BUT SOMETIMES, STILL, amid all his good fortune, he felt consumed by pity for his father. He would see an image of the old man weeping for his lost son and feel a tug at his heart and a childish desire to comfort that image. “Don’t worry, Father,” he wanted to tell it. “I’m alive. I’m well.” And then he would wake out of the trance and realize that he had fallen into a mental trap. All this pity—what good was it doing? It didn’t benefit Jacob in the least, and it left Joseph feeling sad and wrung out with helplessness. So he was compounding his father’s suffering with his own. He was suffering over Jacob’s suffering—over his own imagination of Jacob’s suffering, really—and to what purpose? It was absurd.
Pity couldn’t possibly be an appropriate response, because it cut him off from his own life energy. It was just as obvious that he wouldn’t be able to help his father for a long time, if ever, however dearly he wished to. Jacob would have to find a way to help himself, as we all do ultimately. But Joseph had to stop thinking of him in this way. For weeks he struggled to find a point of equilibrium.
Finally, he decided to devote part of his morning prayers to contemplating his father in all his imagined misery, without any desire that he should be happy or that he should change in any way. This was extremely difficult at first, and it made Joseph heartsick. Then, over the months, it gradually became easier. Finally, he was able to see the image of Jacob’s grieving face without any sense of pity or sorrow, but with a deep compassion that left his own heart at peace.