[Avodah] "Ha'od Avi Chai?"

[Akiva Miller]

.
R' Zev Sero asked:

> Why didn't Yosef also ask about his grandfather?  After all,
> Yitzchak had only passed away ten years earlier.  How would
> Yosef have heard about it?

Yosef knew that Yaakov was alive. He knew it because the brothers kept
talking about their father, and I can't imagine that Yosef thought the
brothers were lying about it.

Therefore, I have always understood "Ha'od Avi Chai?" to be a *rhetorical*
question. And it was part of Yosef's strategy of inducing the brothers to
do teshuva:

"You keep talking about what the loss of Binyamin would do to your father.
What about MY father? Is he still alive? Somehow he survived losing ME,
right?"

If Yosef needed to ask about Yaakov's health, then (as RZS suggests) he
would have asked about the entire mishpacha. But that's not what Yosef was
doing.

Akiva Miller

NOTE: I do concede that Sforno takes the question seriously: "It's
impossible that he didn't die from his worrying about me."  But I learned
it to be a rhetorical question, designed to help the brothers to do
teshuva, and unfortunately I do not remember where I picked that up from.
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