The story of Joseph is one of the most moving and consequential stories in all the Torah. It’s all there — sibling rivalry, jealousy, subterfuge, grief, slavery, sex, forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation. So although Saturday finished the Joseph cycle in preparation for the beginning of Exodus next week, I couldn’t let the day go by without the kids learning about Jacob’s 11th son.
The entire story of Joseph spans nearly a month of torah readings, so for the Kindergarten class, I chose a lovely book — THE FIRST BOOK OF JEWISH BIBLE STORIES by Mary Hoffman. It broke down the very long story into manageable bitesize chunks with well-chosen illustrations. The kids didn’t like that Joseph was sold into slavery, but were happy when he and his brothers made up at the end.
I chose a more literary approach with the 1st/2nd graders, reading BENJAMIN AND THE SILVER GOBLET by the prolific Jacqueline Jules, which told the story from the perspective of Joseph’s little brother, Benjamin.
For the 5th/6th/7th graders, I used Joseph’s mastery of dream interpretation as a jumping off point for the weird and wild BOOK OF DANIEL, found in k’tuvim (writings) portion of the Tanach. You can read about it here: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-book-of-daniel/
The story of Daniel is set during the Babylonian Exile, around 560 BCE, with Daniel mirroring Joseph’s rise to prominence in Egypt, with a similar piety and mastery of dream interpretation for Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. But unlike Joseph (yet similar to Jews in the Book of Esther), Daniel is the subject of vicious anti-Israelite resentment and propaganda, resulting in several harrowing episodes, one involving the famous lions’ den!
But it’s the 2nd half of the Book of Daniel that is the most intriguing. Radically different in tone and language, scholars believe that at least this portion (and perhaps the rest) was written 400 years later than its setting, around the time of the Maccabees, 167 BCE. It contains a series of prophecies that speak of “the end of days” and resurrection, ideas prominent among Jews around the time of the Roman occupation of Israel.
Why this preoccupation with apocalyptic imagery? By the time of the Maccabees, Greek philosophy emphasizing a new sense of self and the concept of a soul separate from ones body had permeated Jewish thought, suggesting that there might be something beyond what was physically manifested.
But more importantly, after an unrelenting series of conquests, culminating in the Roman destruction of the 2nd Temple, Israelites began to wonder if God was still a “present”, active agent in their lives and in the land that had been promised to them. If not (a terrifying thought), then perhaps God had a plan that would only be realized far in the future, in the “end of days” brought about by a messiah, when all that was holy would be redeemed (or resurrected) and all that was evil would perish. Sound familiar? The Book of Daniel reflected all that was to become the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apocrypha, and ultimately, Christianity.