Having the power to retaliate, and choosing another response
Soul4you · Georgina Kovacs · The Birth of Choice series
After Jacob’s struggle, I turn to one of his sons. Joseph stands before the brothers who sold him, but the balance of power has changed: he is now in a position to decide how he will respond. (Genesis 45)
I do not call revenge his right. What interests me is that he has the power to retaliate and does not make retaliation the purpose of the encounter.
Before following him, I want to begin closer to home. Have you ever said you had forgiven someone, while keeping a quiet distinction alive: I am the generous one, and they are the person who failed?
That question is not an accusation. It is a place from which I can examine my own understanding of forgiveness.
Forgiveness and the position above another person
Imagine a family meal where an old disagreement returns to the conversation. Someone says that it has all been forgiven, then recounts every detail in a way that leaves their own moral superiority carefully intact.
This is an imagined scene, not a diagnosis of everyone who speaks about a past hurt. Remembering, processing and naming what happened can be necessary; repetition alone does not prove that a person has failed to forgive.
The narrower question I ask myself is whether I am using forgiveness to keep a ranking in place. Have I released something, or simply found a more gracious-looking way to remain above the other person?
For me, the deepest movement of forgiveness does not preserve that hierarchy. It concerns recognition of a shared origin that wrongdoing has obscured without destroying.
A Course in Miracles approaches forgiveness within a metaphysics in which separation is not ultimately real. (Text, chapter 6, II.6–10) This is the framework I bring to Joseph’s story, not a claim that Genesis and the Course are saying precisely the same thing.
I understand our spiritual being as grounded in one Source. At that level, I do not believe an injury can destroy what we are.
But that conviction must not be used to deny an event, a wound or an offender’s responsibility. “Our essential being has not been destroyed” is not the same sentence as “Nothing happened to you.”
The difference is central to everything that follows. A spiritual account of forgiveness should not make an injured person less safe.
“I am Joseph”
Genesis introduces Joseph at seventeen, narrates his brothers’ hostility and his being sold for twenty pieces of silver, and follows his arrival in Egypt. (Genesis 37:2–28) Later, during the famine, his brothers come to Egypt for grain without recognising him. (Genesis 42:1–8)
The revelation does not happen at their first meeting. When it finally comes, Joseph sends the attendants away and speaks to his brothers through tears. (Genesis 45:1–4)
He identifies himself as the brother they sold into Egypt, then speaks of God sending him ahead to preserve life. (Genesis 45:4–8) Both parts of that statement matter.
He does not pretend that they did nothing. He also does not allow what they did to be the only meaning his life can now carry.
This is the movement I contemplate as forgiveness. The facts are not erased, but they cease to be the sole authority over the future.
Joseph’s interpretation belongs to Joseph within the narrative. It is not a sentence I am entitled to impose on someone else by declaring that God arranged their abuse for a useful purpose.
Meaning found by the person who lived an experience and meaning assigned by an observer are not interchangeable. The difference protects the dignity of the encounter.
The brothers: understandable motives, accountable actions
Genesis openly describes the family tensions: Jacob favours Joseph, the brothers hate him, and Joseph’s dreams provoke further hostility. (Genesis 37:3–11) These details make the actions recognisably human without making them acceptable.
I see several movements in the account:
- Unequal recognition: The father’s visible preference becomes part of the brothers’ resentment. (Genesis 37:3–4) It raises a question about how easily love can be experienced as a scarce possession.
- Fear of subordination: The brothers respond to Joseph’s dream by asking whether he expects to reign over them. (Genesis 37:8) I hear a fear of losing position alongside the anger.
- An attempt to stop the dreamer: The brothers discuss killing Joseph and challenge what will become of his dreams. (Genesis 37:18–20) The narrative does not permit us to call this merely an innocent misunderstanding.
- Profit: Judah proposes selling Joseph rather than killing him. (Genesis 37:26–28) A person’s life becomes the subject of a transaction.
- Refused compassion: Years later, the brothers remember seeing Joseph’s anguish and not listening when he pleaded with them. (Genesis 42:21) Their own recollection acknowledges a response they could have made and did not.
A rabbinic teaching in Shabbat 10b also uses Jacob’s preferential gift to Joseph as a warning against favouring one child over others. (Shabbat 10b) This is the relevant Talmudic passage, rather than a reason to attribute the entire observation loosely to Rashi.
Understanding these motives does not require us to decide that the brothers were merely afraid and therefore not responsible. Fear can help explain an action without excusing it.
That distinction matters in our own lives as well. I can understand someone’s insecurity and still refuse what they do with it.
The spiritual question is not whether I can turn every offender into an innocent victim of circumstances. It is whether I can see a human being without either denying the act or making the act their entire being.
Twenty pieces and thirty pieces
Joseph’s sale for twenty pieces of silver invites a comparison with the thirty pieces offered to Judas for handing over Jesus. (Genesis 37:28; Matthew 26:14–16) I draw that comparison around the act of placing a monetary value on a person.
The legal passages sometimes linked with these amounts need to be described accurately. Leviticus 27:5 gives twenty shekels as a valuation in the context of a vow for a male aged five to twenty, not as a general market price for a boy. (Leviticus 27:1–8)
Exodus 21:32 specifies thirty shekels payable to the owner when an ox gores an enslaved man or woman; it is a compensation provision, not a ransom tariff. (Exodus 21:28–32) The matching numbers do not establish a single, timeless scale of human market value.
