Shall Grasp the Tzitzit of a Jew
Zechariah 8:23, the Brothers of Joseph, Yom Kippur, and the Chain of Tens
An essay in conversation with the lectures of Rabbi David Fohrman and Rabbi Efraim Palvanov
I. The Verse That Gathers the Nations
Thus says the Lord of Hosts: In those days it shall come to pass that ten men from all the languages of the nations shall take hold — they shall take hold of the corner of the garment of a Jewish man, saying, Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.
That is Zechariah 8:23. The Hebrew word for the corner they seize is kanaf, the same word the Torah uses for the corners of the garment upon which tzitzit are bound (Numbers 15:38; Deuteronomy 22:12).
The nations do not seize a throne, a sword, or a creed abstracted from Israel. They seize the fringe that reminds a Jew of the commandments, the thread that, in the language of the Sages, resembles the sea, the sea the sky, and the sky the Throne of Glory.
Rashi, following Shabbat 32b, reads the ten men as a sample from the seventy nations: ten per language, seven hundred per corner, two thousand eight hundred servants for the four corners of the tallit.
The Malbim reads the same verse as an end-of-days recognition that the Torah of Israel is holy, so that the nations no longer wander from city to city seeking the word of God in Jerusalem alone; they recognize it on the garment of any Jew in whose company God is known to dwell.
The Targum tradition had messianic overtones. The plain sense remains stubborn: the nations come to a Jew, not the Jew to a replacement people.
The Number Ten
The number ten is not a decoration. In the lectures that open this inquiry — the series of tens that begins, at about the four-minute mark, with the ten brothers — ten is the measure of a complete company of Israel that can either hold together or tear itself apart.
Ten brothers stand over a pit. Ten spies (of the twelve) slander the Land. Ten days of awe stretch from the sounding of the shofar to the closing of the gates.
Ten martyrs are later recited on Yom Kippur as if Heaven itself were collecting an old debt. The question this essay asks is whether Zechariah’s ten men from the nations are strangers or Israel’s own scattered limbs returning home by grasping the fringe they once let go.
II. The Series of Ten: Brothers, Spies, Days of Awe, Martyrs
The ten brothers
Jacob had twelve sons. When Joseph is sent toward Shechem, and then Dothan, Benjamin is still a child at home,e and Joseph himself is the object, not a member of the company that plots. The active company is ten. Genesis later refers to them as “men” (anashim) ten times in the descent to Egypt.
Rabbenu Bahya hears in that tenfold naming a hint of the Asarah Harugei Malkhut, the Ten Martyrs, whose deaths the midrash treats as a tikkun for the crime against Joseph. Whether one accepts gilgul as history or as midrashic theology, the literary fact is the same: Scripture keeps counting ten.
The ten spies
Twelve princes go into Canaan. Two — Caleb of Judah and Joshua of Ephraim, Joseph’s house — tell the truth. Ten returned with an evil report. The generation that believed the ten was sentenced to die in the wilderness.
Tradition marks Tisha B’Av as the night of that weeping, and Tu B’Av as the day the dying finally stopped. Yom Kippur and Tu B’Av are therefore paired in the Mishnah (Taanit 4:8) as the two greatest days of joy in Israel: one, the day the second tablets were given after the golden calf; the other, the day the decree of the spies was seen to have ended.
Two national catastrophes, two ten-fold failures of brotherhood and of vision, two days on which Heaven is said to have reopened the door.
The ten days of awe and the golden calf
The Aseret Yemei Teshuva runs from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. The Sages place the giving of the second tablets on the tenth of Tishrei. The first tablets were shattered because of the calf. The second is received on the day that will become Yom Kippur.
The calf is the rupture of the covenant; Yom Kippur is the day Moses descends with a repaired covenant. The ten days are not a private self-help season invented in the Middle Ages. They are the span in which a broken people waits to learn whether God will dwell among them again. That is the same question the High Priest will later answer with blood in the inner house: can the Presence remain in a camp that has defiled it?
The ten martyrs
The piyyut Eleh Ezkerah, recited in the Ashkenazic Musaf of Yom Kippur, frames the Roman execution of ten sages as payment for the brothers’ sale of Joseph. The emperor, having learned the law of Exodus 21:16 — he who steals a man and sells him shall die — demands ten lives from a later generation.
The midrash is late, composite, and historically compressed; the ten did not die in a single day. Its liturgical function is exact. On the day the Temple’s impurity is purged, Israel recites a story in which brother-hatred is treated as a debt that still collects interest. The lecture that moves from brothers to spies to martyrs is tracing that same unpaid account.
