JOSEPH’S HEART WAS OVERFLOWING with love. It wasn’t only for Benjamin; it was for them all, all eleven of them.
This was how he had felt toward his brothers as a very young child, before the capacity to impose fixed judgments on the world had established itself in his mind. Now all their history had been wiped clean, and he felt renewed, purified, washed whiter than snow, as if his whole life with them had begun again from the beginning. These dear men, all of them, with their worn, confused, barely comprehending faces and the smell of fear on their skin: how beautiful they were, each one of them! He had to laugh—it was too ridiculous—at the way he in his youthful arrogance had seen them as coarse and stupid, a judgment that simply mirrored back his own coarseness and stupidity at the time, though it was easy to forgive himself, since he had been as innocent as they were, as ignorant of mental cause-and-effect. He had seen only their exteriors; he had never wanted, or been able, to understand who they were beneath the surface of his own perceptions.
He went from one to the other, looking into their eyes, clasping each one in his arms: Dear Judah. Dan. Naphtali, who had once been swift as a deer. Gad. Issachar. Those roughnecks Simeon and Levi. Asher. Zeb.
Reuben was the last brother he embraced, the eldest and tallest of them. His torso was as thick as a tree trunk. His eyes looked out from the depths of sadness. To Joseph, he too seemed beautiful.