The connection I retain is ethical and symbolic. In each betrayal, a person is treated as something that can be handed over in exchange for money.
This is a question about the actions of particular people in particular narratives. It supports no accusation about a people, a religion or an inherited collective character.
I bring it back to myself instead. When do I begin to see another person only as an obstacle, a threat or a means to an end?
The question is uncomfortable because it does not belong only to dramatic betrayals. It concerns the quality of attention with which I meet ordinary people.
The inward court
Lesson 46 of A Course in Miracles begins from the idea that God does not forgive because God has never condemned, and presents forgiveness as release from the effects of fear. (Workbook, Lesson 46) Within the Course’s framework, forgiveness changes the mind’s relationship with condemnation.
For me, that can be pictured as an inward court that continually rehearses verdicts. Other people stand accused, and somewhere beneath the proceedings I am also trying to establish my own innocence.
What would happen if I no longer needed that court to determine my worth? Could I respond to what happened without living inside its accusation every day?
This inward court is not the same as an actual court of law. Seeking justice, reporting abuse or maintaining a boundary does not contradict the possibility of spiritual forgiveness.
Nor does the Course’s language of projection mean that every accusation is invented or that someone harmed by another is secretly guilty of the same act. I use it to examine the judgements I add, not to invalidate evidence.
A more useful distinction is between naming conduct and condemning a whole being. I may need to do the first without continuing to organise my life around the second.
That movement is not always immediate. It cannot be made honest by commanding someone to perform it.
When the brothers become afraid again
After Jacob’s death, the brothers fear that Joseph will now retaliate and ask for forgiveness; Joseph weeps and reassures them. (Genesis 50:15–21) The renewed fear belongs explicitly to the brothers.
The passage does not say that Joseph’s earlier forgiveness has failed or that an old desire for revenge has returned to him. It shows reassurance being offered again when the relationship faces a new uncertainty.
Joseph says:
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to save many people alive, as is happening today.” (Genesis 50:20, World English Bible British Edition)
He then promises to provide for them and their children. (Genesis 50:21) The response takes a practical form.
I hear two truths held together. Their intention was harmful, and his life has become capable of serving something beyond that intention.
The second truth does not abolish the first. It prevents the first from possessing every possibility that follows.
In our own lives, a changed relationship with a grievance may also need to be lived repeatedly. A memory can return without every earlier recognition becoming false.
Forgiveness, as I understand it, is not an order to stop remembering. It is an invitation to meet the memory from a place that is not entirely governed by it.
Remembering what precedes the grievance
The remembering I mean is not a more detailed reconstruction of the injury. It is recognition of a shared spiritual origin.
In my metaphysical view, the relationship with the Source is not created by our good behaviour and destroyed by our worst behaviour. That is why I can distinguish a person’s essential being from an action for which they remain responsible.
The Course’s distinction between knowledge and perception helps me articulate that view: knowledge is not the changing account the mind gives of events in time. (Text, chapter 3, III) But this remains a spiritual framework, not an empirical demonstration that an injury had no consequences.
Joseph’s narrative spans many years: he is seventeen at the beginning, thirty when he enters Pharaoh’s service, and reveals himself after seven years of plenty and two years of famine. (Genesis 37:2; Genesis 41:46–54; Genesis 45:6) Those details give an interval of about twenty-two years within the story.
That is not twenty-two years of uninterrupted slavery or imprisonment. The latter part includes his authority in Egypt, while the separation from his family continues. (Genesis 41:40–57)
I contemplate the contrast between that long history and the immediate recognition of brotherhood. The years are not removed, but they no longer contain everything that can be said about the relationship.
For me, this is why forgiveness is remembering rather than merely overlooking. I remember that the story of harm is not the whole of what we are.
It may bring peace without restoring contact. It may change my inward position while another person remains unwilling to acknowledge their responsibility.
Reconciliation requires more than one person’s inward work. Forgiveness should not become a demand that I make an unsafe relationship available again.
Three practices, without a deadline
Notice whether you are preserving a ranking
If you feel ready to examine a relatively manageable grievance, ask whether a sense of superiority is part of what keeps it active. You do not need to condemn yourself if the answer is yes.
Then ask what you are trying to protect. Naming a need may be more useful than performing generosity while the need remains unacknowledged.
Ask what is possible now
Instead of demanding that you find the good in a painful event, ask what might support your life from here. The answer may concern safety, a decision, grief, practical help or a new direction.
If something valuable has emerged, you can recognise it without deciding that the harm was necessary. What you have made of an experience is not the same as a justification for it.
Separate facts from the added verdict
Write down what happened as concretely as you can. Then notice the conclusions you have attached to it about your worth, the other person’s entire being or what the future must be.
Do not reverse the accusation onto yourself simply to seem spiritual. The purpose is clearer seeing, not a new route to self-blame.
What remains of the story?
This essay begins at the point Joseph reaches with his brothers, then looks back at the family dynamics and the years that stand between them. Dreams, the robe, the pit, service, imprisonment and responsibility remain part of that larger narrative.
I do not imagine forgiveness as a single sentence that makes all of it disappear. I imagine a life no longer required to take its whole direction from the wound.
Is there a grievance you can name without making it the complete account of who you are? What would you need in order to approach that question safely and honestly?
You do not have to begin with the hardest experience in your life. A small, truthful movement is worth more than a declaration made before you are ready.
For me, Joseph’s story leaves this possibility open. What happened can remain true without becoming the final authority over what my life can serve.
With love,
Georgina
Soul4you