We read in Parashat Miketz that as the drought in Canaan tightened its grip and Yaakov and his family faced the prospect of starvation, “Yaakov saw there was food in Egypt” (42:1), and thus decided to send his sons to Egypt to purchase grain.
The word used in this verse is shever, and Chazal in the Midrash (Bereishit Rabba 91) detected in this term an allusion to the other meaning of shever – “destruction,” or “calamity.” But they also noted that by switching the punctuation of the letter shin, it can be transformed into the letter sin and the word may thus be read as sever – “hope.” The Midrash writes:
“There was shever” – this refers to the famine; “there was sever” – this refers to the surplus.
“There was shever” – this refers to “Yosef was brought to Egypt”; “there was sever” – this refers to “Yosef was the ruler.”
“There was shever’ – this refers to “They shall enslave them and torment them for four hundred years”; “there was sever” – this refers to “but afterward they shall leave with great wealth.”
The Midrash depicts Yaakov as being both hesitant and hopeful about sending his sons to Egypt. On the one hand, Egypt was also suffering from drought, but on the other hand, it had stored grain during the preceding years of surplus. Egypt was a place where foreigners were brought as slaves, yet the story of Yosef shows how even a foreign slave could rise to greatness. Yaakov’s family’s dependence on Egypt would begin a lengthy and insufferable period of exile, but that period would culminate in triumph and glory.
The message conveyed by this Midrashic passage is that difficult situations can be approached in one of two ways – as shever, or sever. We can lament and grieve over the harsh circumstances into which we are thrust, or we can look beyond the difficulties and see the opportunities they present. We do not have to experience “shever” – breakdown – when hardships surface; we can instead approach those moments in our lives as “sever,” periods of hope and optimism.
Rabbi Norman Lamm elaborated on this message conveyed by the Midrash:
The ability to survive adversity instead of being crushed by it lies in the
G-dly gift of transforming a “shin” to “sin,” “shever” to “sever,” ruin to hope.
… this capacity for converting “shever” to “sever” is not a matter of blind optimism. The Jew was always optimistic, but it was an enlightened optimism, not what William James called “the religion of the happy-minded.” It is the kind of optimism that requires insight and intuition, not only a profound and mighty faith. And more than that. The transformation of “shever” to “sever” requires hard work and sweat and often great sacrifices. It is a way of life, not a way of shielding one’s self from the ugly realities of existence.
And thus Yaakov right away tells his sons, “Why do you look at each other? I have heard that there is food in Egypt – go there and purchase from there, so that we may live and not die.” The way we transform shever to sever is by working to find the solutions, not by “looking around” in helpless panic. Yaakov bids his sons, “redu shama” – “go down” into the complex and difficult place that was ancient Egypt, the place of potential shever, to find the sever, to find the source of hope and optimism that they desperately needed.