More than an Instagram story: Vayigash
- Dr Tanya White
- Dec 24, 2025
- 5 min read
For a Shabbat friendly printable pdf scroll to bottom of page.
Narrating in an Age of Fragments
Last week, tucked inside the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon, was a small pamphlet with a quietly audacious title: Megillat HaTekuma — The Scroll of Rebirth.
Edited by Rav Tzvi Rimon alongside other religious Zionist voices, it offers what it explicitly calls a “perspective of faith” on the war we are still living through. What struck me was less any single argument it made than the interpretive gesture it modelled. It did not deny trauma, bypass grief, or collapse complexity into slogans. Instead, it attempted something more demanding: it chose to narrate. It insisted that this chapter of history—devastating, disorienting, morally exhausting—must nonetheless be told as part of a story, and that how we tell it will shape not only how we understand what has happened, but who we become in its aftermath.
That claim—that narration is not mere description but a formative act—feels especially urgent today. I was recently reading the work cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, who describes our era as suffering from a crisis of narration. Stories, Han argues, require conditions that contemporary culture steadily erodes: time, attentiveness, patience, and the willingness to hold past, present, and future together in a single frame. A story is never simply a sequence of events; it is the interpretive labour that links events into an arc and, in doing so, gives them meaning. It also creates a shared world. Stories can be told and retold, inhabited together; they bind people into traditions and offer direction by situating lives within a broader horizon of meaning.
In our era however, much of what now passes for “story,” is closer to data: fragmented, present-tense, contextless, and transient. Even the language of “stories,” as in Instagram stories, is revealing (by the way the word Instagram is made up of ‘instant camera’ and ‘telegram’ – a story through an instant picture). These are not narratives in any robust sense—there is no sustained arc, no moral trajectory, no temporal depth—but isolated moments designed for immediate consumption and rapid disappearance. Consider the platforms’ own prompts: “Tell me what’s happening right now.” The question is not what it means, how it fits, or where it leads, but what is occurring in this instant. The result is an endless stream of unlinked scenes—often centred on self-display—that leaves little room for reflection. The medium that moves us immediately to the next clip discourages contemplation. Meaning gives way to momentum; narration gives way to noise.
Judaism as Narrative Life
Judaism as a civilisation of narration stands in protest to this way of story telling. The Torah does not begin with a legal code but with a story, and it insists—again and again—that human beings are shaped not only by rules and principles, but by the narratives through which they understand themselves, their obligations, and their place in the world. Identity is sustained by big stories that place the solitary ‘I’ into webs of loyalty, and moral responsibility across time, creating a ‘we’. Law may regulate behaviour, but story shapes who we believe ourselves to be. The ethical life, in Judaism, is inseparable from the narrative life.
To belong to a covenantal community is to inherit a story that precedes you and will outlive you, a story that situates individual lives within a longer arc of memory and responsibility. It is precisely this narrative continuity—this refusal to reduce existence to isolated moments—that has enabled Jewish life to endure rupture without dissolving into meaninglessness. Judaism does not deny catastrophe, but it insists that catastrophe must be narrated, interpreted, and integrated into a story that still points forward.
Yosef and the Courage to Re-Narrate Trauma
It is against this backdrop that Parashat Vayigash offers a unique perspective on our modern cultural developments. Yosef is not merely a figure within the story; he is an agent of narration. He models what it means to refuse fragmentation—to refuse to live as a series of disconnected moments—and instead to interpret life as an arc capable of bearing meaning even when its chapters are traumatic. When his brothers finally stand before him, Yosef has every justification for narrating his life as a story of betrayal: a beloved son thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, imprisoned unjustly, severed from family for decades. None of this is imagined; it is all painfully real. And yet Yosef refuses to let that chapter become the final word.
We see this narrative posture long before the great reveal. When Pharaoh asks Yosef to interpret dreams, Yosef responds, “Bil’adai—it is not only in me; God will answer Pharaoh’s peace” (Bereishit 41:16). Earlier, in prison, he says to the baker and butler, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (40:8). These are not pious flourishes. They signal a deep refusal to centre himself as the sole author of his ascent. Yosef situates his life within covenantal meaning, not as an escape from responsibility, but as a way of naming it. To place God at the centre is not to abdicate agency; it is to insist that agency operates within a larger horizon of purpose.
That posture reaches its climax when Yosef finally reveals himself to his brothers. “Do not be distressed, and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here,” he tells them, “for God sent me before you to preserve life” (45:5). He repeats the claim a few verses later, expanding its scope: “God sent me before you to ensure your survival… and to keep you alive for a great deliverance” (45:7). Yosef does not deny wrongdoing or minimise the harm the brothers caused. He is aware, however how blame and shame can be counterproductive to healing old wounds. In interpreting the trauma and wrong-doing as part of a larger arc that exceeds human intention—reading providence not as a cancellation of moral responsibility, but as a frame within which even failure can be redirected toward life – he encourages the brothers to repent and repair.
What defines us Pit or Pyramid?
The moment Yosef refuses to let the pit define the end of his story, he does more than save himself—he saves a family from becoming nothing but the act of betrayal. This is what narration does at its best: it binds people back into something larger than pain. And this is why the question of how we tell our story now is not merely literary, but national. Societies can be held together by fear or anger for a time, but not for long. Eventually they require a narrative that can hold grief without collapsing into it, that can honour loss without letting loss define identity, that can name miracle without denying suffering. The struggle, then, is not only for security, but for coherence—for the ability to say: this happened, it hurt, it changed us, and still, it will not be the last chapter. This, in many ways, is precisely what Megillat HaTekuma is attempting to do.
Yosef’s move is radical not only theologically, but psychologically. To reframe a traumatic narrative is to integrate pain into a story that prevents it from consuming the self. His arc suggests that one of the deepest forms of freedom lies not only in what we do, but in how we tell what has been done to us—and in how that telling shapes what we do next.
If Yosef could move from the bottom of a pit to the top of a pyramid without allowing the pit to define the end of his story, then perhaps the challenge of this moment is not only to endure, but to narrate. To refuse fragmentation. To insist on an arc. To tell a story that does not flatter us or numb us, but binds us—again—into the long, difficult, covenantal work of becoming.
Comments