Shabbos: When Light Becomes Concealment and Concealment Becomes Light

Understanding Shabbos through the lens of Parashas Vayeshev

Shui Haber

Dec 12, 2025

Shabbos Vayeshev

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Yaakov’s encounter with the darkness inside the light extends beyond himself. The Torah carries this pattern into the lives of his children and, through them, into the unfolding of Jewish history.

The Beis Yaakov1 notes that when the parashah says אלה תולדות יעקב, יוסף, “these are the generations of Yaakov: Yosef,” it speaks about more than genealogy. The hidden depths of a parent’s heart emerge either through their deeds or through their children. Yosef stands as the visible manifestation of Yaakov’s inner world. Everything that lies most inward in Yaakov, his clarity, his truth, his capacity to live only through fully clarified actions, enters history through Yosef. When Yosef is later torn away from him, Yaakov loses a beloved son and with that loss, he watches the very structure of his own spiritual life appear to collapse. Even then, the Beis Yaakov explains, Yaakov returns to what he learned in the house of Lavan and serves God in a darkness where his promises seem broken and any path of redemption remains hidden. This stubborn fidelity became part of the DNA of the Jewish people forever.

That inner faithfulness then continues through Yosef.

Yosef enters as a figure of radiance. His dreams shine with clear, upright aspiration. His sense of self feels clean and confident. While Yaakov learned how to find sparks in the night, Yosef began as a child of the morning. Yet that light immediately triggered envy and resentment. The brothers reacted against him causing the home that once drew its strength from the brachos of Yitzchak and Avraham, to break. The light called forth its own shadows, and Yosef found himself in a pit.

Chazal explain that this fall, though often misunderstood in the moment, is part of a Divine architecture that moves the world toward the ultimate redemption.2 Yosef, the child of light, had to enter a darkness even deeper than Yaakov ever faced. Yaakov lived in exile surrounded by family, yet Yosef is destined for exile alone. Yaakov endured Lavan’s manipulation and Yosef would endure slavery. Yaakov wrestled through one night, while Yosef would descend into a prison for more than two years, a place of complete darkness. This path of personal refinement for Yosef becomes the prototype of all redemptive crises throughout the history of our people.

We see this pattern beyond this parashah as well. There are countless examples. One that comes to mind appears in the biography of Rav Eliezer Ashkenazi, a mekubal, doctor, and chavrusa/co-author of the Rema. He experienced many personal ups and downs in his life and lived with a simple motto: whenever things became very good, he knew a fall would follow soon. In our language: an abundance of light brings an encounter with darkness. I would add the inverse as well. Whenever life grows very dark, we can trust that new light has already begun to move toward us.

Through this, the Torah reveals a second way that light and concealment work within the soul, where a descent becomes the very force that prepares the ascent. Put simply, often the fall itself becomes what lifts a person higher.

Rav Tzadok explains that the light of Mashiach lives inside this paradox. It emerges from a descent that refines rather than destroys, from a confusion that deepens our destiny rather than derailing it3. He adds that Yosef’s nisayon with Potiphar’s wife was a purposeful confusion that refined him. It was in this moment that his inner light grew strong enough to survive exile.4

The Izhbitzer writes that moments that feel tangled or misguided often form the exact passageways through which Hashgacha Pratis carries the world forward5. Yosef embodied this path. His light continued to grow within the darkness. It matured there and gathered force until the time arrived for him to rise and illuminate entire nations.

Yehuda’s story unfolds alongside Yosef’s. His leadership developed from a scene which appears full of failure and shame. The encounter with Tamar carries confusion on almost every level, yet from that situation comes Peretz, and from Peretz comes the line of David and the line of Mashiach6. In this way, the Torah teaches that the light of redemption rises from broken places that receive courage and honesty, rather than from a world that remains perfectly intact.

Rav Tzadok explains that what looks like an irreparable collapse in fact forms the concealment from which the Ohr of Mashiach emerges7. Peretz is literally the repaired spark of Mashiach, first hidden in the brokenness of Er, and then revealed through Yehuda and Tamar8. In this way, the darkness surrounding Yehuda’s fall becomes the catalyst of redemption. So too, in every generation a spark of Mashiach flickers beneath the surface; greater concealment signals a deeper light in formation9.

The Beis Yaakov10 teaches that when Yehuda “descends” and goes עד איש עדלמי, he does more than change locations. He enters a spiritual zone called Adullam, a place where the light grows so faint it almost disappears. The darkness he passes through carries moral, emotional, and metaphysical weight. As Micha11 says, “עד עדלם יבא כבוד ישראל,” Adullam is the point where the kavod Yisrael, the Divine light bound up with Israel, becomes hidden and compressed into almost nothing.

This is why Peretz, and ultimately Mashiach, emerge specifically from Yehuda. The final redemption requires a light born in a place beyond the reach of ordinary illumination.

Yosef represents the light that survives the darkness. Yehuda represents the darkness that gives birth to light. Together they carry forward the two movements that begin in Yaakov.