III. Grammar and Location: Who Stood Where When Joseph Disappeared
This paragraph is devoted to the grammar and the map, because the popular sermon that says “the brothers sold Joseph for silver, therefore Joseph is a picture of Jesus sold for silver” cannot survive the Hebrew of Genesis 37 if the Hebrew is allowed to speak.
The scene is Dothan, north of Shechem, in the hill country of Samaria, on a caravan route that runs toward the Jezreel and then down toward Egypt. The brothers have moved the flocks from Shechem. Joseph, sent from the valley of Hebron, is directed by an unnamed man (ish) to Dothan.
They see him from afar and conspire. Reuben, firstborn, hears and intervenes: “Let us not take his life. Shed no blood. Cast him into this pit in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him” — in order to save him from their hand and restore him to his father (Genesis 37:21–22). They strip the ketonet passim and throw him into a pit that has no water.
The Brother Sits to Eat
Then they sit down to eat bread. The eating is not next to the pit’s mouth. They have distanced themselves. Judah, seeing an Ishmaelite caravan coming from Gilead with gum, balm, and ladanum, proposes a sale: “What profit if we kill our brother and cover his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let our hand not be upon him, for he is our brother, our flesh.” The brothers listen.
Then comes the verse whose subject the translations have decided in advance (Genesis 37:28): “And Midianite men, merchants, passed by; and they pulled, and they brought Joseph up from the pit; and they sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver; and they brought Joseph to Egypt.”
The verbs wayyimshekhu, wayya‘alu, and wayyimkeru have no explicit new subject. Hebrew narrative often continues a subject by convention. The last named actors, however, are not the brothers. They are anashim midyanim soharim — Midianite merchant-men.
Rashbam, Rashi’s grandson and the great champion of peshat, reads the grammar as it stands: while the brothers sit at a distance waiting for the Ishmaelites Judah had pointed out, another party, Midianites, happens upon the pit, draws the boy out, and sells him to the Ishmaelites.
Rashi, by contrast, forces the brothers back into the verbs: Jacob’s sons pulled him up and sold him, and the Midianites are a later link in a chain of resales. That reading saves Joseph’s later sentence, “I am Joseph your brother whom you sold to Egypt” (Genesis 45:4). It does not save Reuben.
Where is Reuben if the brothers sold Joseph
Where is Reuben? The Torah is careful. “And Reuben returned to the pit, and behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he tore his garments. And he returned to his brothers and said, The child is not, and I — where shall I go?” (37:29–30). If the brothers had just completed a sale in Reuben’s absence, his shock would be theater.
If he had been standing in the circle that pulled Joseph up and counted silver, he would not have come back to an empty hole and rend his clothes. Midrash places him either on his rotation of service to Jacob or in sackcloth and fasting for the matter of Bilhah — the first man, says Bereshit Rabbah, to begin the work of teshuvah. Rabbi David Fohrman’s readings of the Joseph cycle press this spatial fact: Reuben is not in the selling party.
He has left the pit in order to return to it. The firstborn’s plan required that the others remain ignorant of his rescue. That plan only works if the pit is still his destination. When he arrives, the boy is already gone. The grammar and the geography agree. The company that intended to sell did not execute the sale in time. Another set of hands did.
Two Verses
Two later verses must be held together, not collapsed. Genesis 37:36 says the Medunites sold him to Egypt, to Potiphar. Genesis 39:1 says Potiphar bought him from the hand of the Ishmaelites who had brought him down. Genesis 40:15 records Joseph’s own legal description of the event to Pharaoh’s cupbearer: “I was stolen — gunnavti — from the land of the Hebrews.” Stolen, not sold by brothers.
When he later says “whom you sold,” Rashbam and Shadal treat the verb as causal and moral, not as a bill of sale. You put me in the pit. You meant to be rid of me. What follows is on your heads. That is a true indictment. It is not a notarized transaction.
IV. Rabbi Palvanov: The Brothers Did Not Sell Him
Rabbi Efraim Palvanov has insisted on this peshat in public teaching, including the material that treats the so-called sale against the grain of children’s Bibles and of Christian typology. The Torah does not say the brothers sold Joseph. It says they threw him in a pit and sat deliberating.
Judah said, ” Perhaps we will sell him. While they deliberated, Midianite merchants took him out, enslaved him, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. Reuben returned to save him, and the child was gone. He tore his clothes. He said to the others, ” The boy is not. That sentence is unintelligible if they had just pocketed the money together.
Rabbi Ephriam Palvanov Torah Scholar
Palvanov’s pastoral point is as sharp as his grammatical one. If the story is taught as brothers selling a brother, parents are forced to explain a monstrosity to children whom they are otherwise commanding to stay united. The Torah’s story is darker and more usable: a moment of abandonment is enough.
