction are not the extraordinary thing about the Joseph story

It is not that he knows the famine is coming, but that he cares that it is coming

Not that he can predict the future but that he seeks to create a path towards it.

Not that he is merely a superforecaster, but that he seeks to be a good ancestor.

This is the challenge that the story of Joseph presents to us: what kind of ancestors will we be?