We are alive

When Jacob finally reunites with Joseph in Egypt, he says something puzzling: “Now I can die, after seeing your face, for you are still alive.” At first glance, this makes little sense. Jacob already knew Joseph was alive. He had heard that Joseph was not only living, but thriving, second-in-command to Pharaoh, running the most powerful economy in the ancient world. What changed when Jacob saw him in person?

The answer lies in a deeper definition of what it means to be “alive.”

Jacob had heard that Joseph was successful. He had heard about his power, influence, wealth, and control. But success alone does not tell you whether a person is spiritually alive. Egypt was not just another country; it was the center of moral corruption, excess, and idol worship. Jacob’s fear was not whether Joseph had survived physically, but whether Egypt had changed him inside.

Only when Jacob embraces Joseph face to face does he finally understand. The Zohar explains that Joseph wept—not about politics, not about famine, not about power—but about the future destruction of the Temple that would be built centuries later. At that moment, Jacob knew that Joseph was still Joseph. The same child raised in his father’s home, the same soul, untouched at its core by exile, power, and temptation. That’s when Jacob could say, with relief, “Now I can die… for you are still alive.”

This moment is not just about one father and one son. It’s the story of the Jewish people.

For over 2,000 years, we have lived in “Egypts” of different forms; physical exile, cultural pressure, political vulnerability, and spiritual challenge. We have endured the Crusades, expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust. In our own recent memory, we carry the unbearable weight of October 7, the Bondi Beach massacre, and the horrifying resurgence of antisemitism; not whispered on the margins, but shouted in the streets, on college campuses, and even echoed in the halls of government.

And yet, here we are.

That alone demands an explanation.

Joseph himself named one of his sons Menashe, saying, “G-d has made me forget (“nashani”) my hardship and my father’s home.” But this “forgetting” was only external. Joseph did not preserve his past with a token gesture or symbolic nostalgia. He didn’t just light a candle once a year to remember where he came from. In Egypt, he built a place of prayer and learning. He sent his children to grow up with Torah values and Jewish identity. Outwardly, he was Egyptian royalty; inwardly, he lived with Jerusalem.

That is the secret of Jewish survival.

Every Jewish soul descends from a place of holiness into a complicated, often hostile world. The soul cries out: Why am I here? I want meaning, I want truth, I want to live as a Jew. And the answer, again and again, is that this descent is not a fall, it is a mission. Like Joseph’s journey to Egypt, it is meant “to keep a great people alive.”

If a Jew still feels pain over Jewish suffering, still flinches at antisemitism, still mourns our losses, still cares, that is proof the soul is alive. If a Jew feels pride, responsibility, or even anger when our people are attacked, that too is a cry of the soul.

Empires rise and fall. Ideologies burn out. Hatred reinvents itself. But the Jewish soul remains. Bruised, grieving, sometimes exhausted, but alive.

Jacob didn’t rejoice because Joseph was powerful. He rejoiced because Joseph was faithful. And that is our story today. After everything we’ve been through, the fact that the Jewish people still care, still remember, still feel, still show up, is nothing short of miraculous.

We are still alive. And that means our mission is not over.