Leave a brother in a pit “only for a little while,” walk far enough away that you will not hear him, and the road to Egypt will take him without your signature. The brothers did not need to complete the sale to become guilty. They needed only to stop being present. That is why, years later, they still do not look for him in Egypt. People who have sold a slave to a known caravan know the destination. People from whom a boy has vanished do not.
The later midrashim that speak of twenty pieces of silver divided two by two for shoes, of a ban sworn by nine brothers with God as the tenth because Reuben was absent, of Simeon and Levi as the ones who lowered him — these are moral midrashim, not a correction of the verbs. They tell us what the deed felt like in Israel’s conscience. They do not erase wayya‘avru anashim midyanim soharim. Palvanov’s reading, like Rashbam’s, refuses to let conscience rewrite syntax.
V. Why Joseph Is Not a Picture of Jesus
A great deal of popular Christian reading treats Joseph as a type of Jesus: the beloved son, hated by his brothers, cast down, sold for silver, numbered with transgressors, raised to the right hand of power, savior of the nations in famine, revealing himself at last to those who rejected him. The comparison is homiletic. It is not peshat, and on the point that preachers love most — the sale for silver as Judas — it is a false claim about the Hebrew text.
If the brothers did not sell him, the silver typology is already broken. Judas hands a man over; Midianites lift a boy out of a hole the brothers left open. Twenty pieces are not thirty. Joseph is not killed. There is no crucifixion, no tomb, no claim that Joseph’s blood atones.
Joseph marries into Egypt, names his sons for forgetting his father’s house and for fruitfulness in affliction, and rules a pagan court in the clothes of that court. He tests his brothers with a planted cup. He weeps. He feeds. He does not offer himself as a sacrifice. Judah’s later self-offering for Benjamin is the nearest thing in the cycle to substitution, and Judah is not Joseph.
Covenant With Heaven
The deeper objection is covenantal. Joseph’s story is the story of how Israel got to Egypt, how a family that could not hold its own brother became a nation that would have to be redeemed from the house of bondage. To lift Joseph out of Israel and install him as a prefiguration of a man whom the nations would later worship in place of Israel’s God is to repeat, in theology, the original abandonment.
Zechariah 8 does not say that the nations will grasp the robe of a Jew who has been recoded as their own departing deity. It says they will grasp the tzitzit of a Jew because they have heard that God is with you — with the people still wearing the commandments.
Hashem Is With Us
The typology that makes Joseph into Jesus quietly relocates “God is with you” from Israel to a church that no longer needs the Jew except as a shadow. That is not how Zechariah ends chapter 8. That is how later readers used Joseph, having already decided the ending.
None of this requires contempt for those who love the Joseph story in another canon. It requires honesty about Genesis. The brothers did not sell him. Reuben tried to bring him home. Judah tried to avoid blood by a sacrifice that other hands completed. Joseph said he was stolen. The famine, the dreams, the reconciliation, the bones carried up from Egypt — these belong to Israel’s own plot, which runs toward Sinai and the Land, not toward Golgotha.
VI. Yom Kippur: Atonement of the House, Not a Private Ledger of Sins
Leviticus 16 does not open with a catalog of an Israelite’s private faults. It opens with the death of Nadav and Avihu and with a warning that Aaron may not enter the inner shrine at any time.
The day’s work is stated in verbs whose objects are places: he shall make atonement for the holy place because of the impurities of the children of Israel and because of their transgressions, for all their sins; so shall he do for the Tent of Meeting that dwells with them in the midst of their impurities; he shall go out to the altar and make atonement for it (Leviticus 16:16–18).
When the rite is finished, “he has finished atoning the holy place, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar” (16:20). The direct objects of kipper are the shrine, the tent, and the altar.
Jacob Milgrom
Jacob Milgrom and the chapter’s priestly logic are blunt on this point, and the Mishnah agrees in its own idiom. The blood of the inner goat and of the bull purges the Temple and its sancta of the impurity generated when Israelites — knowingly or not — bring tumah into the precincts, enter the house while impure, eat of holy things in an impure state.
Wanton sin that is never brought to the altar drives uncleanness inward as far as the kapporet. Once a year, the house itself is scoured so that the Presence will not depart. The scapegoat then carries the people’s confessed avonot into the wilderness.
Yom Kippur: Anointing for The House Only
Two systems operate on one day: purification of sacred space and the sending away of the people’s guilt. Later piety folded both into “forgiveness of my sins.” The Torah’s emphasis is on the survival of the dwelling. Yom Kippur is the annual answer to a terrible possibility: that Israel will come to the Tent in impurity and force God to leave.
