A TALE OF TWO COATS

We live in a world obsessed with identity – but not the real kind of identity. Today, your “identity” is basically the sum total of your external packaging: your career title, your résumé, the photo you chose for your LinkedIn profile, the curated Instagram grid that makes your life look far more interesting than it actually is.

It is these external trappings that tell the world who we are—or at least who we want the world to think we are. The problem is that these external garments – let’s call them coats – they’re very fragile. Just one scandal, just one embarrassing clip, just one poorly worded email or text that gets shared, and suddenly the coat is ripped off and you’re stripped naked.

We don’t just lose reputations anymore; we lose the costumes that make us recognizable. And when the costume vanishes, many people discover, sometimes painfully, that there wasn’t much underneath.

Vayeishev offers a brilliant and very modern meditation on identity—because Yosef, more than any other figure in the Torah, is defined by his coats. It begins with the famous ketonet passim, that multicolored robe which marks him out as the favorite son. It’s the physical expression of his father’s love and of the destiny Yaakov imagines for him.

Yosef’s brothers don’t just resent the dreams – they resent the coat. It’s the coat that infuriates them, the coat that marks him as different, the coat that screams, “I’m special, and you know it.”

So, when they finally attack him, the first act is not violence against his body but violence against his identity: וַיַּפְשִׁיטוּ אֶת־כְּתֹנְתּוֹ—they strip him of his coat. Literally, they took off his coat. It seems silly, but clearly, to his brothers, removing his coat was very important. Because now, without his coat, he wouldn’t be Yosef anymore.

And in a sense, they seem to have succeeded. Yodef’s life unravels. He’s sold, he’s exiled, he’s enslaved. Everything the coat represented—the privilege, the future, the promise—is gone.

But – and this is what is so curious, so amazing – Yosef, even though he has had his coat taken away from him, does not collapse. He does not say, “Without my coat, who am I?”

Instead, he becomes something entirely new: in Egypt, he becomes a leader in Potiphar’s house, a man entrusted with everything, someone whose success is so obvious that even his Egyptian master attributes it to divine blessing.

Yosef without the coat turns out to be as strong, as focused, and as capable as Yosef with the coat. Losing the first coat doesn’t destroy him; it refines him. Amazing.

Then comes coat number two. Potiphar’s wife grabs Yosef’s coat as he tries to flee her advances. She keeps hold of it and uses it as evidence against him. She holds the coat triumphantly, like a prosecutor who believes she has the winning exhibit: “Look! Here it is! Here’s the coat! Proof of his guilt!”

It’s almost comical how similar the story sounds to the first one. First his brothers say, “Look, here’s his coat. That’s the end of him.” And now Potiphar’s wife says the same. “Look, here’s his coat. That’s the end of him.” Everyone thinks the coat tells the story. Everyone thinks that if they hold the coat, they control the narrative.

But they all make the same mistake: they think that Yosef is the coat. But he’s not the coat.

The Torah uses an astonishing phrase to describe Yosef’s moment of escape: וַיַּעֲזֹב בִּגְדוֹ בְּיָדָהּ וַיָּנָס וַיֵּצֵא הַחוּצָה – “He left his garment in her hand and fled outside.”

Most people spend their entire lives trying desperately to hold on to their coats—their status, their image, the way they appear to others. Yosef willingly abandons his. He walks away from the very thing others think defines him.

That is his greatness. That is his moral courage. That is the moment that transforms him from a handsome young slave into a man of towering spiritual strength. He doesn’t need the coat; he needs his integrity.

It’s worth focusing on this for a moment, because what Yosef does here goes completely against the grain of today’s thinking. Today, if someone tries to strip your coat—if someone attacks your public image—your instinct is to fight back, to defend the coat at all costs. Don’t let them take it. Don’t let the narrative slip away.

But Yosef does the opposite. He lets go. He understands something most of us don’t: the coat is not him. Losing it is not a tragedy. Holding onto it at the cost of his values would be a total disaster. That’s clarity on a whole new level.

And just like with the first coat, the second coat’s removal becomes the beginning of a new ascent. Losing the first coat sent him to Egypt, where he becomes the director of his master’s household. Losing the second sends him to prison – which you might think is a terrible thing.

But in prison he becomes – the director of the prison, and then he becomes the interpreter of dreams, which leads him to be the advisor to Pharaoh, and the visionary who saves Egypt and the region from famine.

Yosef’s outer layers are torn away twice, but each time he becomes more himself, not less. Each stripped coat reveals a deeper layer of identity—an identity that cannot be removed, seized, or destroyed.

It’s a pattern that repeats not just in Yosef’s life, but in Jewish history. Our people have had our “coats” ripped off countless times. We have lost countries, we’ve lost property, we’ve lost status, we’ve lost citizenship, we’ve lost power. We’ve had our reputations smeared in every generation—libel after libel, from medieval blood libel accusations to modern political slander.

If identity was something external, something dependent on acceptance or prestige or imagery – on a coat – then guess what, we would have disappeared long ago. But Jewish identity is Yosef’s identity. When the coat comes off, the essence remains, and it gets stronger. When the world tears away everything that looks like strength, the deeper strength emerges.

That is the real message of Yosef’s two coats. In both cases, his enemies believes the coat is who he is, and with it gone, he’ll be gone. But Yosef’s identity is not a coat. So long as he remembers who he is, with or without coat, no one can take that from him.

And maybe that’s the lesson for us, living in a world where everyone is terrified of losing their public image. The truth is, the coat is not who you are. The position you hold is not who you are. The title on your business card is not who you are. The carefully arranged online version of yourself is not who you are. Those things can be seized, erased, stolen, or shredded. But the person you are when all your coats are gone—that’s the person God sees. That’s the person you really are.

Other nations survive because their coats are strong. But we survive because even without our coat, perhaps especially without our coat, we are the Jewish people.