Yaakov is approaching his last days. He asked Yosef to bring his two children, Menashe and Efraim, so he could bless them.
Yaakov is old. He does not see well any more.
Yosef places Menashe at his father’s right side, while Efraim stays at the left side. Yaakov, however, puts his right hand on the head on the second son, Efraim. On the firstborn’s head, on Menashe, he puts his left hand.
Yosef tries to correct the situation. His father does not see well; maybe he didn’t realize, or he got confused. Perhaps he has mistaken Efraim by Menashe.
But Yaakov answers: “I know, my son. I know”.
He’s well aware of what he does. He is not confused, he is not mistaken. He sees something that Yosef cannot see.
He feels in Efraim something that goes beyond the perception of physical senses. Yaakov is open to understand something that is not within the boundaries of the consensus, that is not the acceptable thing “because this is the way it always was, because this is what has to be and will be”.
He has always dared try what had never been tried before. He has always had the courage to break the mould because he understood that the person is not fixed according to a rigid pattern. The Human Being builds himself and changes. There are basic conditions, he or she have limitations, indeed. But the person is not fixed. With the basic conditions and the space enabled by the limitations, the Human Being changes, renews himself, surprises.
Yaakov does not want to establish the foundation as structure. In other words, he does not want that the primary conditions (or the known conditions established by a preconception) set one only development option for the person, be it the physical or the spiritual development. That’s why Efraim is not the second, even though he was originally the second. And Menashe is not the first only because at the base he was the first. They developed differently and Yaakov understood that. He expressed this understanding in the way he chose to bless his grandchildren. Grandchildren that he declared his own children, since the original evidence of being Yosef’s children does not prevent them to develop into Yaakov’s spiritual sons.
We, his descendants, we are called to open our spiritual eyes as he did, to see what is unexpected in the Human Being, what is not fixed in the Human Being, what is not defined.
We are called not to surrender to a simple and automatic repetition, but to dare find the person veiled by the masks of predefinitions.