The Golden Galf: Hashem Will Make the Second Even Better Than The First
That is why the day belongs with the golden calf and with Joseph’s pit. The calf threatened the covenant’s continuation. The pit marked the beginning of the road to a land where there was no Mishkan at all. The ten martyrs are recited while the Avodah is rehearsed because both concern whether the house and the people can remain together after brother-hatred and defilement.
Afflicting oneself on Yom Kippur is not, in the priestly frame, a technique for feeling sorry about individual lapses. It is the people’s bodily assent to the purgation of the house. The nation steps out of ordinary flesh for a day so that the sanctuary — or, in exile, the memory and hope of the sanctuary — can be clean.
VII. Why Five Afflictions: Five Verses, Five Levels of Soul
The Mishnah (Yoma 8:1 / 73b) lists five inuyim: no eating and drinking, no washing, no anointing, no leather shoes, no marital relations. The Gemara (Yoma 76a) asks to what the five correspond, and Rav Hisda answers: to the five times the Torah commands the affliction of the soul in connection with this day. The five places are:
1. Leviticus 16:29 — “It shall be a statute forever for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you shall afflict your souls.”
2. Leviticus 16:31 — “It is a sabbath of solemn rest for you, and you shall afflict your souls; it is a statute forever.”
3. Leviticus 23:27 — “But on the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement… and you shall afflict your souls.”
4. Leviticus 23:32 — “It shall be for you a sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict your souls; on the ninth of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall rest your sabbath.”
5. Numbers 29:7 — “On the tenth day of this seventh month you shall have a holy convocation, and you shall afflict your souls; you shall do no work.”
Maariv-Shacharit-Musaf- Minchah- Ne’ilah
Eating and drinking alone carry karet, because only they destroy the nefesh in the plain sense of life. The other four complete a system. Kabbalistic and later Hasidic readings map the five afflictions onto the five names of the soul in Bereshit Rabbah 14:9 — nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, yechidah.
The five tefillot of the day (Maariv, Shacharit, Musaf, Minchah, Ne’ilah) are coordinated with the same ladder, Ne’ilah touching yechidah, the singular point at which the soul is not other than its source.
One common pairing runs: anointing against nefesh (the skin’s comfort), leather shoes against ruach (the spirit that would walk at ease upon the earth), washing against neshamah (the lamp that needs a clear vessel), food and drink against chayah (the life-force), and marital union against yechidah (the oneness that must, for this day, be reserved for the One).
Other masters rearrange the pairs. The structure is what matters. Five written inuyim, five spoken prayers, five immersions of the High Priest in the original rite, five levels of soul: the day is built to pass the entire person, not only the conscience, through the cleaning of the house.
To afflict the soul, then, is not to punish the individual for a private rap sheet. It is to still every layer that would otherwise keep bringing impurity into the place where God chose to dwell. The brothers sat down to eat bread while a child cried in a pit.
Yom Kippur answers that meal. No bread. No comfort. No covering of the feet that walked away. No union that pretends the family is whole while a brother is missing. The five denials are a refusal, for twenty-five hours, to be the company that ate.
VIII. Yom Kippur and Tu B’Av: A Happy Day
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said: Israel had no days as good as the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur (Taanit 4:8). The pairing shocks only those who have been taught that Yom Kippur is a funeral. The Talmud explains the joy of Yom Kippur: it is a day of pardon and the day the second tablets were given. The calf is behind. The covenant is rewritten.
Tu B’Av carries its own list: the men were permitted to marry one another; the ban on Benjamin after Gibeah was lifted; the generation of the wilderness stopped dying; Hosea son of Elah removed the roadblocks Jeroboam had set against pilgrimage; the dead of Betar were allowed burial; the wood for the altar was completed.
Almost every reason is a repair of fracture — between Matey, between north and south, between the people and the Land, between the slain and dignity.
Joseph is the hidden joint between the two days. The Book of Jubilees, which is not Torah but is a witness to how some Jews of the Second Temple period read Genesis, dates the brothers’ deception of Jacob — the goat, the bloody coat — to the tenth of the seventh month, and presents Yom Kippur as a statute because they had grieved their father’s love.
Whether one accepts that date or not, the symbols rhyme: a goat is killed, a garment is stained, a father mourns a son who is not dead, a pit in the wilderness, a later sending of a goat to the wilderness. Tu B’Av is the other panel of the diptych.
It is the day the sons of Jacob may become one family again, the day the dying that began with ten spies is over, the day daughters of Jerusalem dance in borrowed white so that no girl is shamed. White garments. No hierarchy of cloth. The opposite of a special coat that marked one brother and enraged ten.
