The Midrash (Bereishit Rabba 84) makes the following comment concerning Yehuda’s suggestion to his brothers that they sell Yosef as a slave: “They said: Let us follow the way of the world: Wasn’t Canaan, who sinned, cursed with slavery? This one, too – let us go sell him to the Ishamelites! And his brothers listened.” According to the Midrash, when the brothers considered their options in dealing with Yosef, they looked to the precedent of Canaan, Noach’s grandson, whom Noach had cursed with slavery in response to the crimes he committed against his him.
The obvious question arises to why the brothers deemed selling Yosef into slavery “the way of the world” simply because servitude was the punishment chosen for Canaan. Why did they look specifically to the example of Noach’s curse to Canaan as the precedent for them to follow in handling Yosef?
Rav Gavriel Margolies, in his Torat Gavriel, suggested that the point of comparison between Canaan and Yosef extends beyond the fact that both (at least in the brothers’ eyes) acted wrongly. Canaan’s offense was that he peered at his intoxicated, unclothed grandfather and then called others to do the same. He violated the privacy of another individual, and then sought to publicize what he saw. The brothers, as portrayed by the Midrash, found Yosef guilty of a very similar offense. As other Midrashic sources describe, Yosef kept careful watch of his brothers’ conduct and brought negative reports to their father. He, like Canaan, peered into the private life of his kin and looked to make it public – at least in the sense of sharing it with somebody else.
According to this understanding of the Midrash, the Sages here offer a powerful insight into the nature of lashon ha-ra, drawing a compelling analogy between gossip and the sin of Canaan. Lashon ha-ra violates the victim’s fundamental right to privacy. Exposing another person’s wrongdoing is very similar to the more literal kind of “exposure” with which Canaan sought to humiliate his grandfather.
Moreover, this reading of the Midrash may narrow the gap, so-to-speak, between the Midrash’s comments and the plain meaning of the text. Seforno (37:27) writes that the brothers decided to sell Yosef as a slave in retribution for his perceived attempts to assert his authority over them. Yosef had dreamt of kingship and power, and now the brothers were determined to consign him to a life of servitude and shame. According to the Torat Gavriel, the Midrash’s comment may be understood along similar lines. Yosef – at least as the brothers perceived him – tried to obtain power and supremacy by defaming them, by exposing their shame; he pursued glory at the expense of their pride and reputation. They therefore felt justified in their decision to subject him to lifelong slavery, where he would suffer the kind of shame and humiliation that he – as they saw it – had attempted to bring upon them.