Divrei Simcha — Parshas Vayeshev

It’s Tuesday afternoon around 5:00pm. Beryl walks outside of the shul and screams his famous line to every passerby; “We need you for a minyan.” The shul unfortunately only has nine men and cannot say Kaddish or Kedushah without one more man. How many times have we seen this happen?

Why do we need ten men in a minyan after all? Why can’t we just say these special prayers with the nine men we have? Why do we need specifically ten?

This week’s parsha is one of the reasons why we need ten men. Our Chazal, Sages of blessed memory, tell us that there was a group of ten that made the decision to sell Yosef to Egypt. From here, we learn that a group of ten men makes up a minyan.

But I have a problem. There weren’t ten men in the minyan in this week’s parsha. There were twelve sons of Yaakov. Out of these twelve, let’s count the brothers that were not involved in selling Yosef. Well, immediately, we know that Yosef was not part of it (he didn’t want to sell himself). We also know that Binyamin was not part of the selling because his father, Yaakov, felt Binyamin was too young to leave the house. So now we are left with ten men, BUT Ruevain was not part of the selling either. He was caring for his father. Therefore, there were only nine men that took part in this decision. Then who is the tenth? Maybe a minyan should only be nine men?

When I lived up in Boston, a friend of mine told me the answer. The tenth was Hashem. And if you look ahead in Parshas Vayigash, we see proof to this. In chapter 45, verse 5, Yosef had just revealed himself to his brothers and tells them, “Do not be angry with yourselves… for G-d sent me here before you.” Why did Yosef say that G-d sent him there? It was because Yosef knew that G-d was the one who made the minyan. G-d was the one that made the ten.

When my friend told this to me, it was an eye opener. I had always thought that ten brothers had sold Yosef, but now I learned that it was really Hashem. Then I realized the lesson we are to learn from this. Everything that happens in this world comes from Hashem. It sometimes looks like there is someone else we should be blaming for the things that happen to us, but Hashem planned it all out. When things start going wrong and it looks like someone is giving us trouble, we should remember this week’s lesson. Hashem made the final decision. He is the one that made the minyan that decides what our fate should be. Hashem is the one in control of everything!

Good Shabbos!

-yes

Any questions or comments can be sent to me at [email protected].

By Rabbi Yaacov Seltzer
[email protected]
(305) 652-0186