watch your words

Chazal tell us that of all the brothers, Yosef most closely resembled Yaakov.  How then did the brothers not recognize him during any of their interactions together?  Rashi writes in last week's parsha that when Yosef left home he had no beard and now he had a beard.  This would mean that Yosef even more closely resembled their father!  How then could the brothers miss seeing it?  

A person can disguise a lot of things about him/herself, but certain things cannot be changed.

When Yaakov came to "steal" the brachos from Yitzchak, he dressed up in Eisav's clothes, he brought food just like Eisav was supposed to bring, he used animal skins to make himself hairy like Eisav.  But then when he spoke to his father, every sentence he said had a "na," a "please" in it and he almost gave the game away.  "Ha'kol kol Yaakov," Yitzchak noticed.  Such polite language -- it's got to be Yaakov and not Eisav! 

Yaakov changed everything else about himself -- why for a few minutes couldn't he leave out the "please?" 

How a person speaks, the language and tone they use, is part of who they are.  You can  dress up and use make up to **disguise** who you are, but you can't **change** who you are.  Saying "please" is who Yaakov is. 

The halacha says a blind man is permitted to his wife because he recognizes the tone of her voice -- he knows this is his wife and not an imposter and not another woman.  There is no halacha that says a husband can assume this is his wife because he recognizes her dress or knows how she styles her hair, etc.  How we speak defines us.

L'mashal, I can put on a Yankee uniform, buy an MLB official bat, sit in the dugout at Yankee stadium so that everyone thinks I am part of the team, but trust me, if I had to step up to the plate to bat, that notion would quickly be dispelled.  The ability to play the game is part of a player's identity -- not the uniform, not the bat, not where he sits in the dugout.  So too, Yaakov could put on the clothes, put on hair, etc., but he could not change his identity to actually be someone else.

When the brothers first come back to Yaakov to report on their meeting with the person they took to be the viceroy of Egypt, the first thing they remark on is "dibeir ha'ish adonei ha'aretz itanu kashos," the man we met spoke harshly with us.  This apparently was even more important to mention than the fact that they were accused of being spies.  How the viceroy spoke made even more of an impression on them than what he said.  The brothers understood that language and tone of speech define a person's identity.  Had we been there, our attention might have been captured by what the viceroy was wearing, what the palace looked like, etc. -- all chitzoniyus.   The brothers focused on speech, as that reflects pnimiyus.



"Dibeir kashos" -- therefore, there was not even a hava amina that this was Yosef.  Members of Klal Yisrael just don't speak that way.

We finally get in our parsha to Yosef's revelation of his identity.  "Re'u ki pi ha'medaber aleichem" he tells his brothers.  "Look at how I am speaking to you," he tells them.  Look at the lashon kodesh that I am using.  This is who I am -- no Egyptian can speak this way (see Rashi, Ramban) because it's not part of who they are and they can't fake it.  The "dibeir kashos" (not even close to true Eisav-speech) was just a hora'as sha'ah, a necessity, a hechsher mitzvah to bring us back together, but this is the real me.