Every Friday evening, traditional Jewish parents bless their male children (and often grandchildren), “May the Almighty make you like Efraim and Menashe” and their female children, “May the Almighty make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.” Why do we not bestow the blessing of the patriarchs upon our male children, “like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”?

Apparently because the Bible, in this week’s Torah reading, ordains, “And [Jacob] blessed [his grandsons] on that day saying, ‘In such a manner shall Israelites bless [their children], saying, ‘May the Almighty make you like Efraim and Menashe,’ and [Jacob] placed Efraim before Menashe.” (Genesis 48:2).

But the biblical verse notwithstanding, what is so special about Efraim and Menashe? And why does Efraim, the younger son, receive top billing? (48:17-19). And what does grandfather Jacob mean when he requests of Joseph that these two grandsons born in Egypt be his, Jacob’s, “like Reuven and Shimon”?

In order to understand, it is necessary to analyze the personality of Joseph, and view his phenomenal personal and religious development. Initially, Joseph is pictured as his father’s son: “These are the generations of Jacob; Joseph was 17 years of age…. Israel loved Joseph more than all of his children because he was the son of his wisdom and old age.” (37:2,3 and Rashi.) He was the most beloved son with whom his father spent much time transmitting the tradition, the son slated to be his heir and the bearer of the Abrahamic birthright.

Joseph’s dreams — of the brothers’ sheaves of grain and the sun, moon, and 11 stars bowing down to him — express a cosmic arrogance as well as a hankering after the more sophisticated and powerful Egypt, which the brothers believed to be antithetical to the family mission and covenant with God. Father Jacob rebuked him for his hubris (37:10) but at the same time apparently valued his universal reach, which could well be viewed as a desire to realize the divine charge that through the Abrahamic family “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The brothers — in jealousy and righteous anger against the egocentric dreamer who threatens to undermine the united family vision of the centrality of God and the Land of Israel — cast Joseph into a pit filled with snakes and scorpions. In the pit, Joseph physically senses pain in every one of his bodily members and psychologically cuts himself off from his membership in what has become a cruel family of Israel intent on his destruction. From the pit, he blames his father for having created such a dysfunctional familial relationship due to his egregious favoritism.

Joseph is sold into Egypt and succeeds in overcoming many obstacles and rising to second-in-command to Pharaoh himself. But his alienation from his past only becomes more intense. He wears Egyptian garb, sports an Egyptian ring and necklace, assumes an Egyptian name, and marries Osnat, the daughter of Potifar, Egyptian priest of On. He names the eldest son Menashe, “Forgetfulness,” for “the Creator has enabled one to forget all of my toil and the household of my father.” (41:51) And he names his second son Efraim, “Fruitfulness,” because “the Creator has made me fruitful, with future, in the land of my affliction.”

Joseph remained a moral son of the Creator — withstanding the seduction of Mrs. Potifar — during this part of his Egyptian period, but the personal God of the Abrahamic covenant and the familial customs of Israel seem to have eluded him. As he develops, Joseph regains his memory, and his brother Yehuda, by invoking a portrait of his loving and mourning father, succeeds in getting him to rejoin the family of Israel. In a most poignant climax to Genesis, Joseph becomes reunited with his father, his memory, and his traditions. The oldest male son of Jacob and Rachel remembers with his father, sees the God of Abraham and Israel as the central architect of all his failures and successes, and, with his dying breath, asks to be buried in the Jewish homeland. His universalism has been reunited with the Abrahamic vision.

Now old grandfather Jacob comes to bless his grandsons born in Egypt, Menashe and Efraim. True to their names, Menashe serves as his father’s linguist-interpreter and political adjutant, a true Egyptian scholar and statesman. (42, 43) Efraim studied Torah with grandfather Jacob as soon as the patriarch arrived in Egypt. (48:1) Jacob-Israel well understands that the Jewish people must remain true to their past, must remember ancient traditions, as they move into a future in which all the nations of the world inform their lives and their cultures with the peaceful and redemptive teachings of Israel. Torah must embrace the world — but it must first and foremost remain true to its source. So must our generations be blessed — like Efraim and Menashe together — but with Efraim before Menashe.