A happy day, then, is not a day that pretends the pit never happened. It is a day on which the house is clean, the tablets are second and therefore still given, the Matey may marry, and the nations — if Zechariah is telling the truth — will one day take hold of a Jew’s tzitzit rather than a brother to throw him away.
IX. Are the Ten Men the Sons of Israel? The Lost Brothers?
Zechariah’s wording is not coy. The ten are “from all the languages of the nations,” mikol leshonot hagoyim. They are not introduced as Shevatim. They speak the tongues of the goyim. The Jew whose kanaf they grasp is identified as Yehudi, a man of Judah’s remnant, the community that returned from Babylon and still wore the commandments in Zechariah’s day. On the peshat, the ten men are Gentiles.
And yet Israel’s own story makes the question unavoidable. Ten Matey were torn from the house of David and sown among the nations. Hosea named a child Lo-Ammi, not my people. Ezekiel was told to take two sticks, Joseph and Judah, and make them one in his hand. The spies who slandered the Land were ten.
Joseph and Ten Brothers
The brothers who abandoned Joseph were ten, and Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, became the very house that would later be called “Ephraim” and lost. It is not an allegory to notice that the number which Zechariah assigns to the nations is the number of the missing brothers.
One may therefore hold two sentences at once. First, the verse is about the nations. Second, some of those nations may be carrying Israel without knowing it. The lost Matey, if they return, will not return as a museum of northern accents. They will return as people who have heard that God is with the Jew who still keeps the fringe, and who take hold of that fringe in order to walk.
The Sons of Noach: The Great Prophet of Sumer
Converts, God-fearers, remnants, souls the midrash calls “the lost ones of Israel in the land of Assyria” — Zechariah does not issue passports. He describes a gesture. Ten take hold. They do not seize the Jew. They seize the tzitzit, the reminder of Sinai, and say the only sentence that repairs the pit: “We will go with you.“
Are they the son of Jacob? Not in the simple sense that Zechariah was secretly talking only about Ephraim. Are they permitted to include the sons? The prophets spend half their breath hoping so. The lecture that runs from ten brothers to ten spies to ten martyrs is already teaching that the ten who failed must become the ten who hold on. When the nations grasp the corner, Israel’s own scattered tens are invited to grasp it first.
X. Conclusion: From the Pit to the Corner
The chain is one chain. Ten brothers leave a boy in a pit at Dothan and sit down to eat. Midianites, not they, complete the disappearance; they are guilty all the same. Ten spies teach a nation to weep for the Land as if it were a grave. A calf breaks the first tablets.
Ten days later, the second tablets come down, and that day is named for the purging of the house. Five times the Torah says, ” Afflict your souls, because five layers of a person have been feeding the impurity that collects in the sanctuary.
Ten sages in a midrash will not let the sale go unpaid. On Tu B’Av, the sons may marry, and the dying stops. On Yom Kippur, the Avodah is recited as if the High Priest still walked inward with blood, and Eleh Ezkerah is recited as if brother-hatred were still the debt.
Ten Men From The Nations
And at the far end of the book of the Twelve, ten men from the languages of the nations take hold of a Jew’s tzitzit because they have heard the only news that ever mattered in this family: God is with you.
The readers who made Joseph into Jesus needed a sale that the verbs do not give them, a death the story refuses, and a transfer of “God is with you” away from the people who still tie the fringe. The Torah’s ending runs the other way.
Reuben turns back toward the pit. Judah learns to offer himself for a brother. Joseph, who was stolen, feeds the world and asks only that his bones go up. The nations, at last, do not replace the Jew. They hold his tzitzit and ask to walk.
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Principal sources
Tanakh: Genesis 37; 39:1; 40:15; 45:4–8; Leviticus 16; 23:26–32; Numbers 13–14; 15:38–40; 29:7; Deuteronomy 22:12; Zechariah 8:20–23. Mishnah Yoma 8:1; Taanit 4:8. Talmud Yoma 76a; Shabbat 32b. Rashi and Rashbam on Genesis 37:28; Rashi on Zechariah 8:23; Malbim on Zechariah 8:23. Bereshit Rabbah 84. Midrash Eleh Ezkerah / Asarah Harugei Malkhut. Rabbenu Bahya on the ten “anashim.” Lectures and writings of Rabbi David Fohrman (Aleph Beta; Joseph cycle) and Rabbi Efraim Palvanov (on the peshat of the sale). Scholarly discussion of priestly kipper: the sanctuary as object of atonement in Leviticus 16.