Collective Guilt

Individual exceptions don’t absolve collective guilt

It reads like an African story, maybe even a plot-line for Scandal!  He had 13 children by 4 women – 1 daughter and 12 sons.  Two of these women were his wives.  So he was a polygamist.  They were sisters.  The other two women were maids – one deployed by each of the two wives to procreate more children.

Jacob tricked his older brother out of his birthright.  So he had two flee into exile, where he met his match – an trickster called Laban, his mother’s brother.  The bride price for his daughter Rachel was 7 years employment, but it didn’t seem long to Jacob as he loved this lady so!  But on his wedding night, his uncle slipped Rachel’s older sister Leah under the veil, forcing a second 7-year contract on him. 

However, on the 7^th and last day of that wedding feast, Jacob did receive Rachel “on credit”.  In one week he went from being single to having 2 wives.  His first wife Leah bore him seven children – six sons then a daughter.  Rachel did not produce children at first so she offered her maid Bihah as proxy.  It worked, as she bore 2 more sons.  Not to be outdone, Leah deployed her maid Zilpah as well – and she produced 2 more sons.  Then Rachel came right and mothered 2 sons – Joseph and Benjamin.  One BIG happy family?

Well, not exactly.  Dinah had no sisters so she looked for friends in other homes.  In her socializing she was noticed by the Mayor’s son, who dishonored her.  However, he genuinely fell for her, and sent his father the Mayor to negotiate lobola for her with Jacob.  This posed a challenge, for she could not marry someone who was uncircumsized.  As a result, the Mayor agreed that he, his son and all the men in Shechem would be circumsized.  Ouch!

This left them vulnerable, unable to defend themselves.  Two of Leah’s sons (Simeon and Levi) committed one of the most heinous crimes ever recorded… on the third day of the collective male suffering through this act of attrition and good faith, they murdered every man in town, pillaged the city and absconded with its women and children.  Their father Jacob never forgave them, even on his deathbed.

Jacob also deprived Reuben of his birthright.  (First his own brother Esau and then his eldest son!)  He passed this on to Joseph, the eldest son of his beloved Rachel.  This was because Reuben got a little too close to his auntie Rachel’s maid, Bilhah, who while not technically his mother, was one of the 4 mothers of his father’s 13 children.

Communal responsibility

In the light of the background above, it is easier to contextualize the act of the older brothers turning on Joseph.  “Here comes the dreamer” they scoffed when he came into sight on an unexpected visit.  Some think that the 4 sons of the 2 maids would have ranked the lowest, and resented him most.

All the other sons at this point (assuming Benjamin came along later as the “late lamb”) would be sons of Leah.  Six in all.  Plus the four sons of the 2 maids.  Joseph was the first son of Rachel, and perhaps there was a rivalry within the family?  Was it just plain jealousy?  (For Jacob showed favoritism to Joseph.)

They were going to kill him and cover it up.  But Reuben, acting in his capacity as the eldest, convinced them to throw him down a pit.  In fact, he came back later intending to free Joseph only to find the pit empty.  To his dismay, brother Judah had made a counter-suggestion that they sell him to a passing caravan as a slave.  Double bonus!  They get rid of him, and get some money out of it too!

It was several decades before they met again.  The tides had turned.  Joseph has risen to become the second ranking government official in Egypt, under the Pharoah himself.  He had foreseen famine based on the Pharoah’s dream and was put in charge of disaster mitigation.  For seven years he built up a strategic reserve.  Regional drought arrived in the eigth year, and Jacob sent ten of his sons down to Egypt for food aid.  He kept Benjamin at home, not wanting to risk Rachel’s only remaining progeny.

Joseph was a trickster like his father Jacob and his great uncle Laban.  He put his brothers through the paces, even holding Simeon as surety so that they could go back home and bring Benjamin down to Egypt too.  But on their return, Jacob refused to let them take Benjamin.  Until in the second year of famine the hunger became unbearable, and he had to relent so that they could go down and get more assistance from Joseph’s food bank.

This time, Judah offered himself as surety to his father Jacob, that Benjamin the youngest son would not be harmed.  In fact, it was when Judah finally implored Joseph to let Benjamin go based on this personal guarantee, that Joseph finally broke down and disclosed who he was to them.  He couldn’t take it any longer because after the callous and cruel way that they had treated him as a youth.  He now saw them protecting the youngest and knew that they had changed, because they came to see the gap that a missing brother left in family life.

There were individual exceptions to the collective crime (Plan A)… Reuben convinced the brothers not to kill Joseph, just to fake it (Plan B).  Judah suggested that they rather exploit it as a money-making opportunity (Plan C).  Simeon was held as surety by Joseph.  Then Judah offered himself as surety to his father to protect the youngest brother.

Collective Guilt for Climate Change

Individual exceptions do not absolve us of collective guilt.  Wangari Maathai won a Nobel prize as a green crusader.  She said we should take what we need, not more, and leave the rest for future generations.  Yet the plunder continues, the African symbol being rhino horns.

As the Durban conference approaches, we have to come to this point that the brothers of Joseph came to.  They took a wrong turn.  They exchanged a brother for money.

Collective guilt can be ascribed by generation.  For example, the baby boomers.

It can also be ascribed by race.  For example, the disparity in terms of sharing resources under apartheid.

It can even be ascribed by class.  Desmond Tutu complains about the level of littering in Africa, but poor people’s first and foremost concern is not environmental responsibility.

Inheritance may have been the deepest issue in the story of Joseph, the older brothers resenting that the eldest, Reuben, had lost his birthright.  It had passed to the youngest, Joseph.  In the case of Climate Change, the younger generations are the ones who have been robbed of their inheritance.

Leaving a legacy for youth

It is too late to put back the non-renewable resources that have been used up greedily by a generation.

But it is not too late to redress disparities, lest they become structural.

As for class, one does not have to be rich to be responsible.  But attitudes of resentment and fatalism are encroaching African values.

No one will be affected more by future Climate Change than our youngest brothers and sisters.  They need to be alerted and resourced to fight the good fight against environmental degradation.

Einstein said that you will not change the current state of crisis by applying the same thinking that caused the crisis in the first place.  That’s precisely what Joseph was doing to his brothers – ensuring that they were thinking differently from they way they thought when they sold him out.

As much as we need individual acts of courage and wisdom in this eco-Struggle, what we need to do is ALL CONFESS our need for a new way of thinking and acting.

This begins with adopting a youth-led solution to the new problem which is apropos of the Pharoah’s dream.  The fat years of the present are going to cause some lean years in future – of depleted resources, extinct species and global warming.  The Pharoah put the Solution into the hands of a youth who was a foreigner.