Parshat Vayechi begins by telling us that Jacob spent 17 years in Egypt. This rather puzzling nugget of information seems quite superfluous, bearing in mind that we are also informed that he died at the age of 147-years-old, having arrived in Egypt at the age of 130. After all, rudimentary arithmetic enables us to calculate that his time in Egypt amounted to 17 years.

Addressing this curious anomaly, Rabbi Dunner shares a beautiful Nesivos Sholom, which delves into the necessity of Jacob having to be in Egypt at all, and indeed why it is that the Jewish nation needed to be forged out of the impure spiritual environment of Egypt.