This is what makes Shabbos possible. We have the ability to hold what was broken without fear..

The Mei HaShiloach adds an even sharper layer to this contrast. Yaakov sought a life of perfect serenity, shalva, and Yosef followed him in this way, living with exquisite spiritual precision. The Mei HaShiloach teaches that this very perfection is why Yosef is judged so strictly. His path resembles that of Pharaoh’s baker: when a person operates in a realm of such refinement, even the smallest “pebble in the bread” counts against him. Even slight missteps carry great weight. This is why Yosef’s descent feels so sharp and so painful.

Yehuda’s path looks entirely different. He walks through desire, confusion, and morally tangled moments, yet the Mei HaShiloach says these actions are guided from Above, like Pharaoh’s wine butler who cannot stop a fly from landing in the cup. Yehuda’s failures are not disqualifying, indeed they become the very soil from which Peretz and ultimately Mashiach emerge. In this way, the Ishbitzer reveals that the ohr finds its strength more in the flawed, vulnerable human terrain of Yehuda than in the immaculate light of Yosef. In that place, God’s hidden hand steers imperfect actions toward redemption.

Where Yosef reveals the ohr he received from Yaakov, Yehuda reveals the ohr he receives within the darkest concealments, a light that can only come directly from Hashem.

The Mei HaShiloach explains that Yosef and Yehuda are not only two stories; they are two spiritual engines within Klal Yisrael itself. Yosef embodies the clarity of structure. Yehuda embodies the God-facing intuition that sometimes breaks the structure for the sake of a deeper truth. Their tension feels real and necessary. Yet the Navi promises that one day, “Efraim will no longer envy Yehuda, and Yehuda will not oppress Efraim”12, because both paths will finally be revealed as one movement toward redemption.

This tension appears on both spiritual and historical levels. Rav Kook writes13 that the split between Yehuda and Yosef reflects a disagreement about how the kedushah of Klal Yisrael is meant to appear in the world. Yosef’s mission is outward-facing, to engage the nations, to teach them wisdom, to elevate even Egypt, “להיות אדון לכל מצרים.” Yehuda’s mission is inward, to guard the uncompromised core of the Jewish people, the holiness of the Mikdash.

For this reason the Mishkan stood in the portion of Yosef, while the Beis HaMikdash is rooted in Yehuda. As long as these visions remain separate, the story stays unfinished. The future redemption comes when, as Yechezkel14 describes, “עץ יוסף” and “עץ יהודה” are finally brought together, when the calling to illuminate the world and the calling to preserve the Torah reveal themselves as one.

The Navi already hints to this in the words “כי מציון תצא תורה ודבר ה׳ מירושלים.” My father explained that Tziyon corresponds to Yosef, while Yerushalayim corresponds to Yehuda. Yerushalayim, the city of Yehuda, holds the inner core of kedushah, the place of the Mikdash and the concentrated presence of God. Tziyon and Yosef share the same gematria, because both express midas yesod, the bridge between heaven and earth, the point where holiness begins to move outward into the world.

In this light, (pun intended) the story of Chanuka reflects the same split. The Greeks tried to suppress Jewish spirituality and to draw the Jewish soul into their culture, which created a separation between the inner world of Torah and the outer world of influence, between Yehuda and Yosef. The Chashmonaim rose from within Yehuda, yet their victory allowed the light of Torah to spread outward once more, in a way that belongs to Yosef as well. When we light Chanuka candles, we touch a trace of that ohr, a glimmer of the ohr haGeulah and the ohr of Shabbos, the light through which the world reaches its completion.

The ultimate tikkun comes when we live with the depth of Yehuda, immersing in Torah until we uncover its inner light, and then walk with the clarity of Yosef, sharing that light with our fellow Jew and, when the time is right, with the world.

All of this returns us to Shabbos.

The ultimate Shabbos is the moment we enter shalva, when atzvus (pain from the past) and rogez (fear of the future) fall away completely and all that remains is the Ohr HaShechinah.15

Each Shabbos, we receive a neshama yeseira, and a small ray of the hidden light of Mashiach breaks through the concealment of history16.

The Beis Yaakov17 deepens this by teaching that Yosef guards this eternal spark. Even when the Jewish story seems severed, even when the lineage of who we are appears lost in the darkness, Yosef preserves the hidden point of life, the Kusta d’chayyusa, the light that never fades.

Eliyahu comes from Yosef18 as he is the one who restores identity and reveals all that is unknown at the end of days . On Shabbos, that same ohr resurfaces inside every Jew: a point that has never dimmed, even in our deepest states of concealment.

In that light, Yosef’s descent and Yehuda’s fall are clearly not tragedies but as the very material from which redemption is woven. Their stories reveal how light can move through darkness and how darkness can give birth to light.

When we step into Shabbos, the week settles inside us in a new way, and we realize that the darkness we carried did not dim the light at all; it only taught us how to receive it.

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